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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.

The article explores terminological issues in a hitherto hardly explored chapter in early Hindi lexicography, namely in Francois-Marie de Tours' extraordinary dictionary of 1703, the Thesaurus Linguae Indianae. The manuscript consists of 490 folios verso and recto organized in four columns: Latin keyword, Hindi word in Devanagari, French rendering, and a phonological transcription with an advanced self-styled set of diacritics. Altogether, the language that the author presents in the dictionary and also in his grammar of Hindustani is astonishingly close to Modern Standard Hindi. Both extraordinary documents appear to be meant to go to the press, but for unclear reasons survived only as manuscripts. The dictionary is an important contribution to the early history of Hindi as well as of the early forms of the European encounter with South Asia. The following article is a provisional report on the project at Uppsala University and some of its findings.