Luigi Pio Tessitori

When Luigi Pio Tessitori arrived in India in the spring of 1914, his fame as linguist and philologist was already well established beyond the borders of Italy. Born in Udine on the 13 December 1887 to a family from Moggio Udinese, he had spent his childhood and early youth in his home town. In 1906 he went to Florence where he studied Sanskrit at the Regio Istituto di Studi Superiori under the distinguished scholar Paolo Emilio Pavolini. In 1910 he got his degree after defending a thesis on Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa and Tulasī Dāsa’s Rāmacaritamānasa. An abstract of his work was reviewed by the Irish linguist Sir George Grierson, Superintendent of the Linguistic Survey of India. Subsequently Tessitori mastered his knowledge of Prakrits and modern Indian languages, and obtained his higher studies diploma for a critical edition of Dharmadāsa’s Uvaesamālā. In Florence he was in correspodance with the Jaina scholar Vijaya Dharma Sūri. During a short stay at Naples, where he monitored the outcome of a public competition for a chair in Hindustani at the Regio Istituto Orientale, he obtained from the Government of India the direction of an important research project in Rajasthan for the Asiatic Society of Bengal. After landing in Bombay on 8 April and spending several months in Calcutta, Tessitori moved to Marwar, in the edge of the desert, where he drafted the research project’s guidelines entitled Bardic and Historical Survey of Rajputana. The work began in Jodhpur on 1 January 1915 and it came to include mainly historical and epigraphical studies, with researches of local traditions and a survey of medieval manuscripts of chronicles and bardic literature, some of which he acquired for his personal collection. Towards the end of 1915, thanks to the backing of Maharaja Ganga Singh, who became his patron and supporter, he moved to Bikaner, where he continued his work with equal intensity. Tessitori also concerned himself with archaeology, completing work on behalf of the archaeologist John Marshall, who met in Simla in the summer of 1916. After a brief stay in Kaśmir in the spring of 1917, Tessitori carried on his excavations in Rajasthan, discovering inscriptions, sculptures, earthenware pottery, coins and seals. Tessitori's activities came to a sudden end when he died, after a short illness, at Bikaner, on 22 November 1919. 

• Florentine period (1906-1913)
• The stay in Calcutta (1914)
• The transfer to Jodhpur (1915)
• Arrival in Bikaner (1916)
• Towards Simla (1916)
• A passage to Kaśmir (1917)
• Explorations at Kalibangan (1918)