Manuscript Culture in the Service of the Nation: The Formation of the South Asian Manuscript Collections in Italy, 1700-1890

The present study represents the first attempt to reconstruct the formation South Asian manuscript collections in Italy within its broader historical, political-ideological and cultural contexts. The history of South Asian manuscript culture in Europe is a transnational history, a history of competition and collaboration during which scholars traveled between Paris, London, Oxford, and Berlin, by copying and acquiring primary sources for publishing new and revised critical edition of the most relevant South Asian literary works. Starting from unpublished private correspondence, the article aims to demonstrate how in 18th- and 19th-century Italy, as in other European countries, Indian manuscript culture—besides its scientific value—played a pivotal role in the construction of national identities and in their self-assertion as European powers. In a nation-in-the-making such as Italy, the wave of secularism and anti-Catholic turn obliterated the contributions made by Catholic missionaries from the 17th century onwards, whereas in Germany the collaboration between Protestant missionaries and universities coincided with the national cultural policy. The formation of manuscript collections in Italy represents a national enterprise, even though the scientific progress achieved through the philological studies conducted by Italian Indologists on the bulk of manuscripts purchased by Angelo De Gubernatis and others was quite modest and circumscribed to the field of Jain literature.