In yet another new discovery, an 18th century palm manuscript, titled "Gnanamuyarchi", has been found in an Armenian monastery in northern Italy.
The manuscript had been safely stored within the monastery's library and was misclassified as "Indian Papyrus Lamulic Language–XIII Century".
It was discovered by Tamil Bharathan, a doctoral scholar from Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University's (JNU) Special Centre for Tamil Studies, who had travelled to Italy to participate in a seminar on Greek paleography at the headquarters of the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice.
The monastery authorities believed that Armenians residing in Chennai might have brought the manuscripts to Italy, unaware that they were actually written in Tamil.
After much persuasion, Bharathan got access to read the manuscript which is believed to be a copy of the first Tamil translation of Spiritual Exercise, written by St. Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century.
Bharathan revealed that the translation was mostly done by Michele Bertoldi, known in Tamil as Gnanaprakasasamy.
To decode the scripture, Bharathan reached out to Professor Margherita Trento, who is a scholar on the history of the literary and social techniques employed by Roman Catholics to localize Christianity in early modern Tamil Nadu.
According to Trento, the Palm manuscript is a prose text from the early 18th Century (around 1720s) and has been printed many times in the 19th Century by the Mission Press in Puducherry.
Bharathan aims to make a catalogue of the manuscripts and also plans to visit the Roja Muthiah Library in Chennai.