The Kern Institute was founded on April 4, 1925. It was named after the founder of the Dutch Indological School, Hendrik Kern (1833-1917), who became the first professor of Sanskrit Studies at the University of Leiden in 1865. His portrait, made in stone, still stands at the entrance to the library of the Institute, as if inviting incoming students to study in the field of indology.

Initially conceived as an institute for the study of Indian archaeology, the Kern Institute eventually became a center for indological research in a broad sense, meaning the study of the history, culture and religion of not only the Indian subcontinent, but also territories where the influence of India has historically spread, primarily the regions of Southeast and East Asia and, of course, not only Indology, as such, but also Buddhology, tibetology, etc.

At the time of the founding of the Kern Institute, Leiden University had two departments that trained specialists in Indology and Indonesian archaeology. These are the Department of Sanskrit Studies, founded in 1865, and the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History of the Netherlands East Indies, founded in 1919. Vogel (1871-1958), who continued to study his favorite subject: Indian archaeology and epigraphy. The Department of Archaeology and Ancient History of the Netherlands East Indies has been headed by N. J. Krom since its foundation in 1919. Prior to these appointments, both scientists were employees in British and Dutch India, respectively. Vogel served as Director of the Northern District of the Indian Archaeological Survey from 1901 to 1914, and his duties included, among other things, the preservation of historical monuments and the supervision of excavations. During this period, he managed to collect a rich collection of photographic materials. N. J. Krom was director of the Archaeological Survey of the Netherlands Indies, founded by him in 1913 as an extension of the Archaeological Commission for Java and Madura. Returning to their homeland, they lost the objects of their archaeological research, which were in abundance at their disposal before. Now they had to be content with studying secondary materials (photos, slides, etc.) from their own and other people's private collections. The need to have this kind of material on hand to continue the study of Indian culture and archaeology was the immediate reason for the foundation of the Kern Institute.

In general, the entire eighty-year history of the Kern Institute can be roughly divided into two periods: before and after 1960.

In the first period, which lasted thirty-five years, from 1925 to 1960, the Kern Institute existed as a private institution of the University of Leiden, which promoted research and training of students in the field of Indian and Indonesian archaeology. Thus, the quality of teaching these subjects was raised to a level that the university was not able to provide independently.

Initially, the institute was located in a historic building in the center of Leiden, called "Gravensteen", on the top floor of which the Kern Institute Association rented several rooms from the municipality.

The publication of this article was made possible by the author's work at the International Institute of Asian Studies (HAS) in 2005 and 2006 as a fellow of the J. Gonda Foundation. The information presented in this article is largely based on the booklet "Guide to the Kern Institute: History and Present Research" (Leiden, 2000), published on the occasion of the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Kern Institute, and on the author's personal communication with his staff.

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The leadership of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Leiden was extremely pleased with the appearance of a private institute. It was of the opinion that such an institution, while providing materials for archaeological studies, would be a valuable resource for teaching academic courses in Indian archaeology, Sanskrit and Javanese. Moreover, in the face of a shortage of classrooms, the existence of additional facilities at Gravensteen was also very welcome. The Faculty supported the request of the Board of Supervisors of the University of Leiden for a grant from the Ministry of Education to establish the Kern Institute.

The first chairman of the Kern Institute Association was Prof. - F. Vogel. During his tenure (1925-1939), the Institute became a true center for the study of Indian and Indonesian archaeology, widely known both in the Netherlands and far beyond. The goals of the Institute and the composition of its collection certainly reflected Vogel's personal research interests in Indian archaeology and epigraphy. Despite limited financial sources (donations, gifts, and subsidies), over the years we have managed to collect a large number of books, magazines, photographs, slides, prints, etchings of inscriptions, manuscripts, letters, maps, and plans. In the Association's ten-year report, Vogel wrote that the Kern Institute Library's collection is almost complete in terms of Dutch Indian archaeology and the most representative in terms of British India. For the acquisition of all this material in general and photographs in particular, Vogel's own efforts were invaluable, based on his direct connections with scientists, organizations of cultural institutions, directors of archaeological services and museums in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. In this regard, we should also mention the contribution of N. J. Krom. As a co - founder of the Institute, and later as Vogel's successor as chairman of the Kern Institute Association, he became an active member from the very beginning. Crom was particularly concerned with adding to the photographic collection of ancient monuments in the Dutch East Indies.

Purchases, due to their limited financial resources, were only a secondary means of acquiring collections. The growth of the congregation was mainly due to endowments, wills, and exchanges of gifts.

Another important source of material was to exchange it for issues of the Annual Bibliography of Indian Archaeology (ABIA). The publication of the bibliography was an ingenious idea of F. D. K. Bose, Crom's successor as director of the Archaeological Survey of the Netherlands Indies. Vogel accepted the project, worked it out in detail and implemented it. The first issue of the yearbook for 1926 was published in 1928. This bibliography, compiled in collaboration with scientists from South and Southeast Asia, has significantly raised the international reputation of the Core Institute. It contributed to the achievement of two goals at once. First, with the ever-increasing number of publications in the field of Indian archaeology, the publishers of the yearbook have made a lot of efforts to ensure their availability by conducting special research. Secondly, being an exchange item, the yearbook contributed to an increase in the collection of the Institute's library. After the first issue of the yearbook, the library received about 50 journals (by 1931 this number had increased to hundreds) and many other publications from institutions such as the Archaeological Survey of India, the Royal Batavian Society and the Archaeological Survey of the Netherlands Indies. For the publication of ABIA, the Kern Institute Association received grants from the governments of the British and Dutch Indies, as well as from other organizations.

In addition to the creation of a specialized library and the publication of a bibliographic yearbook, which continued to be the priority areas of the Kern Institute's activities, it soon began teaching modern Oriental languages such as Hindi, Balinese and Malay. Initially, these courses were intended to train officials of the Dutch administration, but almost immediately students began to attend them, since these languages were not taught at the university. The courses have become a complement to university education.

By agreement with the university library, all books submitted to the Kern Institute were centrally processed and entered in the general catalog of the University of Leiden. Moreover, many books from the university library collection related to the archaeology of India were taken over by the Kern Institute Library for long-term use. Subsequently, the university library stopped purchasing books on this subject, so that the Kern Institute became the sole collector.

As the library collection expanded, the space in the Gravensteen building, even after the expansion, was clearly not enough. In 1938, the institute moved to 1e Binnenvestgracht, where it was located in a wing of the former university hospital. At the new location of the Core Institute

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It provided a reading room for students studying modern Indian languages, previously located in the university library along with the corresponding book collection, which nevertheless continued to be listed as the university library. Through these activities and the specialized library thus established, the Kern Institute has grown into a thriving institution in the field of Indian archaeology. It was widely known, especially abroad, and attracted a lot of world-famous visitors.

In 1939, at the age of 68, J.-F. Vogel has retired. The Department of Sanskrit Studies was headed by F. B. Y. Kuyper, who held this position until 1972.At the same time, Vogel also left the post of chairman of the Kern Institute Association, but until his death in 1958, he maintained close ties with the Association as its honorary, and sometimes even its full chairman. As a token of gratitude for his selfless service for the benefit of the Association, he was awarded his bronze bust, which still adorns the library room. His successor as Chairman of the Kern Institute Association was N. I. Krom, who at that time headed the Department of Archaeology of the Netherlands Indies. After his death in 1945, F. D. K. Bos became the head of the department and chairman of the Association.

Since its foundation, the Kern Institute has had a difficult time operating due to financial problems and the economic crisis of the 1930s. During the Second World War, the purchase and exchange of books, magazines and other materials from India and Indonesia almost completely ceased. This led to the formation of gaps in the collection, which were almost irreplaceable later. After the war ended and India gained independence, the situation with the supply of books did not improve. Moreover, after the independence of Indonesia, the flow of publications that came from the Dutch India Archaeological Survey almost stopped due to the fact that the reorganized Indonesian Archaeological Survey began to publish a significant part of its publications in the Indonesian language.

For this reason, the publication of the Bibliographic Yearbook of Indian Archaeology (ABIA) has been very difficult. Delays in obtaining books and magazines, and their small number, were a weak basis for its subsequent publication. After the 14th volume, which covered 1939, ABIA ceased to be a yearbook. In 1952, subsidies from the Indonesian Government ceased. The situation improved somewhat with a small grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research - and a slight increase in subsidies from the Ministry of Education, which allowed the ABIA compiler to be kept on a permanent basis since 1958. In 1955, the first issue of the series "Memoirs of the Kern Institute"was published.

Nevertheless, even at this time, important purchases were made and valuable gifts were received from both individuals and institutions (for example, from the University of Calcutta, the Indian National Archives and the Institute of Oriental Studies. Bhandarkara in Pune). In addition, several prominent members of the Kern Institute passed away during this period, and their inheritance passed to the Institute. Thus, the Kern Institute received the bequests of the collection of N. I. Krom (books and photographs of Sumatra antiquities, 1945), the theologian Johan van Manen (books, Tibetan woodcuts and manuscripts, as well as archives, 1948) and, of course, its founder J.-F. Krom. Vogel (archives, 1958). The collections of books and photographs that had belonged to Vogel were already in the Institute library for long-term use. According to the will of T. van Earp, who actively contributed to the replenishment of the institute's photo collection, the institute received about 300 photographs of Balinese antiquities. Until 1955, through the efforts of F. D. K. Bose and his successor A. I. Burnet, the Institute received photographs from the Archaeological Survey of the Netherlands Indies/Indonesia.

At the same time, the financial resources available to the Kern Institute were extremely scarce. The Association, as a private institution, had to rely only on donations from its members, gifts (even Indian princes were among the donors) and grants. The active influx of new members, which was observed in the first years of the institute's existence, was replaced by a sharp decline in their ranks in the 1950s. The Kern Institute Association received grants not only from the governments of the Netherlands, India, Ceylon and Indonesia, which funded the publication of the bibliographic yearbook, but also from other domestic and international cultural organizations, such as the Leiden University Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences. Small funds also came from the wills of J. F. de Kock (1953) and J.-F. de Kock (1953). Vogel.

These funds were clearly not enough to provide the Kern Institute with a stable existence. The growing cost of maintaining the premises and the preservation of collections, especially photographs and prints, required constant concern. The Institute could afford to keep only one custodian on a permanent basis, whose duties included:

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make collections accessible by cataloging books and describing photographs and preserving them, keep the library and reading room open, compile a bibliographic yearbook, and keep up-to-date correspondence. Only occasionally a second employee was hired to help him. In addition to the first curators S. L. Fabry, H. Goetz and A. I. Bernet Kempers, we should mention P. H. Pot, a first-class and most valuable specialist in this field. He was curator of the Kern Institute collection from 1945 to 1960, combining this work with that of curator of the National Museum of Ethnology in 1947. In 1947. he compiled an index of publications on the antiquities of the Dutch Indies for 1901-1941. Later, for more than 35 years (1950 - 1986), P. H. Pott served as Secretary of the Association, replacing H. T. Damste, who served as secretary from 1925 to 1950. It should be said that all this work was often carried out for more than a symbolic reward.

In the 1950s. The Kern Institute continued to be a world-renowned center with a specialized library. This was confirmed by the donation of 400 Sanskrit works to the Institute, made by the Government of India in 1958 in recognition of his services. Unfortunately, in the Netherlands itself, interest in the activities of the Kern Institute was much lower. Under the pressure of difficult financial circumstances, the Executive Committee of the Kern Institute Association decided in 1955 to adhere more strictly to its original goals, limiting its activities to the field of Indian archaeology. This meant the suspension of courses in modern spoken Indian and Indonesian languages.

In the years that followed, it became quite clear that the Kern Institute would not survive if the University of Leiden did not take over the maintenance of its staff, along with other costs. In the end, the Executive committee of the Association submitted a submission about this to the University's Board of Curators.

It proposed to draw a clear distinction between the Core Institute itself and its association. The Institute assumed all financial obligations related to the maintenance of its activities and the library. This meant that the Kern Institute became part of the university, which took on the maintenance of full-time staff, payment of taxes, provision of utility costs, etc. At the same time, the Kern Institute Association gained independence, becoming an autonomous association that continued to perform its assigned tasks (stimulating the study of Indian archaeology), transferring the acquired property to the Kern Institute and carrying out publishing activities. The University's Board of Curators approved this presentation, taking into account the significant contribution made by the Kern Institute in the field of basic scientific research, which remained a priority task of the university for a long period. It was taken into account that the Kern Institute had already been entrusted with significant state-owned collections: This is a collection of books held in the university library and a collection of photographs obtained from the Archaeological Survey of Indonesia and given to the Institute by the former Colonial Office. In deciding in favour of the submission, the University set out two conditions for the Association: first, it must remain in Leiden and, second, it must make its property available to the public.

With the transfer of the Kern Institute under the jurisdiction of the university, the second period of its existence began.

The separation of the Institute from the Association has created an excellent opportunity to once again take its activities beyond the goals originally announced. Thus, the Kern Institute was transformed from a center for the study of Indian archaeology into a center for Indological research. It was assigned to that part of the Faculty of Humanities, which later became the Faculty of Languages and Cultures of South and Central Asia. At the same time, the Kern Institute maintained an indissoluble connection with the Association, which allowed it to retain its name later, in the late 1970s, when intra-university institutions were virtually abolished.

In the post-war years, the University began to expand its research and teaching activities. During this period, in addition to the existing indological departments - Sanskrit studies, as well as archeology and ancient history of South and Southeast Asia-two new ones were established. The first of them - the Department of Buddhology, Indian Philosophy and Tibetan language-was opened in 1956; it was headed by J. V. de Jong, after him-D. S. Ruegg, and later-T. E. Vetter. In 1964, the fourth Indological department was opened: languages and Cultural History of South Asia after the Islamic conquest. It was headed by I. S. Heesterman, and since 1990 - D. H. A. Kolf. By the time the Kern Institute was transferred to the University, the Department of Sanskrit Studies was headed by F. B. J. Kuyper, who was replaced by H. P. Schmidt, M. Witzel, and since 1992 - H. V. Bodewitz. Since 1957, the Department of Archaeology has been headed by T. P. Galesten, who was appointed head of the Department of Archaeology.

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Also in 1960, Director of the Kern Institute. In 1986, after the resignation of his successor J. G. de Casparis, the department was transferred to the Faculty of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia, being renamed the Department of Modern History of Indonesia.

These events in the educational and scientific life of the Faculty of Languages and Cultures of South and Central Asia could not but affect the composition of the Institute's library collection. Since 1960, new books and magazines have been purchased through the University library. Purchasing policy was now determined by four faculty departments, and in particular, the newly opened departments of Buddhology and contemporary South Asia made a significant contribution to the development of specialized areas represented in the library collection. Thus, over the years, the collection of Buddhist and Tibetological books has significantly expanded. The same can be said for publications on modern history and languages, especially after the establishment of the South Asian Documentation Center in 1987. As for the Sanskrit part, after the appointment of Professor Kuiper, the "interweaving" of Sanskrit with archeology ceased; the emphasis was placed on research in the field of linguistics, philology, and religion. The result was the foundation in 1957. The Indo-Iranian Journal.

The events that took place in the country also affected the library collection of the Kern Institute. As a result of the government's cost-minimization policy of the 1980s, two Indian departments at the University of Amsterdam were closed: the Department of Indian and Iranian Languages and the Department of South Asian Art and Archaeology. Initially, their collections were transferred to the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. Later, however, in search of a more suitable home, a collection of books and magazines on ancient and new Indian languages, as well as a collection of photographs and slides on Indian art, were transferred to the Kern Institute. Moreover, in 1992, after the merger of the Indology departments of the Universities of Leiden and Utrecht, the Utrecht book collection on Indology was also transferred to the Kern Institute.

Meanwhile, the Kern Institute Association was going through far from the best of times. After the transfer of the institute to the university, F. D. K. Bos remained at its head as chairman and P. H. Pott as Secretary. The scope of the Association's functions was reduced, which, in turn, led to a drop in interest in its activities, which were practically not conducted. The number of its members has steadily declined, and annual meetings have lost their regularity. The situation was aggravated by the fact that with the death of J.-F. In 1958, many contacts with scientists and institutions in South and Southeast Asia were cut off. In 1967, F. D. K. Bos, the initiator of the publication of the Bibliographic Yearbook, died.

Nevertheless, the publication of the ABIA remained one of the Association's priorities. Its publication was still dependent on grants from external organizations, while the university paid for a permanent employee who worked on the compilation of the yearbook in conjunction with the international editorial board. Despite this, the difficulties facing the publication increased, and the debt increased. Finally, in 1984, after the publication of 23 volumes covering the period 1926 - 1972, its publication ceased. This was a huge loss for the study of the art and archaeology of South and Southeast Asia, as ABIA was practically the only tool in this field. Moreover, the suspension of publication entailed far-reaching consequences for the replenishment of the magazine collection, since soon the flow of magazines received by exchange dried up.

Two years later, the second term of the charter of the Kern Institute Association came to an end. This situation was used by P. H. Pott, who, with the approval of I. Bronkhorst, proposed to completely update the composition of the executive committee of the Association. The first decision of the newly elected executive Committee concerned changing the name of the Association: from now on it was called the Association of Friends of the Kern Institute. The second solution expanded the concept of the Association's goal: now it was formulated as promoting indological research in general.

P. H. Pott believed that the new executive committee would revitalize the Association's activities, and his assumption was fully justified. The number of members of the Association increased again, and it resumed its activities. First of all, she intended to resume the publication of the Bibliographic Yearbook on Indian Archaeology, but it took ten years before this intention could be realized. Several publications from the series "Memoirs of the Kern Institute" were published, and a new series was founded, called "Almanac of the Kern Institute". To date, eight issues of this series have been published. As a tool for book exchange, these publications made up only to a small extent for the loss associated with the termination of the publication of ABIA, which previously served this function.

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Other activities of the Association include organizing lectures, guided tours, celebrating the 125th anniversary of Sanskrit studies in the Netherlands (1990), and establishing the biannual National Day of Indologists (since 1989).

In accordance with its stated goals, the Association has always taken care to preserve its collections. Every year, a certain amount from its budget was intended for bookbinding. Sometimes attempts were made to restore particularly valuable materials. Not so long ago, through the Association, an old photo album from the collection of J.-F. was restored. Vogel. Funds for the restoration were allocated by the National Heritage Preservation Foundation and the J. Gonda Foundation. The album contained 240 albumin prints of Buddhist archaeological finds from the Gandhara region made by Major Cole during the 1883 archaeological season. In recognition of P. H. Pott's services as curator of the collection, the P. H. Pott Foundation was established in 1989 after his death to promote the preservation of the collections.

Despite the expansion of the Association's fields of activity, the arts and archaeology of South and Southeast Asia have always enjoyed its special attention. Since the foundation of the Kern Institute, the study of these disciplines has been under the tutelage of J.-F. Kern. Vogel, N. I. Krom, F. D. K. Bose, T. P. Galestin, and I. G. de Casparis. Custody ended in 1986. In this situation, the Association of Friends of the Kern Institute took the initiative to create a department of South Asian Art History at the Faculty of South and Central Asia. Such a department was opened in 1995; its professor was K. R. van Kooy. In the late 1990s, he also headed the Association.

The Association's ongoing efforts to renew the publication of the Bibliographic Yearbook and preserve its collections have not been in vain. In the late 1990s, two projects aimed at creating databases based on modern technologies were adopted. The first of these is a project proposed by the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden, Amsterdam) and partially supported by the J. Gonda Foundation and the Faculty of Arts of Leiden University. This project involves the resumption of the publication of the Bibliographic Yearbook on Indian Archaeology under a new name and in a new form. ABIA, an Index to the Art and Archaeology of South and Southeast Asia, is an online electronic database available both in hard copy and on electronic media (CD-ROM). As before, the annotated bibliographic database is compiled by an international team of specialists. The first issue of the index contains annotations and keyword indexing of publications dating back to 1996, and was published in 1999. Another project concerns the creation of a database of photographs stored at the Kern Institute on the art and archaeology of Asia. It includes digitized photos from the richest collection of photo prints of the XIX and XX centuries. The database consists of a description, a thesaurus, and an access module. By 2002, the database included 45,000 prints out of a total collection of 70,000 photographs.

In recent years, the Kern Institute has received a large number of books as gifts from both individual scholars (for example, books on ancient Iran, Dravidian and Munda languages from F. B. Y. Kuiper) and institutions (books on modern Indian literature from the Embassy of India). Collections left by bequests continued to arrive - from P. H. Pott (1989), J. Gonda from the University of Utrecht (1993), and from the archaeologist E. S. I. During Caspers (1996).

After 1960, the Kern Institute collection expanded significantly through purchases, gifts, exchanges, and later amalgamation with collections from Amsterdam and Utrecht. To date, the library of the Kern Institute has more than 60 thousand volumes of the book collection and 150 titles of journals, being replenished annually by more than 1 thousand. volumes. Thematically, it presents art and archeology, languages and literatures, religion and philosophy, history and social sciences of South and Central Asia, as well as East Asian Buddhism, archeology and religion of Southeast Asia. In addition, the collection of the Kern Institute consists of more than 70 thousand photographs of art objects and archeology of South and Southeast Asia, more than 30 thousand photographs of ancient monuments. more than 800 Tibetan woodcuts and 400 Tibetan manuscripts, 330 Sanskrit manuscripts, about 200 Lepcha manuscripts, more than 300 impressions and prints of inscriptions, more than 300 maps and plans, as well as numerous archives.

The constant expansion of the collection led to the fact that after 1960 the Kern Institute was forced to change its premises three times. It currently occupies one floor of the old university building at Nonnensteeg, 1-3, providing its collections for both academic and research purposes.

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