Photo: Sahibdin · Public domainValmiki’s Ramayana in more than four hundred paintings, made at the Sisodia court while Mewar still refused to bow to the Mughals in spirit.
Each kanda fills its own volume, with the Sanskrit text beside the pictures. A single large painting often shows several moments of the katha at once: in Sahib Din’s Yuddha Kanda the armies of Shri Rama and Ravana fill the page, with Lanka’s gold walls behind.
It is the grandest illustrated Ramayana of Rajasthan and shows the Mewar court putting its wealth into the Itihasa of Shri Rama.
ManuscriptThe palm-leaf copy that brought Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the ancient book of statecraft, back into print after centuries in which it was known only by quotation.
ManuscriptThe oldest philosophical manuscript in Sanskrit, named after Moritz Spitzer who first studied it, which holds a list of the parvas of the Mahabharata.
ManuscriptBirch-bark leaves in Gupta-era Brahmi holding seven texts, three of them on medicine, including the Navanitaka.
ManuscriptBirch-bark books of Buddhist scripture in Sanskrit, the oldest manuscript collection to survive in the subcontinent.
ManuscriptSeventy fragile leaves of birch bark holding a book of arithmetic in Sharada script, in which zero is written as a dot.
ManuscriptA palm-leaf copy of the Sushruta Samhita made in Nepal in 878 CE, older than any other dated copy and older than the commentary of Dalhana that shaped the printed text.
ManuscriptThirty manuscripts of the Rigveda, some with Sayana’s commentary, that UNESCO entered in its Memory of the World Register in 2007.
ManuscriptAbout thirty letters from Tipu Sultan to the Jagadguru of Sringeri, among them his reply after Maratha horsemen raided the math in 1791.
