What can you learn from a book you can’t read? Sanskrit manuscripts, admired for their philosophical insights are also extraordinary visual objects. In this visual reading of manuscripts from the collections at Cambridge University Library, explore how the colour red offers meaning and enchantment beyond language.
You’d think in this digital age where we can use the internet to find the answer to everything, that understanding ancient Sanskrit manuscripts would be easy. But there’s something esoteric about them, and perhaps that’s part of their allure. How does our visual literacy aid understanding and, perhaps more importantly, spark the awe that draws-in our curiosity to learn more?
Images of beige pages are in endless supply across Library collections the world-over – every day more and more are digitised and made accessible, ready and waiting to be discovered. Some pages stand out from the crowd for all sorts of reasons; they might be revered for containing the thoughts of humanity’s greatest minds, or so elaborately decorated that we marvel at their creation. But if you don’t understand the language or context, looking for commonality and universal things we can all understand is a great starting place.
Seeing the colour Red
Red is perhaps the colour with which humans have the most enduring relationship, indeed psychologists have long pondered the matter.Broadly coinciding with the emergence of the human species around 300,000 years ago, red was first used as a pigment in the form of red ochre. Its increasingly habitual use correlates with subsequent phases of advancement, becoming common around 160,000 years ago. It’s likely there may be an even deeper evolutionary basis to why our perception of red is so much more salient and striking than other colours, and we therefore universally associate red with higher social status. We inherently associate red with ripening fruit and the significance of blood, both the importance of noticing external bleeding and internal effects such as the implications of reddening skin to primate social and sexual signaling.
The use of red ochre to create rock art varies in scale – from the small engraved stone “crayons” found at the very southern tip of Africa in the Blombos Cave, to grand scenes depicted on the walls of caves as far afield as those at Lascaux in France, and the Bhimbetka area of central India.
Painting of a bull from Lascaux Cave France / Photo: arzu çakır, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Its use to stain personal objects and bone, as can be seen on the Red Lady of Paviland, suggests a more ritualistic than utilitarian intent. For this reason, the ritual use of red may even underpin the emergence of language. It is no wonder then that red has remained deeply significant across many cultures – we associate it with the divine, fortune, wealth and the full spectrum of passion from anger to love.
Codification of a Colour
This colour red, which stands out so boldly, also has deep linguistic connections. Both the English word ‘red’ and Sanskrit word ‘रुधिर’ (rudhira) share roots in the Proto-Indo-European language in the form of ‘*h₁rewdʰ-‘. Much like how language develops over time though, the significance of the colour red to language doesn’t stop there. The use of red by human cultures developed into the practice of using it to indicate significant parts of text, known as rubrication. It’s perhaps a short leap from pre-history to examples of incorporating red into texts that date to around 3000 years ago. By around 1000 CE, elements of this practice can be seen in a wide range of material in which these visual devices share a broadly universal and practical purpose, in helping us to navigate and articulate the structures of text and language.
The colour red : Salience to Symbolic
As paper supplanted palm leaves as the medium of choice for Sanskrit manuscripts, the use of red took on further symbolism that relates to the physicality of the medium in addition to the structure of the text.
The older palm leaf manuscripts have at least one central hole through which a string keeps the leaves bound together, much like a book. The physical string became redundant, as paper manuscripts could be kept in paper sleeves or folded into concertinas. But the structural, or mystical, concept lingers on, the hole often imitated by a red dot or other decorative device – the use of red in these seemingly special spaces of the pages seems intentional and significant. I wonder if this has a deeper meaning, or is merely an enduring nostalgic magic – perhaps not dissimilar to how we retain the format of the paper page in this now largely digital age?
We’ve seen how the salience of red has an articulating role and taken on symbolic meaning, but in this last manuscript, the colour red is elevated to an opulence that dominates the entire object.
The pages of this Kalāpustaka – or ‘performing art book’ – are anything but beige. Borders and backdrops become an animated “stage” for exuberant illuminations, almost obscuring any captions.
Pratapaditya Pal first drew attention to this Kalapustaka manuscript in 1967, describing it as a “strange medley of Brahmanical and Buddhist legends”. It is so distinct that it warranted a new set of principles for defining the artistic style to which this and only a select few other manuscripts belong. One endearing detail of which is a tendency to depict the scenes “staged” in front of festooned fabric backdrops that add to the theatrical and performative vibrancy.
Pal suggested its creation is mostly of aesthetic value, but its digitisation offered an opportunity to reassess this through scholarly description of every page. A new theory suggests it was a royal commission, created as a visual teaching aid for young aristocrats – something that would have been more appealing and inspirational than the texts alone. When you see this manuscript amongst the others, their touches of red become diminutive to the glowing cardinal world to which the Kalapustaka invites you – immediately revealing its significance to any onlooker.
One of the most striking pages occurs towards the end of the manuscript, where we are presented with a mandala-like visualisation of the Rasalila – “the joyful dance and amorous sport among Kṛṣṇa and the Gopīs”.
This double page spread almost pulsates off the page in its attempt to break free from the rigid rectangular form of a page – the suggestion of motion, a combination of colour and form.
The intensity of fiery red fronds that eddy and enrich the fabric backdrops of many of the scenes are peppered by some cooler blue or green colours, and occasionally the frenetic fronds give way to the gentler curving patterns of waves on water. Some of the stories depicted in these scenes feature the River Yamunā , perhaps sources of the rivers’ veneration. In one of these, “Kṛṣṇa defeats the nāga Kāliya, who had poisoned the river Yamunā”:
Unfortunately it seems the river has been poisoned once more, only this time by pollution and industrialisation. I hope that the poisonous snake of pollution can be conquered once more – for even though I can’t read Sanskrit, looking at some of these glorious manuscripts is enough to know that they contain stories of hope and regeneration.
These manuscripts, which are so foundational to global culture, remain conduits of learning and inspiration, transcending the culture they were made for and language they were written in.
Our relationship with the colour red, like humanity, might change and evolve over time, but it does endure, and that persistence is simultaneously both a key, and the light shining through a keyhole, standing out from these pages as an invitation to open a door. Whilst we all might have our own positionalities, and see through different lenses, identifying points where these can meet, such as through our universal understanding of something like use of the colour red, is a way to keep that door open.
As we’ve seen, the wonder and curiosity that the colour red can generate extends its reach beyond a merely practical nature, it enables a kind of universal enchantment that endures through things like these manuscripts. “Enchantment is always an embodied experience” that manifests itself through our senses, and reflecting on that enchantment facilitates an experiential learning experience, drawing us in and making us want to know more. We are used to looking at things online so fleetingly these days, it’s easy to forget that we can also embrace some mindfulness and spend time exploring things like these manuscripts and thinking about what it is we see and allowing that enchantment to work its magic.
This article is part of our Open Knowledge series (2025), supported by Wikimedia UK.
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