Project Description

The task of the research group, which was established in 2005 at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, is to realise research projects on the historical cultural area of Kashmir (intellectual history, historiography, literary documentation) with a longer-term processing period.

One of the current projects, the DFG-funded edition of the so-called Anonymus Casmiriensis, is a critical first edition of the Kashmiri recension of an anonymous Sanskrit text. Due to its content, style, and scope (approx. 32,000 stanzas), the work went down in world literature under the name "Yogavasistha" as the most extensive philosophical art poetry ever created. During its centuries-long history of tradition, the opus was considerably reworked and its original textual form and philosophy distorted beyond recognition. Manuscripts of a more original version found by the project leader form the basis of the new edition.

Another major project of the Centre is SARDS2, an online database that currently lists about 56,000 bibliographically dependent citations of research papers from journals, congress volumes, festschrifts and other collective publications in the fields of Indology and South Asian Studies over the period 1786-2000.

Report 2013