Raghunath Temple, Aravali
About Raghunath Temple
History
Library and religious school
During the reign of Ranbir Singh, the temple complex started a pathshala (school) which welcomed students from all castes and classes. The temple housed a library with some 6,000 manuscripts. These are mostly copies made from manuscripts not available for sale, in Devanagari from Sarada originals, by scribes employed by the library in the nineteenth century. The library added to its collection, in the 19th-century, a dozen rare Sanskrit birch bark codices in the Sarada script as an object of curiosity. The collection as indexed by Stein, included Sanskrit manuscripts (predominantly Devanagari) of Vedic literature, grammar, lexicography, prosody, music, rhetoric, Kavya, drama, fables, dharmasutras, Mimamsa, Vedanta, Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Jyotisha, Architecture, Medicine, Epics, Puranas, Bhakti and Tantra.Singh funded a translation centre and included an effort to translate texts in Arabic and Persian languages into Sanskrit. According to Zutshi, this inter-religious initiative was praised by his contemporaries.The Raghunath temple remains a significant scholarly source of Sarada script manuscripts and one of the largest collection of Hindu and Buddhist texts of the Kashmir tradition. The Raghunath temple has been an early promoter of digitization initiative of the manuscripts it houses, and has started the eGangotri initiative to digitize ancient manuscripts from other parts of India.