Berliner Indologische Studien, Band 19

The seven contributions in volume 19 (2010) treat different aspects of South Asian culture. Michael Knüppel (Göttingen) brings to our attention the bequest of the German Tocharologist and Indologist Emil Sieg (1866-1951) now preserved in the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen. Kurt Tropper (Vienna) and Gudrun Melzer (Leipzig) discuss a 13th-century Tibetan inscription in Alchi (Ladakh) and its parallels in Tibetan and Sanskrit literature. Malgorzata Wielinska-Soltwedel (Munich) deals with the Bengali Tradition of Paninis Grammar between the 7th and the 15th century. The remaining four articles are concerned with art-historical subjects, covering a wide range of Buddhist, Jaina and Hindu iconography. The topic of Claudine Bautze-Picron (Berlin/Paris/Brussels) are the figures of emaciated demonic characters in Buddhist art, relating them to similar representations in Brahmanical art. Klaus Bruhn (Berlin) gives an overview of early Jaina iconography mainly from Mathura, but he also includes Chausa (pre-Gupta), Tamil Nadu, Aihole and Badami (Karnataka). Gerd J.R. Mevissen (Berlin) presents a corpus of more than 100 Visnu images from Bengal accompanied by miniature figures of the ten incarnations (dasavataras), with an appendix referring to more than 500 related images from other Indian regions. Ibrahim Shah (Mansehra) deals with some images of the sun-god Surya from the Northwest of the Indian subcontinent.