The Importance of Colophon Research from the Perspective of Cultural History: A Case Study of Religious Palm-leaf Manuscripts of Odisha

Abstract

Most Indic manuscripts contain post-colophons that offer a wide range of information, such as, date, place, scribe, author, purpose of scribing etc. In recent years, research on Indic manuscripts has attracted worldwide attention, but it is mainly based on textual research. In conventional research, it can be said that colophons have been given an auxiliary role to understand the content of a manuscript. However, colophons can play a major role by revealing the message of the scribe.

Focusing minutely on the description of the colophon itself rather than the text content of the manuscript, this paper explores the possibilities of research of colophons to elucidate the reception of Indic manuscripts from the social, religious and cultural aspects through a case study of the colophons of palm-leaf manuscripts of Odisha (India) treating them as the primary material. These colophons are limited to the karaṇī script, Odia language religious manuscripts such as the epics, purāṇas, stotras etc., preserved in different repositories in Odisha and in a private collection in Beijing. Most of them were scribed in the 1800s.