Akshara Ravishankar Parmeswaran, PhD candidate in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, spent her time on a Nicholson Fellowship researching translations of the Bhagavad Gītā.

“I travelled to London in March 2022, and spent approximately two months in the United Kingdom, visiting the British Library and the Wellcome Collection. My dissertation is on early modern Sanskrit and early Hindi commentaries and translations of the Bhagavad Gītā. The British Library in particular holds a lot of manuscript material, in addition to printed materials, in the early North Indian vernaculars, and I was able to examine a few Hindi manuscripts in the library’s reading room. I was able to access, at the British Library, a wide range of administrative documents and historical records regarding the identity and location of some of the relatively minor figures who are central to my dissertation, and who wrote some of the vernacular texts that I study. The Wellcome Collection, additionally, had two rare manuscripts that I was ableto consult.”

– Akshara Ravishankar Parmeswaran

*The manuscript is from the Wellcome Collection, MS Hindi.235.