P.S. Sudhanjali

P.S. Sudhanjali is currently working as a researcher on the DiPiKA project (‘Digital Preservation of Kerala Archives’), led by Hugo David and funded by Arcadia. Co-author, with M. Muralikrishnan, of the first catalogue of the collection from the four Śaṅkarian monasteries in Thrissur, she was among the very first to recognise the importance of this collection and the need for a new inventory of private collections in Kerala.

Within the project, she is primarily involved in identifying private collections of manuscripts on ôles in the Thrissur region (monasteries, ancestral homes, temples, etc.), cataloguing them, and undertaking the detailed cataloguing and physical conservation of the digitised collections.

At the same time, Sudhanjali is continuing her studies in the field of Vedic studies and ritual exegesis. As part of this, she is currently preparing a first edition of the Dīpaśikhā (the ‘Torch’), an unpublished treatise by Śālikanātha, a renowned exegete and philosopher of the 9th–10th centuries. The text, which has been preserved in only a single palm-leaf manuscript recently discovered in the library of the Kiṭaṅṅaśśeri Mana in Irinjalakkuda (some 50 km south of Thrissur), is a commentary on Prabhākara’s ‘Light Gloss ’ (Laghvī) by Prabhākara, a fundamental text of Brahmanic exegesis which, unfortunately, has not yet been rediscovered.

2020: PhD – Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady (Inde).