The Citrasastra palm-leaf manuscript from Odisha

"In the 1960s, the Puri-based and internationally known Pandit Sadasiva Rath Sarma presented Alice Boner with an illustrated palm-leaf manuscript entitled "Citraśāstra" (painting treatise). It consists of nineteen folios, inscribed on both sides with Sanskrit slokas (verses) and Odia captions to a large number of incised drawings and diagrams. The pothi (manuscript) also contains a four-line colophon that speaks of a Rūpakāra (wood-sculptor's caste) master from Puri as the author and also gives a date that leaves much room for interpretation. The light-brown folios have the look of antiques, of having been prepared decades, if not centuries, ago. No similar text exists in the Odia language and only a few comparable works are known, all famous and often quoted among art-historians. In 1999, my friend Dinanath Pathy showed me the manuscript; I photographed the folios and we decided to publish it. In the process of editing the fascinating opus, which provides us with most inter esting terms in Sanskrit as well as in the specific Odia workshop lingo of "traditional" craft-persons of Puri, we were again and again puzzled by obscure details. But only after we had properly transliterated