Dr. Deviprasad Mishra, researcher in the Indology Department of the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP), has been selected as a recipient of the Maharshi Badrayan Vyas Samman Award for the year 2015 for his outstanding works as a young scholar in Sanskrit.

President to honour

The Presidential award carries a certificate of honour, a memento and a one time cash prize of Rs.1 lakh. The award will be handed over to Mr. Mishra by President Pranab Mukherjee during 2016.

The Maharshi Badrayan Vyas Samman distinction is conferred on persons once a year on the Independence Day in recognition of their substantial contribution in the field of Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Pali/Prakrit. The award introduced in the year 2002, is given to selected young scholars in the age group of 30 to 45 years.

Mr. Mishra, a native of Nayagara district in Odisha joined IFP as a research scholar in 1999. He has authored a book Surya Satakam (Sun God) and has done phenomenal work in Saiva Agama. At IFP, Mr. Mishra has catalogued and edited over 3,500 manuscripts.

“I was passionate about manuscripts while doing my Ph.D. When I joined IFP, I was given the opportunity of cataloguing manuscripts and was more deeply drawn to it,” he said.

IFP has about 8,400 bundles of palm leaf manuscripts (classified as Memory of the World collection) by UNESCO with a majority on Saivagama, rituals, temple architecture, astrology, astronomy, Thirukkural, traditional south Indian medicine, Sanskrit literary works and Tamil devotional literature, he said.

Most of the manuscripts are written in Grantha script, used by Tamil Brahmins for writing Sanskrit while others are in Sarada, Nandinagari, Newari, Tigalari, Grantha, Tamil, Telugu, Oriya and Tulu scripts. Each palm leaf bundle contains dozens of texts engraved in tiny letters, he said.