The origin and fate of a Hindustani Grammatica and a Thesaurus by François Marie de Tours 1703–1704

Some scholars of Indology in the 2010s came across one since long hidden manuscript, with a title page in Devanāgarī script dated to 1703, in the Historical Archive of Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in Rome. The manuscript, despite being entitled as Thesaurus Linguæ Indianæ, does not contain a dictionary, but its main part is a complete grammar of the Hindustani language, dated 1704 and written by a Capuchin friar and missionary to India, François Marie de Tours. The finding later led to a rediscovery in Paris of two manuscripts, dated 1703, of the Thesaurus missing in the Rome manuscript by the same author. One of them is supposedly the original and the other one a later copy, produced in 1784. These three manuscripts in Rome and Paris have a common but by scholars in the field forgotten history. Their relation and history will in this article be revealed in detail and contextualized, firstly in a section in which the manuscripts are closely described, secondly in a section about the author as much as is known. A third section will follow the history of the Thesaurus manuscripts in Paris up to the present day.