Two years back the National Mission of Manuscripts was launched to catalogue India’s ancient documents. These documents in temples, monasteries and mosques are decaying fast due to lack of proper care. For this project some 30,000 manuscript hunters are moving across the whole nation.

After Rana takes off his shoes and washes his hands, he prays at the shrine. Then Jain leads him to the temple’s dimly lighted manuscript room. He opens a creaky steel cupboard and reveals rows of old texts, bundled in yellow cotton cloth. Rana squats on the ground and cautiously holds some pages up to the window light to examine the writing.
“It is in Prakrit language,” he says, referring to a popular dialect of classical Sanskrit, no longer spoken. “The period is early 1600s. It prescribes a model code of living for Jain monks,” a religious order that arose along with Buddhism in the 6th century B.C.
The manuscript project’s officials say the nationwide survey will open a window to India’s ancient knowledge systems: religion, astronomy, astrology, art, architecture, science, literature, philosophy and mathematics

This project has led to the discovery of some very ancient documents.

The oldest manuscripts that India possesses are a set of 6th-century Buddhist texts that were found buried in the hills of Kashmir about 60 years ago. In the last two years, the surveyors have found rare ancient Sanskrit and Arabic treatises on such subjects as diabetes, astrophysics, interpretation of dreams, surgical instruments, concepts of time and the art of war. A 400-year-old handwritten Koran was also found in a locket measuring three inches..[In India, Marking the Paper Trail of History]

Whoever thought of this should be commended.
The article also credits some 18^th century European scholars for translating ancient Sanskrit and Buddhist manuscripts and making them available to the world. I hope he means the western world because there was this thing called the eastern world, which apparently does not qualify as a world.
Buddhism spread to China, Korea, Japan and Sri Lanka and many Indian manuscripts were translated into those languages. In fact the very technique which Buddha taught – Vipassana was lost in India and survived only in Myanmar[7]. A ninth-century Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra was the oldest-known printed book in the world. In fourth century AD, Kumarajiva was invited by the Chinese emperor to translate Sanskrit texts into Chinese and he translated among other things, the Lotus Sutra. Around the same time the Indian scholar Buddhaghosa went to Sri Lanka. The Indian monk Paramartha went to China in 546 AD and Santarakshita translated lot of documents to Tibetan[6]. Besides this many Chinese and Korean students travelled to India and studied and translated documents.
It was in 1844 that the first attempt to explain Buddha’s teachings to the west was done by Eugène Burnouf, an academic at the Collège de France. Only that seems to matter now.
Note: I am currently reading Pankaj Mishra’s book on Buddha[6] and hence the focus on Buddhist history.
Related Links: On China and India, Alberuni, the father of Indian Historical writing?

Few days back we reported on the discovery of a Haritika statue in Sirpur, a town in Chattisgarh state. This is a place which still has samples of Shaiva, Vaishnava, Buddhist and Jain architecture. Now a temple complex, much bigger than Nalanda has been discovered in Sirpur.

About 200 mounds, 100 Buddha vihars, four Jain vihars and more than 100 Shiva temples spread across 25 sq km were found during excavations that began in February but have had to be suspended for the monsoon.
A 1.8-metre Shivalinga, believed to be the tallest in the state, has been found during the recent excavations.
Agreeing with Sharma, Muhhamed said Sirpur gave temple architecture in India a turning point. The Laxman Temple here is one of the country

Jammu and Kashmir Archaeology Department has made some discoveries in Anantnag

Excavators have stumbled into the remains of a bustling ancient urban settlement in Anantnag district of south Kashmir with tiled pavements “stamped in colourful human and animal motifs” and inscriptions in the now defunct Karoshti script.
It consisted of a tiled pavement in concentric circles with a “full-blown lotus” at the centre. “The pavement was laid out in such a wonderful sequence that it left the excavators baffled,” Zahid told PTI.
He said it’s tiles were “stamped in a variety of colourful motifs of humans, animals, mystical creatures, flowers and other abstract designs… Most of the tiles are inscribed in the Karoshthi script” prevalent in civilisations of north- western India circa AD 3rd-4th century. “The features speak of some highly advanced urban civilisation which looks to have flourished on this plateau in the ancient period,” Zahid said and claimed the human-animal motifs on the few exposed tiles were the first to be noticed at any archaeological site. [KASHMIR-DISCOVERY via IndiaArchaeology]

Most most history books don’t mention kharoshthi and the only reference I could find were in the books of Romila Thapar[3, 5]. Sometime before 530 B.C., Cyrus the Achaemenid emperor of Persia converted Gandhara into his satrapy, the most famous city of which was Takshashila where Iranian, Indian and Hellenistic Greek learning mingled. The language of the Achaemenid empire was Aramaic (the same language supposedly spoken by Jesus Christ) and kharoshthi was derived from it.

Ayaz Amir writes

STRANGE that one of history’s cradles, the Indian peninsula, should have so little truck with genuine history, as opposed to myth-making and mythology.
Is there any Indian Herodotus? Or Thucydides or Tacitus? One of the richest histories of the world, full of blood, conquest and great achievement without any chronicler, not even an apology of a Gibbon. Before Alberuni who accompanied the armies of Mahmud Ghaznavi, we have the Hindu holy texts, the Upanishads, Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Megasthene’s account of the court of Chandragupta Maurya. But nothing that can be credited as historical writing.
Indian history – that is, historical writing – begins with the coming of the Muslims. This is a remark made not in the spirit of drum-beating because we of the sub-continent are prickly to an inordinate degree, apt to stand on our dignity and pick quarrels about the wrong things, but just a bald statement of fact.[A travesty of history via an email from The Acorn]

Amir’s assertion is that till Muslims came to India, there was no historical writing. A civilization which was thriving from 2500 BC, did not have any “historical writing” till 1017 AD till Alberuni visited India, which is a big gap of 3500 years. Now what did Alberuni write about?

He accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni to India and stayed there for many years, chiefly, in all probability in the Punjab, studied the Sanskrit language and translated into it some works from the Arabic, and translated from it two treatises into Arabic (Elliot and Dowson:5). Sachau, translator of Alberuni’s Indica believes Alberuni “composed about twenty books on India (Sachau:xxvii), both translations and original compositions, and a number of tales and legends, mostly derived from the ancient lore of Eran and India.” He was indeed a prolific writer and his works are stated to have exceeded a camel-load. (Elliot and Dowson:3)
Let me also make another observation about Alberuni. He regards Hindus as excellent philosophers and he felt strong inclination towards Hindu philosophy but still he was a Muslim and at times does not fail to point out the superiority of Islam over Brahmanic India[India as Alberuni saw it]

Alberuni translated Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra into Arabic (called Kitab Patanjal). He also wrote a monograph on Indic culture, Kitab al-Hind which did not achieve the prominence of other works of comparative religion written around the same time. Romila Thapar adds that Alberuni was the finest intellect of central Asia. In the ten years he spent in India, he made observations on Indian conditions, systems of knowledge, social norms and religion. His book Tahqiq-i-Hind is the most incisive made by any visitor to India. But was he the first person to indulge in some “historical writing” as Ayaz Amir writes.
Huen Tsang was a Chinese scholar who visited India in 630 A.D at the age of 26. Huen Tsang returned to China with enough statuary and texts to load twenty horses and wrote a long account of India which was based on personal observation[1]. It seems his accounts had more detail than his predecessors and was meticulous in detail [3]. Alberuni carried one camel load of books and Huen Tsang required twenty horses and so the winner is…
Around the same time Banabhatta wrote Harshacarita which provided a descriptions of significant events during the reign of Harshavardhana [3] This was the first biography in Sanskrit as well as a masterpiece of literature.[1]. At this time Alberuni’s grandfather was not even born.
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