The DHARMA project ERC n°809994 was launched on May 1st 2019. It was funded by an ERC Synergy Grant 2018 through the European Union’s Research and Innovation Programme Horizon 2020, and lasted over 90 months (May 2019 through October 2026). For general information about the project and its goals, head over to our blog on Hypotheses.org.

The acronym DHARMA stood for The Domestication of “Hindu” Asceticism and the Religious Making of South and Southeast Asia. However, a comparative approach (not focusing only on Hinduism, but also considering Buddhism and Jainism) was fundamental to the project’s attempt, in a broad range of regional contexts, to uncover the complex interplay of religion, state and society in premodern South and Southeast Asia.

Recognizing that inscriptions are crucial historical sources because most of our knowledge of early South and Southeast Asia is based on epigraphy, the project aimed to explore, mine and diffuse these sources with digital humanities tools, and specifically to create an unprecedentedly large database of primary sources, in the framework of the Text Encoding Initiative and its implementation for epigraphy called EpiDoc.

About dharmalekha.info

That database has become the foundation of this platform and it was the principal deliverable of the ERC Synergy Project called DHARMA. Since the end of that project, the platform is being managed by a consortium which retains the same name.

The database covers almost exclusively premodern sources in Indic scripts, to the nearly complete exclusion of sources in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts. It is strongly focused on epigraphic texts but does include a number of critical editions of manuscript-transmitted texts, as well as diplomatic editions of specific manuscripts. For the time being, only epigraphic texts can be queried by the search engine.

All of the source files for the database are accessible via a dedicated GitHub organization.

The structuring of our data and the design of the database were led, during the duration of the ERC Project, by Axelle Janiak, Dániel Balogh and Michaël Meyer. Their work involved, among many other things, the structuring of the GitHub organization, the drafting of guides to document our work, the integration of our XML source files into an SQL database, and the development of a search engine able to query the data.

About the DHARMA Consortium

A formal consortium was formed to carry out the ERC project DHARMA, and it was led by Emmanuel Francis, Arlo Griffiths and Annette Schmiedchen as Principal Investigators. In a more informal manner, the consortium lives on and is now led by Dániel Balogh, Florinda De Simini, Emmanuel Francis, Arlo Griffiths, and Annette Schmiedchen.