Үндістанның Пуне қаласындағы Шығыс зерттеулер институты

Research institute in Pune, India

The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) is located in Pune, Maharashtra, India. It was founded on 6 July 1917 and named after Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar (1837–1925), long regarded as the founder of Indology (Orientalism) in India. The institute is well known for its collection of old Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts.

This institute is of a public trust registered under Act XXI of 1860. Initially, the institute received an annual grant of 3,000 rupees from the government of Bombay. Presently, it is partially supported by annual grants from the government of Maharashtra. The institute also receives grants from the government of India and the University Grants Commission for specific research projects. The institute has one of the largest collections of rare books and manuscripts in South Asia, consisting of over 125,000 books and 29,510 manuscripts. The institute publishes a journal, Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, four times a year. The institute also hosts the Manuscripts Resource and Conservation Centre under the auspices of the National Mission for Manuscripts, a project of the Ministry of Culture of the government of India. In 2007, the Rigveda manuscripts preserved at the Institute were included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

The government of Bombay, in 1866, started a pan Indian Manuscript Collection project. Noted scholars like Georg Bühler, F. Kielhorn, Peter Peterson, Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, S. R. Bhandarkar, Kathavate and Ghate collected more than 17,000 important manuscripts under this project. This collection was first deposited at Elphinstone College in Bombay. Then it was transferred to Deccan College (Pune) for better preservation. After the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) was founded in 1917, the BORI founders proposed to offer even better preservation and research. Hence Lord Willingdon, the then governor of the Bombay Presidency and the first president of BORI, transferred the valuable government collection of manuscripts to the BORI on 1 April 1918. The first curator, P. K. Gode took active initiatives to enhance this collection. Presently, the Institute has over 29,000 manuscripts. The largest part of the collection (17,877 Manuscripts) is part of the "Government Manuscript Library", while there is an additional collection of 11,633 manuscripts. The most prized collections include a paper manuscript of the Cikitsāsārasangraha dated 1320 and a palmleaf manuscript of the Upamitibhavaprapañcakathā dated 906. Among the several scholars referring to the works at BORI, the most well known person arguably is the Bharat Ratna awardee, Pt. Pandurang Vaman Kane.

In 1932, there was a need for money for the publication of the Mahabharata. A formal request was made to the seventh nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, who granted Rs.1000 / per year for a period of 11 years and offered Rs 50,000 for construction of the guest house which is called "Nizam Guest House". The office of the university was operated at Nizam Guest House until June 1, 1949. The vandalism and the subsequent ban on the book were denounced in a statement by historians, among whom were R. S. Sharma, R. C. Thakran, Suraj Bhan, Irfan Habib, D N Jha, Shireen Moosvi and K. M. Shrimali. Oxford University Press, publisher of James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, withdrew the book after protests from historian Ninad Bedekar and other right wing politicians due to what they claimed to be 'objectionable' statements about Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.