Wikipedia:Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal

The research project "Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal", Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, makes accessible a text corpus of documents and other texts that are relevant to the history of religion and law in pre-modern Nepal. The aim of the project is to make this corpus, that has so far been dealt with only partially, available in printed and digital form. The project with research units in Heidelberg, Germany and Patan, Nepal has a duration until 2028; it is directed by Axel Michaels.

Project aim
The aim of the project is the systematic description and comprehensive investigation of the text corpus on the history of religion and law in pre-modern Nepal, the cataloguing of the documents and the publication of selected documents in the form of digital scholarly text editions, accompanied by translations and commentaries. The project focuses on the creation of an open access data base. It will examine the edited documents from a historico-cultural point of view, thus drawing a nuanced picture of Nepal's socio-cultural developments and processes of transformation from the late 18th century to the first half of the 20th century. The research approach combines methods of Indology, Tibetology, History, Anthropology, History of Religion, Philology and, also, Digital Humanities and the Semantic Web.

The corpus has got a wide range; it covers temple documents and legal documents of different kinds, many of them storing valuable information relating to religious institutions (e.g., contracts, foundation charters, land grants, edicts, letters, etc.) and to legal and administrative practice (such as caste regulations and court decisions on moral conduct), and it also includes, although represented to a much lesser extent, narrative-eulogical texts on local shrines and holy places. As a whole, these groups of texts lay the foundation for a better understanding of the history of numerous temples and different kinds of sanctuaries in Nepal (particularly in the Kathmandu Valley), as well as for the history of legal practices of South Asia. In addition, the material gives insight into the development of elite cultures, forms of religion related politics, the formation of public order and state administration, and into diplomacy and foreign policy. Furthermore, it helps to evaluate the significance of the textualisation and codification of law within ethnologically recorded jurisprudence. By drawing on the text corpus, the members of the project focus on particular research topics that are related to their areas of research. The time focused by the project is Nepal's "long 19th century". i.e., the early Śāha (1769-1846) and Rānā (1846-1951) periods.

The text corpus is built of records held by the National Archives of Nepal (Rashtriya Abhilekhalaya, Kathmandu) and other governmental organisations; these records have been microfilmed and rudimentarily catalogued as part of the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP) by the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DMG). However, only few have yet been published as a scholarly text edition, translated or studied. Thus, with the successive cataloguisation and digitisation of the total NGMPP holdings of over 100,000 historical documents, the project will make a significant contribution to the preservation of a microfilm collection that is unique for South Asia. To complement the documents microfilmed by the NGMPP, documents from other collections will be gradually included.

Documenta Nepalica
The "Documenta Nepalica" comprise the digital infrastructure of the project consisting of two interrelated parts, i.e., "Catalogue" and "Editions", and the publications of the research results produced therewith.

Catalogue
The catalogue database records entries together with metadata of the already edited and published documents as well as of documents that have so far not been processed further. At the time of the database launch (05/2016), the catalogue comprised about 19,000 entries; the number has grown to about 60,000 (as of 12/2020) and continues to increase; by the end of the project in 2028 it shall cover all relevant NGMPP documents (more than 100,000 entries), together with the other, subsequently integrated collections. The catalogue metadata will be enriched by bibliographic information on previous editions, translations, and studies. The project also establishes links between catalogue records of documents and the respective editions.

Editions
The project has implemented an editing platform with a versatile functionality for the transliteration, transcription, philological editing (following diplomatic principles of textual criticism), and XML tagging (in compliance with the standards established by the Text Encoding Initiative - TEI) of the documents. Each edition can be viewed on the editing platform; the user interface displays facsimile, the textual transcription, and translation side by side; also, it shows the short title of the document, the name(s) of the editor(s), an abstract of the content, a German translation, notes, and a commentary. Various options are available for displaying the editions (diplomatic or with word separation; XML tree, transliteration in Latin script or Devanagari, zoom).

E-Publications
At frequent intervals, the research project makes accessible the new document editions on the editing platform; 376 documents are published yet [as of 02/2021]. Since February 2017, the editions are, successively, also published with a DOI in cooperation with the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg on the platform "Heidelberg Historic Literature Digitized" (DWork) in Open Access [133 editions as of 02/2021].

Print
The research unit publishes the printed publication series "Documenta Nepalica – Book Series" in Open Access (CC BY-SA 4.0). The volumes are also available as print-on-demand.


 * Simon Cubelic, Axel Michaels and Astrid Zotter (Edd.), Studies in Historical Documents from Nepal and India, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018 (Documenta Nepalica – Book Series, Vol. 1); DOI: 10.17885/heiup.331.454
 * Rajan Khatowoda, Simon Cubelic and Axel Michaels (Hrsg.), The Mulukī Ain of 1854. Nepal's First Legal Code, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, in print (Documenta Nepalica – Book Series, Vol. 2)

Literature
Bajracharya, Manik, Rajan Khatiwoda and Axel Michaels. “Six 19th-20th Century Documents on Elephants from the National Archives of Nepal”. In: Abhilekha 32 (2015): 96-105.

Michaels, Axel. „Kulturelles Erbe in Katastrophen: Nepal und seine Erdbeben“. In: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jahrbuch 2015, Heidelberg: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2016, p. 78-80.

Bajracharya, Manik, Simon Cubelic and Rajan Khatiwoda. “Reporting across Borders in a Time of Turmoil: Eight Reports from Lokaramaṇa Upādhyāya from the Years 1837–1844”. In: Abhilekha 34 (2017): 138–172.

Michaels, Axel. Kultur und Geschichte Nepals. [1. Auflage], Alfred-Kröner-Verlag, Stuttgart 2018, ISBN 978-3-520-21201-6, URI: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1061315940 [abgerufen am 08.02.2021]. Rezension: Mirnig, Nina, "Kultur und Geschichte Nepals". In: ''Internationales Asien Forum. International Quarterly for Asian Studies''; München Bd. 50, Ausg. 3/4,  (Autumn 2019): 122-127. URI: https://search.proquest.com/docview/2400104987?fromopenview=true&pq-origsite=gscholar

Zotter, Christof. "Ascetics in Administrative Affairs: Documents on the Central Overseer of Jogīs and Saṃnyāsīs in Nepal". In: Simon Cubelic, Axel Michaels and Astrid Zotter (Hrsg.), Studies in Historical Documents from Nepal and India, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018 (Documenta Nepalica – Book Series, Vol. 1), DOI: 10.17885/heiup.331.454, p. 445-491.

Plachta, Nadine and Subas Tamang. “Labor Geographies: Uneven Infrastructures in Nepal’s Rana Period.” Roadsides 2 (2019): 25-33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-20190028

Pretsch, Sabine. "Nepal Research Bhavan Opens In Patan", March 24, 2019, 8:49 a.m. In: Spotlight. Magazine Issue: VOL 12 No.16, March 29-April 18, 2019 (Chaitra. 15, 2075) Online Register Number: DOI 584/074-75, URL: https://www.spotlightnepal.com/2019/03/24/nepal-research-bhavan-opens-patan/

Zotter, Astrid. "Papier ist geduldig". In: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jahrbuch 2019, Heidelberg: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2019, S. 95-100.

SAI News. "Visit of the Nepal Research Bhawan", 23. Oktober 2019, URL: https://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/kathmandu/news/kathmandu_news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1571829063&archive=&start_from=&ucat=4&