Photo: Madhavrao I · Public domainThe archive of the Maratha state under the Peshwas: accounts, orders and letters in Marathi, mostly in Modi script, bundled in cloth rumals.
Letters from the field and the court tell the Maratha century from inside: Bajirao’s marches, the Panipat campaign, the regency of Nana Phadnavis. G. S. Sardesai published forty-five volumes of Selections from the Peshwa Daftar between 1930 and 1934.
It lets Maratha history be written from Maratha papers rather than from the accounts of their enemies.
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.
ManuscriptValmiki’s Ramayana in more than four hundred paintings, made at the Sisodia court while Mewar still refused to bow to the Mughals in spirit.
