Cataloguing Arabic, Persian, and Indic Literatures

Abstract Before approaching the specificities of cataloguing Arabic, Persian, and Indic literatures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, the chapter introduces readers to early modern theories and practices of cataloguing. It then offers a detailed account of the piecemeal establishment of ‘Oriental’ collections at the Bodleian Library up to the acquisition of the Ouseley collection at the end of the eighteenth century. The Bodleian was by far the major centre for the study of Islamicate literary traditions in England at the time, including first Semitic and then Persian manuscripts. Aiming at comprehensiveness, the chapter also traces the modes of acquisition and the manuscripts present in the ‘Oriental’ collections at the Cambridge University Library, and also in London (British Museum Library, India Museum Library, Royal Society Library) and Calcutta (Asiatic Society Library, Fort William College Library). In addition it studies the catalogues of the private collections that were not donated to or acquired by university libraries, such as the Russell brothers’, Jones’s, Scott’s, and Colebrooke’s collections. These offer exceptional insights into the collecting practices and tastes of British orientalists in the early modern and early colonial periods, as well as the existence of informal manuscript circulation networks. The chapter also considers as highly significant the presence of imagined catalogues, such as Ouseley’s catalogue for the constitution of a future library of Sanskrit manuscripts and Clarke’s catalogue produced through ‘the friendly offices of a Dervish in Constantinople’, and studies their relations with existing canons of Arabic, Persian, and Indic literatures.