Across Southeast Asia, textiles were used to adorn, protect and to add merit and value to written works. These textiles are works of art in themselves, featuring intricate patterns and in some cases inscriptions that provide contextual information about manuscripts. Often, they were custom-made from valuable hand-woven silk brocades, dyed or painted cotton, as well as fabrics with complex designs made in the ikat technique. The use of imported materials like chintz, silk damask, felt, or printed fabrics reflects the trade and exchange relations within Southeast Asia and beyond.

A new display highlights the British Library’s collaboration with external experts and graduate students. Chevening Fellow Noon Methaporn Singhanan researched and catalogued manuscript textiles during a 12-month project in 2022-23 and Khin Kyi Phyu Thant described and translated Burmese Sazigyo (manuscript binding ribbons) during a five-week internship organised through the Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in 2022.

Tube-skirt wrapper for palm leaf manuscripts. Northern Laos, mid-20th century, purchased in 2012. British Library, Or 16886

This protective wrapper was made from a re-purposed luxury tube-skirt to wrap around several bundles of palm leaf manuscripts. It originates from a Tai Moei ethnic community in northern Laos. The main section of this woman’s tube-skirt has an ikat pattern, where the yarn has been dyed before weaving. It is also intertwined with metal foil threads imported from Europe. The lower section, or 'foot', is a colourful woven textile made from silk and cotton yarns. Valuable textiles or clothes like this example were often re-purposed as wrappers for Buddhist scriptures in Laos and neighbouring regions. Donating clothes of deceased loved ones to re-use as manuscript wrappers was regarded as an act of merit in the Lao Buddhist tradition, and they reflected the faith and wealth of the deceased and the donors.

Burmese wrapping mat for a kammavaca manuscript. Myanmar (Burma), 18th century, purchased in 1838 from J. Polson Esq. British Library, Egerton MS 735

This vibrant mat was used to wrap a beautifully decorated, lacquered kammavaca manuscript which contains a ritual text in Pali language, used in monastic ordination ceremonies. The colourful zig-zag patterns were made locally by intertwining cotton yarn and bamboo slats. This type of manuscript cover was widely used in Myanmar, but also in Northern Thailand and Laos. The combination of bamboo slats and yarn made it very strong and therefore it protected the manuscript well against insects and the elements.

Burmese sazigyo with inscription. Myanmar (Burma), dated 1894, donated by Jill Morley Smith in 2011. British Library Or 16817

Sazigyo (binding ribbons) were made by women weavers in Myanmar to wrap around Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts. This multicoloured example of exceptional quality is nearly five metres long and contains text in round Burmese script, auspicious symbols and figures. It was made in the tablet weaving technique on a portable loom worn strapped around the back of the weaver. This method uses small tablets (or cards) with holes through which the threads of the warp are strung. Inscriptions and patterns are created by turning the tablets. Generally, the texts on sazigyo record merits or prayers, names of donors, and sometimes location and date of the donation.

Malay cloth envelope. Sumatra, Indonesia, 1824, Raffles Family Collection. British Library MSS EUR D.742/1/61

Malay letters to and from rulers were often sent in yellow silk or cotton envelopes. The name and address of the recipient was written on a piece of paper which was wrapped around the fabric pouch and fastened on the reverse by entwining the two intricately cut-out paper ends. Shown here are envelopes from two Royal Malay letters sent to Thomas Stamford Raffles, then Governor of Bengkulu on the island of Sumatra, in 1824. The yellow envelope (above) is made of imported patterned damask silk and was from the Adipati or senior minister of the city of Palembang, Sumatra. The plain cotton envelope (below) was from the Temenggung, the ruler of Johor on the Malay peninsula.

Malay cloth envelope. Johor, Malaysia, 1824, Raffles Family Collection, British Library MSS EUR D.742/1/149 & 180.

Curators of the Southeast Asia Section, with contributions by Noon Methaporn Singhanan and Khin Kyi Phyu Thant

Further reading
Burmese manuscript conservation success. Royal Asiatic Society (accessed 20 November 2024) 
Chan, Vanessa, Sarsikyo. Woven Buddhist ribbons of Myanmar. Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre Working Paper No. 29 (Dec 2018) 
Igunma, Jana and Noon Methaporn Singhanan, Drawn from across the globe: manuscript textiles in the Southeast Asian collections. British Library Asian African Studies blog (2 October 2023) 

This is the second in a series of five blog posts on the provenance of the Colebrooke Collection of Sanskrit manuscripts now in the British Library, following the first post, which introduced the Colebrooke Family and the East India Company.

 

According to the historian Christopher Fleming, while in India, Colebrooke ‘assembled the world’s most extensive collection of Sanskrit legal manuscripts’ (Fleming 2021, p. 192). Why did he do this, and what is the story behind this?

 

Pages from Colebrooke’s copy of the Vyavahāratattva, a legal digest composed by the sixteenth-century scholar Raghunandana. These pages include Colebrooke’s own notes and translation. British Library, IO San 191c

 

Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) arrived in India in 1783, while Warren Hastings was Governor General. In the preceding years, Hastings had been responsible for a range of reforms to the East India Company’s governance in India. One of the areas he focused on was the administration of justice. A new system of courts was set up, operating at local and regional levels and overseen by superior courts in Calcutta [Kolkata]. Though the judges were British, they were to try cases according to local law. Furthermore, in cases ‘regarding inheritance, marriage, and caste, and all religious usages and institutions’ this was to be tailored according to whether those appearing in the courts were of the Muslim or Hindu faith (IOR/V/8/15). To ensure this was done correctly, local law officers were appointed, and in the case of Hindu law, these officers were referred to as ‘pandits’.

 

For centuries it had been a practice in India for pandits who were experts in law to be consulted during legal disputes. The Company’s employment of them as law officers can therefore be seen as a continuation of this policy. At the same time, however, Hastings also sought to set down a standardised body of Hindu law ‘in order to render more complete the judicial regulations, to preclude arbitrary and partial judgements, and to guide the decisions of the several courts’ (IOR/E/4/31, f 447). A team of eleven pandits were commissioned to compile a suitable reference work, and a copy of their completed digest, titled Vivādārṇavasetu, can be found in the Colebrooke Collection (IO San 3145a). It was later translated, via Persian, into English as A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits.

 

Front page of A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits (London, 1776).  British Library, 26.i.6

 

Perceived deficiencies in Hasting’s code led to a new digest being commissioned, under the direction of the scholar and judge Sir William Jones. Again, pandits were employed to compile the material under the oversight of Jones, who was also to make a direct translation into English. However, Jones died before he could embark on this translation, and the task was taken up by Colebrooke. A copy of the original Sanskrit version of the digest, titled Vivādabhaṅgārṇava, can be found in the Colebrooke Collection (IO San 1767-1770), and the translation was published in 1798 as A Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions.

 

Front page to the first volume of A Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions (Calcutta, 1798). British Library, 5319.f.12.

 

However, Colebrooke was dissatisfied with this digest. In particular, he felt it was too long (the English translation consisted of four volumes), and he blamed this on the ‘copious commentary’ produced by Jagannātha Tarkapañcānana, the pandit in charge of the compilation (Colebrooke 1798, p. ix). Shortly after this, Colebrooke proposed a supplementary work and offered to oversee the work of the pandits, adding, "I should restrain the compilers from inserting a long train of argument in support, or in refutation, of the opinions cited by them, which has so greatly swelled the digest of Law on Contracts and Succession" (IOR/F/4/39/974)

 

The pandits, first and foremost, were scholars who were concerned with understanding the complexities of legal tradition and debate. The interpretation of Hindu law varied greatly across India, so for the pandits it was important to pay attention to these differences. Colebrooke, however, was concerned with establishing principles which could be applied in a uniform way across the different regions ruled by the British. He therefore became impatient with the pandits he employed for his new work. This is documented in a marginal note he added to a manuscript one of the pandits, called Bāla Śarman Pāyaguṇḍe, had produced for him: "After the experience I have had, that no Pandit is capable (or adapted by his habits of thinking) to compile a digest in the form I require, I must now seriously set about compiling it myself" (IO San 37).

 

A page from the Dharmaśāstrasaṃgraha with Colebrooke’s notes. British Library, IO San 37.

 

Colebrooke would continue to employ pandits to supply material for him, but he now took on responsibility for compiling the final text himself. His work on the supplementary digest continued for a number of years, but was ultimately abandoned. Instead, in 1810, Colebrooke published Two Treatises on the Hindu Law of Inheritance, an annotated English translation of the Dāyabhāga and the Mitākṣarā, two twelfth-century legal texts. In the preface, he explained why he had decided to publish this translation rather than his planned supplementary digest:

"In a general compilation, where the authorities are greatly multiplied, and the doctrines of many different schools, and of numerous authors are contrasted and compared, the reader is at a loss to collect the doctrines of a particular school and to follow the train of reasoning by which they are maintained. He is confounded by the perpetual conflict of discordant opinions and jarring deductions; and by the frequent transition from the positions of one sect to the principles of another. It may be useful then, that such a compilation should be preceded by the separate publication of the most approved works of each school. By exhibiting in an exact translation the text of the author with notes selected from the glosses of his commentators or from the works of other writers of the same school, a correct knowledge of that part of the Hindu law, which is expressly treated by him, will be made more easily attainable, than by trusting solely to a general compilation" (Colebrooke 1810, p. iii).

 

Colebrooke therefore sought to avoid the uncertainty and confusion created, as he saw it, by the many voices of Hindu legal scholarship, and instead to bring into focus what he identified as the two original and distinct ‘schools’ of law which existed in the regions of India under British rule. His translation included ‘annotations necessary to the illustration of the text’, but these, he explained, could be disregarded by those unfamiliar with Sanskrit. The English reader, he insisted, could rely on his scholarship:

"Having verified with great care the quotations of authors, as far as means are afforded to me by my own collection of Sanscrit law books (which includes, I believe, nearly all that are extant) I have added at the foot of the page notes of references to the places in which the texts are found. They will be satisfactory to the reader as demonstrating the general correctness of the original citations" (Colebrooke 1810, p. v).

 

Interestingly, then, the reason the Colebrooke Collection contains such a large number of Sanskrit legal manuscripts is Colebrooke’s dislike of the scholarly practices of the pandits who produced these manuscripts for him. Frustrated by their attention to the interpretative nuances of Hindu law, and desiring to produce a legal framework which could be easily applied by the British, Colebrooke took it upon himself to study and interpret Hindu law. To do this, he gathered his famous collection of Sanskrit legal manuscripts. However, despite his aversion to the methods of the pandits, he was nevertheless dependent on them to acquire, or produce, copies of the texts he required. The next blog post will look at the stories of two of these pandits.

 

In the third blog post on the provenance of the Colebrooke Collection, we will look at the stories of two of the pandits who worked with Colebrooke.

 

Works Consulted

Colebrooke, Henry Thomas (trans.), A Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions (Calcutta: Honourable Company's Press, 1798).

Colebrooke, Henry Thomas, (trans.), Two Treatises on the Hindu Law of Inheritance (Calcutta: Hindoostanee Press, 1810).

Fleming, Christopher T., Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Letter from the Government of Bengal to the Court of Directors, 25 March 1773. British Library, IOR/E/4/31, f 447.

Letter from H. T. Colebrooke to the Government of Bengal, 20 August 1797. British Library, IOR/F/4/39/974.

Regulation No. 27, from Regulations for the Administration of Justice, recorded on the Revenue Proceedings of Government, on the 28th March 1780; and passed by the Governor General and Council on the 11th April 1780. British Library, IOR/V/8/15.

Dharmaśāstrasaṃgraha. British Library, IO San 37.

Vivādārṇavasetu. British Library, IO San 3145a.

Vivādabhaṅgārṇava. British Library, IO San 1767-1770.

 

David Woodbridge, Provenance Researcher Sanskrit Collections (REAP pilot project 2023-2025)

This is the first in a series of five blog posts on the provenance of the Colebrooke Collection of Sanskrit manuscripts in the British Library.

Bust of Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837), by Henry Weekes, commissioned by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1837. RAS 02.008 

‘I am commanded to offer you in the name of the Court their best thanks and acknowledgements for the present which you therein purport making to the Company of your collection of Oriental manuscripts, and to assure you of the high sense which they entertain of your obliging attention. The Court propose to set apart a portion of their library for the acception of these valuable manuscripts and to distinguish it by the name of the Colebrooke Collection.’ (Letter from the Court of Directors of the East India Company to Colebrooke, 24 April 1819. British Library, IOR/E/255, f 240).

The above is an extract from a letter that was sent to Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) by the East India Company’s Court of Directors in London, on 24 April 1819. Four years previously, Colebrooke had returned to Britain after thirty-two years in India. His career had been an impressive one, beginning on the lower rungs of the Company’s civil service and rising up eventually to become a member of the supreme council of the Government of Bengal.

However, what Colebrooke is most remembered for today is his scholarship. While in India, he held the position of professor of Sanskrit at the College of Fort William,  founded by the EIC in Calcutta in 1800. And for the nine years prior to his departure in 1815 he was the president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the pre-eminent forum for Europeans pursuing research into any branch of enquiry relating to India. Later, in 1823, he would found the Royal Asiatic Society in London, in an attempt to replicate something of that interest in Britain.

Colebrooke’s most tangible legacy is his collection of over two thousand Sanskrit manuscripts, which he brought back with him from India and donated to the EIC’s Library (later renamed the India Office Library, and now part of the British Library). The ‘Colebrooke Collection’ covers a wide range of subjects, including religion, philosophy, law, grammar, poetry, mathematics, astronomy, and botany, and has been a vital resource for students in Britain and beyond.

A page from the Mahabharata, one of the manuscripts in the Colebrooke Collection. British Library, IO San 1771.

But what is the story behind the formation of this important collection? In particular, how did Colebrooke come to be in India? What influenced his interests and choices as he formed his collection? And how did he find and acquire the manuscripts themselves? These questions will be examined in a series of blog posts, of which this first post, on the Colebrooke Family and the East India Company, will provide some background to Colebrooke’s arrival in India.

Even before Henry Thomas set off for Asia, the Colebrooke family had become closely associated with the East India Company. His father, Sir George Colebrooke (1729-1809), was a wealthy and prominent banker, and made investments in EIC shares. In 1764, he became one of the Company’s proprietors, the elite group of shareholders who owned enough stock to qualify for a vote to elect the members of the Court of Directors. These members, who met in the Company’s headquarters in London, were responsible for overseeing all of its operations. Sir George himself became a member in 1767, and served three terms as chairman in 1769, 1770, and 1772.

As chairman, Sir George defended the EIC against criticism from within Britain and attempts to introduce greater government control over its activities. This criticism stemmed from the growing power of the Company in India, where it had been fighting wars, making deals with local rulers, and taking control of areas of territory. Many in Britain believed the EIC had gone beyond the bounds of acceptable activity for a trading organisation, and were concerned by reports of corruption and abuse of power. Sir George successfully resisted calls for greater government control. However, during his third term as president, the Company experienced a major financial crisis and had to appeal to the government for relief, which was damaging for Sir George’s reputation. But worse was to come, as his own financial affairs rapidly deteriorated, leading ultimately to bankruptcy.

Henry's father Sir George Colebrooke was a prominent figure in British public life, and as the EIC foundered under his leadership he was the subject of attacks in the press. This cartoon is from an edition of the Oxford Magazine published in 1773. Sir George is depicted in the centre, kneeling before Lord North, the Prime Minister, while handing him a bag of money and pleading ‘Save us my Lord or we perish.’  British Museum, 1868,0808.10039. © The Trustees of the British Museum

It was in this context that Henry Thomas, along with his elder brother, Edward (1761-1838), set out for Asia to work for the East India Company. For someone who had occupied positions of considerable status, Sir George would have envisaged a more elevated future for his sons than a career in India. But in the family’s reduced situation, the EIC offered a potential path to restoring their fortunes. Opportunities were highly sought after, but their father’s previous service doubtless counted in the sons’ favour, and both obtained positions as writers, that is, administrators, in India.

Henry Thomas Colebrooke arrived in India in 1783. In the wake of its crisis ten years previously, the EIC had undergone a number of reforms, with an emphasis on improving the standards of its administration. Colebrooke had therefore arrived at a time of great change for the Company. Though his father’s reputation and the family’s situation had been greatly damaged, he had nevertheless been granted an opening in EIC employment. There was a need for competent administrators who were willing to familiarise themselves with local conditions and devise ways for the EIC to transform itself into a responsible government. This is the context in which Colebrooke embarked upon his career in the Company’s service.

The second blog post in this series on the provenance of the Colebrooke Collection will be on Colebrooke’s manuscripts on Hindu law.

Works Consulted
Buchan, P. Bruce, ‘The East India Company 1749-1800: The Evolution of a Territorial Strategy and the Changing Role of the Directors’, Business and Economic History, 23:1 (1994).
Rocher, Rosanne and Rocher, Ludo, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company (London: Routledge, 2012).
Letter from the Court of Directors of the East India Company to H. T. Colebrooke, 24 April 1819. British Library, IOR/E/255, f 240.

David Woodbridge, Provenance Researcher Sanskrit Collections (REAP pilot project 2023-2025)