7 July 2026

The Silent Scribes: An Account of the Mackenzie Collection

This talk explores the Mackenzie Collection, one of the largest archives of South Indian manuscripts assembled in the early nineteenth century and now housed partly in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library in Chennai, and partly in the British Library in London. Focusing on nine manuscripts containing histories of the Pāṇṭiyas, it examines how these texts were created, transmitted, translated, and ultimately received by colonial scholars.

The talk begins with a practical problem: many of these manuscripts are remarkably difficult to identify and locate due to a series of archival and cataloguing errors that have kept them largely hidden since their creation almost two centuries ago. It then traces the sources from which these histories were compiled, showing how they drew upon a much wider world of textual and oral traditions, particularly the various versions of the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam. Finally, it turns to the translators, scribes, and intermediaries who produced English accounts of these histories, highlighting the central role played by Indian collaborators in shaping the historical knowledge that emerged from the Collection. 

The examination of the Mackenzie manuscripts alongside their source-texts from the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam and its many versions also provides the basis for a much-needed linguistic study on the various prose genres that emerge in the early 19th century, and their quasi-spontaneous style of writing that is heavily influenced by spoken dialects. The timing of their emergence also marks a larger trend in the Tamil literary traditions of the time - classical poetry was now being simplified into shortened prose so that they may also reach lay-audiences and provide study-guides to students of Tamil. They are also possibly the direct precursors to the Mackenzie histories in style, content and formatting.

The Tamilex monthly seminar will take place on 7 July 2026, at 10:30 CET (14:00 IST). This will be hybrid event; for the Zoom link, please contact Charles Li(charles.li"AT"uni-hamburg.de).