This five-year project (2023-2028), entitled The Van Manen Collection: Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas (acronym: VAN MANEN), has been made possible with an ERC Starting Grant. It aims to (digitally) reunite all parts of the Van Manen Collection. This enables us to study it as a whole, helping us to understand the process of collection formation. More importantly, perhaps, it will also shed light on printing culture, knowledge dissemination, and religious and ritual practices in Central Tibet and the Eastern Himalayas in the first half of the 20th century.
The Van Manen collection is a collection held in the Leiden University Library that contains a large number of Tibetan and Himalayan texts. These started arriving in Leiden in the 1920s and 1930s, when the texts were sent from India, along with Sanskrit and other Indic materials, by Johan Van Manen (1877-1943). Van Manen also collected artefacts, and these are housed in the Wereldmuseum in Leiden.
The Van Manen collection as a whole consists of nearly 1000 blockprints, over 600 manuscripts, around 450 artworks and objects of use. It also contains mostly uncatalogued notebooks, pictures, maps, letters, drafts of articles, drawings, scraps of paper, a personal archive and a variety of ephemera. This ERC-funded project aims to organize and bring together all these different aspects of the collection, facilitating the study of the collecting activity of Van Manen as an integrated process.
Some of the project’s key objectives are:
1) To extensively catalogue and study the mostly unstudied, unique, and rare manuscripts in the collection
2) To gain an understanding of the “collection formation” process beyond the colonial narrative
3) To learn how to “read,” and engage with, a multi-media collection curated by a single collector
4) To contribute to the analysis and methodology of multi-media collections of non-Western literature and material culture
