“Opening the Archive”: Jambūvijaya and his Manuscript Preservation Projects at the Jaisalmer Bhaṇḍār

This paper will show how the widely respected Śvetāmbara Jain scholar-monk Muni Jambūvijaya (1923-2009) opened the archives to the West while equally revamping local indigenous understandings of knowledge preservation through his enormously successful cataloguing, scanning, xeroxing, and digitizing efforts at the Jaisalmer bhaṇḍār located in the Jaisalmer Fort in the Rajasthani desert. The phrase “Opening the Archives” is repurposed from a conference held at the University of Chicago last year that discussed the several Jain figures who opened certain archives or textual materials to the world. This phrase most adequately describes what Jambūvijaya intended to do with the manuscripts held at the Jaisalmer bhaṇḍār.

After the untimely death of Jambūvijaya (at the age of 87) on 12 November 2009, Indian scholars and Jains gathered at the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad to celebrate his life-work cataloguing, digitizing, and critically editing manuscripts ranging from Jain canonical literature in Prakrit to a wider range of Sanskrit philosophical, grammatical, and doctrinal texts of both Jain and non-Jain origin. As he was celebrated in India, so he was in the West. At the start of a symposium on Jaina art on 13 November 2009 at Yale University organized by Phyllis Granoff, prominent scholars of Jainism and Indology offered their condolences, recognizing the central role that Jambūvijaya played in making accessible manuscripts and in aiding the research of generations of Western-trained academics. In the March 2010 SOAS Jain Studies Newsletter, Sin Fujinaga published an obituary of Jambūvijaya after then PhD student Hiroko Matsuoko had already distributed a worldwide report documenting that tragic death of Jambūvijaya and his male disciples. Prior to these events, Jambūvijaya’s reputation and influence in scholarly circles, including those in Japan, was widespread enough to earn him a dedicated festschrift volume in 2004, which included articles from Sanskritists such as George Cardona, Paul Dundas, Nalini Balbir, John E. Cort, and others. The stretch of his influence went far beyond those present in this festschrift volume, as several other western scholars benefited from Jambūvijaya’a intellectual prowess, curiosity, and generosity in the 1950’s onward, such as Daniel Ingalls, Johannes Bronkhorst, and later generations of scholars such Maria Heim. In addition to his engagement with both Indian and Western-trained scholars of Indology, Jambūvijaya’s contributions to Sanskritic learning occurred through his manuscript cataloguing work, critical editions, and his own writings. Despite such influence and output, there remains limited studies of his collective influence on Jain and Indological studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Jambūvijaya’s stature as a learned Jain monk came not only from his own intensive studies of Jain and other Indian traditions, but also from his own situatedness in a lineage of scholar-monks who were trained in all areas of Sanskritic learning and for whom scholastic endeavor was part of a broader devotional practice. In this regard, one could make the argument that in many ways Jambūvijaya retained something of the character of the great twelfth-century Jain polymath Hemacandra, whose Sanskritic intellectual endeavors took place in the very city of Paṭan, Gujarat in which Jambūvijaya would subsequently endeavor to collect manuscripts in the modern period. Whereas, in the medieval period, Hemacandra relied exclusively on royal patronage and its appendages, in the modern period, Jambūvijaya depended on the resources made available by networks of Jain laypeople, numerous Jain boards and trustees, academic institutions, the Indian government, and both local and foreign scholars. Indeed, John Cort’s article “The Jain Knowledge Warehouses: Traditional Libraries in India” (1995) has given us a glimpse into the historical context and micro history of how the collections at Paṭan and at other Jain bhaṇḍārs or manuscript warehouse libraries were managed and opened.

Beyond the Paṭan library, however, exists the Jaisalmer bhaṇḍār. Said to have been set up to house collections from the Paṭan library in attempt to preserve palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in the thousands from Muslim invasions, this smaller cave-like bhaṇḍār continues to exist in the Rajasthani desert in the Jaisalmer fort beneath important Jain temples. This paper will tell the story of how Jambūvijaya opened up the archives of the Jaisalmer bhaṇḍār. The stories and information found in this paper derive from field research conducted in 2019-2020 and 2023 and disclose the actions of several individuals working in concert with Jambūvijaya to “open the archives”. I argue that telling such stories are important in that we cannot divorce this micro history from the larger processes of knowledge making and preservation in Indian contexts; the changes in the materiality of manuscripts themselves; and the colonial, oriental, and governmental agents who began the processes of opening, preserving, and recording manuscript collections. And as we will learn in the context of Jambūvijaya’s work, we also cannot overlook the way digitization has supplanted the processes of reproducing manuscripts and centuries old traditions of scribal practices.