Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism

By Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee

Philology and Criticism contrasts the Mahābhārata’s preservation and transmission within the Indian scribal and commentarial traditions with Sanskrit philology after 1900, as German Indologists proposed a critical edition of the Mahābhārata to validate their racial and nationalist views. Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee show how, in contrast to the Indologists’ unscientific theories, V. S. Sukthankar assimilated the principles of neo-Lachmannian textual criticism to defend the transmitted text and its traditional reception as a work of law, philosophy and salvation. The authors demonstrate why, after the edition’s completion, no justification exists for claiming that an earlier heroic epic existed, that the Brahmans redacted the heroic epic to produce the Mahābhārata or that they interpolated “sectarian” gods such as Vis.n.u and Śiva into the work. By demonstrating how the Indologists committed technical errors, cited flawed and biased scholarship and used circular argumentation to validate their racist and anti-Semitic theories, Philology and Criticism frees readers to approach the Mahābhārata as “the principal monument of bhakti” (Madeleine Biardeau). The authoritative guide to the critical edition’s correct use and interpretation, Philology and Criticism urges South Asianists to view Hinduism as a complex debate about ontology and ethics rather than through the lenses of “Brahmanism” and “sectarianism.” It launches a new world philology—one that is plural and self-reflexive rather than Eurocentric and ahistorical.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783085781

Book preview

Philology and Criticism

CULTURAL, HISTORICAL AND TEXTUAL STUDIES OF SOUTH ASIAN RELIGIONS

The volumes featured in the Anthem Cultural, Historical and Textual Studies of South Asian Religions series are the expression of an international community of scholars committed to the reshaping of the field of textual and historical studies of religions. The volumes in this series examine practice, ritual and other textual religious products, crossing different area studies and time frames. Featuring a vast range of interpretive perspectives, this innovative series aims to enhance the way we look at religious traditions.

Series Editor

Federico Squarcini, University of Florence, Italy

Editorial Board

Piero Capelli, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy

Vincent Eltschinger, ICIHA, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria

Christoph Emmrich, University of Toronto, Canada

James Fitzgerald, Brown University, USA

Jonardon Ganeri, University of Sussex, UK

Barbara A. Holdrege, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Sheldon Pollock, Columbia University, USA

Karin Preisendanz, University of Vienna, Austria

Alessandro Saggioro, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, University of Lausanne and EPHE, France

Romila Thapar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Ananya Vajpeyi, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA

Marco Ventura, University of Siena, Italy

Vincenzo Vergiani, University of Cambridge, UK

Philology and Criticism

A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism

Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-576-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-576-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

nārāyaṇaṃ namaskṛtya naraṃ caiva narottamam |

devīṃ sarasvatīṃ caiva tato jayamudīrayet ||

Dedicated to

Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar

Philology […] has become the modern form of criticism.

—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter Summaries

Introduction Ad Fontes, Non Ultra Fontes!

About This Book

Why a Critical Edition?

What Is a Critical Edition?

How to Interpret the Critical Edition

Conclusion

Chapter OneArguments for a Hyperarchetypal Inference

The Normative Redaction Hypothesis

Normative Redaction, Archetype and Original

Criticism: Higher and Lower

The Argument from Spread and the Argument from Resilience

The Argument from Empty Reference

The Argument from Loss

Chapter TwoReconstructing the Source of Contamination

Understanding Contamination

Contamination: Hyperarchetypal and Extra-stemmatic

Identifying the Source of Contamination

The Argument from Uncertainty

The Argument from Oral Source

The Argument from (Postulated) Antiquity and the Argument from Ideology

Chapter ThreeConfusions Regarding Classification

Classification: Typological and Genealogical

Determining Filiation

Eliminating Witnesses

The Argument from Brevity and the Argument from False Premises

The Argument from a Misapprehension Concerning Classification (Schriftartprämisse)

The Argument from Extensive Contamination

The Argument from Independent Recensions

The Argument from Expertise

Conclusion: Textual Criticism and Indology

Epilogue

Appendices

1.The Volumes of the Critical Edition

2.Editions Besides the Critical Edition

3.English Translations of the Mahābhārata

4.How to Use the Critical Apparatus

5.How Editors Reconstructed the Reading of the Archetype

6.How to Cite the Mahābhārata

7.The Extent of the Mahābhārata’s Books

8.The 18 Parvans and 100 Upaparvans of the Mahābhārata

9.The Arrangement of the Parvans in the Southern Recension

10.Other Narrative Divisions

11.Sukthankar’s Table of the Manuscripts Collated for the ādiparvan

12.Extent of the Śāradā Codex for the ādiparvan

13.Abbreviations and Diacritical Signs Used in the Critical Edition

14.Abbreviated Concordance of the Principal Editions of the Mahābhārata

15.Stemmata for the Different Parvans of the Mahābhārata

16.Commentaries on the Mahābhārata

17.Commentaries on the Bhagavadgītā

18.The Use of Venn Diagrams to Depict Manuscript Relationships

Glossary

Annotated Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1The two options of a philology oriented toward the text and a philology oriented toward the witness

2The constituted text along with its critical apparatus: understanding what one is reading

3The part stands in for the whole

4The birth and death of manuscripts

5Textual tree of ādiparvan versions, illustrating the stemmatic relationships

6The real stemma

7Maas’s hypothetical stemma, illustrating the distinction between hyparchetype, archetype and original

8Flores’s argument from the spread of errors, and Bigger’s normative redaction hypothesis

9Bigger’s argument from the resilience of tradition

10The stemma as a minimal architecture

11Our abstract stemma

12Making the archetype and the normative redaction coincide

13Bigger’s argument from empty reference

14Bigger’s prehistory of the normative redaction

15Reconstructing the source of contamination

16Extra-stemmatic contamination into an extant witness

17The consequences of assuming extra-stemmatic contamination

18Extra-stemmatic contamination into a direct descendant of the archetype: S as an example

19The consequences of assuming extra-stemmatic contamination into S

20S as the original oral epic

21Extra-stemmatic contamination into a direct descendant of the archetype: N as an example

22The consequences of assuming extra-stemmatic contamination into N

23N as the original oral epic

24The original oral epic as the source of N

25Contamination via an oral source

26Recentiores non deteriores

27Recentiores deteriores

28Transmission via an oral source and the inevitability of a written intermediary

29Von Büren’s stemma of the manuscript tradition of Isidore’s Etymologies

30Hyperarchetypal contamination, extra-stemmatic contamination and the resilience of tradition

31Eliminatio

32Grünendahl reproduces Sukthankar’s stemma

33Sukthankar’s list of manuscripts forming the critical apparatus

34Sukthankar’s stemma reversed 180 degrees around a central axis

35Reversed stemma with the subrecensions in turn reversed around a central axis

36Lüders’s list of the manuscripts collated for his sample critical edition

37Treating each manuscript as an independent witness

38Groups versus individual witnesses

39Mapping the relationship of manuscripts within a group to each other

40The evolution of northern Brāhmī

41The evolution of southern Brāhmī

42Agreement between independent versions

43Stemma lectionum of verse 1.29.5

44Alternative stemma lectionum of verse 1.29.5

45Contamination, undermining the assumption of independence

46Contamination, the real nature of the relationships in our stemma

47Contamination from and into the central subrecension

48The interpolated passage 321*

49D as the source of the interpolated passage 321*

50γ as the source of the interpolated passage 321*

51(Non)contamination of Ñ4 and D2.5 with K

52Constituting groups on the basis of additional passages missing from manuscripts

53Identifying a core K group on the basis of missing additional passages

54Using the absence of interpolations to refine the classification of manuscripts

55The descent of S in Grünendahl’s classification

56The true position of S in Grünendahl’s classification

57The order of interpolations

58Unrelated manuscripts on the same stemma

59The expansion of the text according to Grünendahl

60Open and closed branches of the tradition

61Brushing aside the dead ends

62Hypothetical stemma with K as the archetype

63Understanding Grünendahl’s model for reconstructing archetypes

64Stemma lectionum of verses 1.1.1A and 1.1.2

65The expansion of the text according to Grünendahl

66Abolishing the distinction between group and version

67The fragmentation of the K group into K1 and K0.2–6 according to Grünendahl

68Collapsing Ś1 and K1 into a single version

69Grünendahl explains contamination

70Reconstructing the reading of 1.1.1A

71P. P. S. Sastri’s scheme of adhyāyas from his critical edition of the southern recension

72P. P. S. Sastri’s scheme of Ślokas from his critical edition of the southern recension

73–77Parvan divisions and Śloka counts of the Kumbhakonam recension

78A. C. Burnell’s stemma

79V. S. Sukthankar’s Pedigree of ādiparvan versions

80V. S. Sukthankar’s stemma of the āraṇyakaparvan manuscripts

81R. Vira’s stemma of the Virāṭaparvan manuscripts

82S. K. De’s stemma of the Udyogaparvan manuscripts

83P. L. Vaidya’s stemma of the HarivaṃŚā manuscripts

84Brockington’s Venn diagram

85A Venn diagram depicting sets whose members are individual manuscripts

86The corrected Venn diagram

87A Venn diagram of sets that contain manuscripts of the S and NE groups

88A Venn diagram of sets containing manuscripts of the S and NE groups

89A modified version of Brockington’s original Venn diagram

90The corrected Venn diagram

91Expressing relations between two orders of sets

92The source of the error

93Mapping interpolations using a Venn diagram

Tables

1Grünendahl’s list of interpolations in the northern recension

2How Grünendahl imagines the process of constitution

3Grünendahl’s table of the distribution of interpolations in the northern recension

4Grünendahl’s error in constituting the text

5The text as the true basis of classification

6K contamination and the fragmentation of the Mahābhārata tradition

7How Grünendahl imagines the classification of manuscripts

8Grünendahl establishes filiation

9Grünendahl establishes that K3 is not contaminated with the passages with which it is not contaminated (hence, the editor has failed to establish the contamination of K3)

10Grünendahl demonstrates that ν and S cannot be against γ (for at least one γ manuscript always agrees with them)

11Sukthankar considers the agreement of the versions

FOREWORD

Philology and Criticism is the first book of its kind. Incisive in its analysis, this book undertakes a rigorous defense of the Mahābhārata critical edition. Following a prologue and an introduction, this book is divided into three chapters. Each chapter states a problem and discusses key concepts and principles in textual criticism pertaining to it. Thereafter, the authors guide the reader through a history of responses to the problem. Each response is posed as an argument (via citing the critic who raised it). The authors address each argument individually in a separate section. In each section, they consider whether the argument can be defended from some perspective. Once they establish that the argument is untenable, they state their conclusion. In this way, they systematically work through contemporary criticisms of the critical edition, focusing primarily on Andreas Bigger’s and Reinhold Grünendahl’s work.

The first chapter addresses the view that the constituted text of the critical edition reconstructs merely a late stage of the transmission. Although several scholars advocate this thesis (James L. Fitzgerald, for instance, thinks the critical edition reconstructs a Gupta-era archetype, which he elsewhere calls a written Sanskrit text of the epic), the authors focus on the thesis’s author: Andreas Bigger. Bigger holds that the critical edition merely reconstructs a text he calls the normative redaction of the Mahābhārata, supposedly the result of a uniform redaction of the epic undertaken during its first transcription from a fluid oral tradition. Adluri and Bagchee demonstrate the circularity of this claim.

The second chapter addresses the underlying assumption of Bigger’s work, though it also broadens the scope to include other Mahābhārata critics. The authors show that Bigger’s thesis appears plausible only because scholars assume an oral epic preceded the written Sanskrit Mahābhārata. The authors demonstrate that their arguments are not stemmatic and hence do not hold. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the so-called analytic approach to the epic. The authors argue that this approach is premised on an uncritical view of Indian history, whose origins they outlined in their book The Nay Science: A History of German Indology.

The third chapter, the longest in this book, addresses a perplexing problem: How were the Mahābhārata manuscripts classified? Were they classified by script as Grünendahl argues? The authors convincingly demonstrate that they were not. As they show, script cannot play a role in classification for it is an external marker. This chapter also addresses Grünendahl’s claim that extensive contamination makes a critical edition of the Mahābhārata unachievable as well as his claim that focusing on a regional recension would have led to a better edition. The conclusion provides a summation not only of this book but also of the authors’ first book. It presents a serious challenge to contemporary Sanskrit philology inasmuch as it relies on opinion rather than argument.

While I disagree with the authors in some respects (most notably on the southern recension’s place in the Mahābhārata tradition), Philology and Criticism will stimulate debate. It poses a major challenge to scholars who have made unguarded statements about the Mahābhārata’s origins in an oral tradition. As I have argued since 2001 (Rethinking the Mahābhārata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma King), the notion of an oral epic is a myth. The Mahābhārata is clearly a written text. In all likelihood, a small group of Brahmans created it. T. P. Mahadevan identifies these Brahmans with the historical PūrvaŚikha Brahmans. In spite of the text’s expansion and changes, no evidence exists that it was ever transmitted orally. Philology and Criticism conclusively vindicates this view. As I demonstrated in my review of Fitzgerald’s translation of Books 11 and 12 of the Mahābhārata (in the Journal of the American Oriental Society), those who resurrect the oral hypothesis do so for ideological reasons rather than because persuasive historical evidence exists. Relying on nineteenth-century views of the epic (whose assumptions Adluri and Bagchee criticized in their first book), they overlook the fact that the archetype presupposes a written transmission. Adluri and Bagchee have staked their position, and scholars in the future will have to account for their view in some way.

I hardly need add that Philology and Criticism is essential reading for Mahābhārata scholars. This book significantly advances our knowledge of the critical edition. It is an essential reference work—not least because of its appendices, which enable scholars to consult details of the edition without carrying around all 19 volumes of the edition. Philology and Criticism also addresses a major lacuna in Mahābhārata studies today. It is the first work to explain what the Mahābhārata critical edition is, how it was created, what its merits are and why criticisms of the edition are frequently based on insufficient knowledge of the principles involved. Though aimed at an advanced audience, the analysis is clear and systematic, and the arguments can be followed by anyone who takes the time and trouble (and perhaps uses paper and a pencil). In that sense it is not a difficult book to read, though its scope is breathtaking. Few today in Mahābhārata studies have such a thorough grasp of the critical edition or are as qualified to speak to the issues of textuality, orality, the manuscript tradition, what can be reconstructed and what can be shown with philological methods. In my assessment, the authors present a cogent interpretation of the critical edition. Their clarification of its overarching project is brilliant and makes a lasting contribution to the field.

Alf Hiltebeitel

Washington, DC

PREFACE

This book is a guidebook. That means it is intended for use.¹ The reader must make use of the tools presented herein to test for herself the validity and rigor of the arguments of contemporary Mahābhārata scholars. This is all the more necessary as hardly a field of scholarship existing today is as rife with competing and contradictory theories as contemporary Mahābhārata studies. This book does not claim to be a comprehensive guide to textual criticism (for that the reader will have to read one of the classic manuals on the subject such as M. L. West’s Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique or Giorgio Pasquali’s Storia della tradizione e critica del testo),² but it does claim to bring to Mahābhārata criticism the sort of reason, precision, clarity of thought and beauty that is a hallmark of textual criticism in other fields. Regrettably, Mahābhārata studies has long been a stronghold of neo-Aryanist ideology, anti-Semitism and Romantic fantasy. Thus, this book has had to be equal parts guidebook and polemical essay. As such, it owes as much to the tradition of Nietzsche as to that of West. There is no doubt in our minds that the great editors of classical and medieval texts made enduring contributions to the study of texts and, in particular, to the canons of method that enable us to expunge centuries of error and dross and come closer to the authors’ original texts. There is also no doubt in our minds that these techniques are also applicable (with the necessary riders and adjustments) to the study of Indian texts. As Pasquali wrote (and Paolo Trovato now affirms), I, at least, cannot imagine that the original, say, of a Chinese or Bantu text could be constructed from copies or any other testimony, in sum, from its tradition, otherwise than on the basis of Maas’s considerations and the rules he laid down.³ In fact, there is an entire tradition of Indian editors (not only V. S. Sukthankar, to whom this book is dedicated, but also S. K. Belvalkar, P. L. Vaidya and others⁴) who could rightfully take their place alongside the great editors in the classics. But (and we are no less convinced of this than of the applicability of textual criticism to the Mahābhārata) textual criticism cannot and may not be used to promote ideological agendas. Andreas Bigger writes, That I make the critical edition of the Mahābhārata the foundation of my work does not mean that I approve of the text constituted by the editors in all respects. [Reinhold] Grünendahl and others have demonstrated that in the domain of lower criticism of the Mahābhārata the final word is yet to be spoken. The results of this criticism of the ‘first critical edition’—for one may not forget that Sukthankar quite consciously referred to it as such—will flow into this work [Bigger means his book] and, where the evidence forces itself upon us, will be expanded upon.⁵ The reader will frequently encounter such statements in the work of Mahābhārata authors quoted in this book. She will find examples of circular reasoning, conclusions that do not follow from their premises, arguments ad baculum and appeals to inappropriate authority. And she will find that the only two constants among these theses, theories and dogmatic positions are that Indians are not capable of reading their texts critically and that priests are corrupt and mendacious.⁶ This failure to engage with the theory of textual criticism has extracted a heavy price. It has meant that Mahābhārata scholars have not kept abreast of recent developments in textual criticism, whether in the areas of hermeneutics, literary criticism, structuralism, post-Lachmannian theories of critical editing or the study of variantistica—in short, that entire field that is today denoted by the term ecdotics and encompasses the study of textual cultures in the widest sense.⁷ It has meant that scholarship on the epic, even considered as arising out of and responding to the documentary impulse,⁸ has failed to contribute in any meaningful way to a history of the text. Against this intellectually stunted and resentment-driven science, Sukthankar’s genius stands out all the brighter.

Notes

1 Technical terms, especially on their first occurrence, are placed in italics to draw the reader’s attention to the relevant glossary entry. An earlier glossary may be found in S. M. Katre, Introduction to Indian Textual Criticism . With Appendix II by P. K. Gode , Deccan College Handbook Series 5 (Pune: Deccan College, 1954), 90–99 (A Glossary of Some Important Terms Used in Textual Criticism). Sanskrit equivalents may be found in Venkatesh Laxman Joshi, ed., Prau ḍ ha Manoramā with Commentary Śabdaratna , Deccan College Monograph Series 31 (Poona: Deccan College, 1966), 331–52.

2 See the bibliography for further works on the subject; any of the many works on textual criticism listed in this book may be read with great profit. Paolo Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method: A Non-Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism, Cladistics, and Copy-Text (Padua: Libreriauniversitaria, 2014) supersedes the earlier manuals and is now the definitive resource.

3 Paul Maas, Critica del testo , trans. Nello Martinelli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1972), v, cited and translated in Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method , 74. Trovato’s comment can be found in the preface to his book (ibid., 21).

4 See Appendix 1 of this volume for a complete list of editors involved in the critical edition project and also of the volumes and their dates of publication.

5 Andreas Bigger, Balarāma im Mahābhārata : Seine Darstellung im Rahmen des Textes und seiner Entwicklung (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 15. All translations from German sources are ours.

6 For a discussion of the racial, anti-Semitic and anticlerical resentments that drove this scholarship, see our The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). See especially chapters 2 and 4.

7 The somewhat recherché term ecdotics will perhaps be unfamiliar to English-speaking readers, but it has been a widespread synonym for textual criticism in Romance languages since Dom Henri Quentin introduced it in his Essais de critique textuelle (Ecdotique) (Paris: Ricard, 1926). For a discussion of the term’s use in Italian textual criticism, see Paola Pugliatti, Textual Perspectives in Italy: From Pasquali’s Historicism to the Challenge of ‘Variantistica’ (and Beyond), Text 11 (1998): 164–69. Of course, here we are interested in the term not as a synonym for textual criticism but in its wider sense, where it has come to mean any study that is not limited to the ways and methods of the traditional critical edition, but include[s] all the elements which mark the entire movement of a text from the author to the readers (or users), provided that these elements are viewed from a perspective of editions, ancient or modern, destined for study and for a typographic, digital reading, or under the aspect of whatever third possibility. This is how the term is defined, for example, in the Foreword of the journal Ecdotica (http://ecdotica.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=42).

8 Sheehan expresses the principle best: "The idea of the textual unconscious was key to the documentary impulse. By divorcing the physical features of the manuscript from its literary content, and by using these physical features to historicize the manuscript, both Mabillon and Montfaucon successfully removed the question of literary content from the domain of serious scholarship. In a sense, they operated within that wider shift from ‘gentlemanly humanism’ to a ‘professionalized philology’ that we have already seen in the English letters in the early part of the eighteenth century. For those on the modern side of the querelles des anciens et des modernes , like the Maurist brothers, scholarship should not be distracted by the idle pleasures of aesthetic judgment. Nor should it be moved by the particular arguments made in the texts it analyzed. Rather, it should invent nonliterary techniques (of which paleography was one) for evaluating documents." Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 102. In the field of classical and medieval textual editing, the documentary impulse may have led to significant insights. In the field of Mahābhārata studies, however, beyond the superb work done by the editors in the Mahābhārata critical edition, the documentary impulse has at most been cited as justification for not reading the text. It has not led to any meaningful consideration of the physical aspects of the text or the tradition.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We owe, first and foremost, an enormous debt of gratitude to our families for their patience, love and encouragement. We fondly remember Suguna and Indrasena Adluri and Sumati Bhandarkar, who would have loved to read this book. We were fortunate to have many sources for advice for this book. We would like to recognize them here: Michael D. Reeve for reading an early draft; Paolo Trovato for his enthusiastic championship of our work and his invitation to teach in the summer school on textual criticism at the University of Ferrara; Patrick Olivelle for encouraging us to write this book and recommending it to the publisher; Paola Pugliatti for being an invaluable resource on developments in Italian textual criticism; John Lenz for conversations on Nietzsche and philology; Alf Hiltebeitel for his scholarship and for writing the foreword; Bruce M. Sullivan for stimulating discussions about the Mahābhārata; Madhavi Kolhatkar for her profound knowledge of the Vedic tradition; Aruna Bagchee, Edward P. Butler, Matt Newman and Paolo Alberto Celentano for their assistance with translations; and faculty at the Sanskrit Department at Pune University for inviting us to lecture and share our research. The section on the development of Indian scripts is indebted to Saraju Rath at IIAS, Leiden. Jahnavi Bidnur graciously shared her work on the Mahābhārata commentators. We also thank all participants of the textual criticism workshop at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. We could not have asked for better students. To our friends and well-wishers Srinivas and Anu Udumudi, Hari Kiran and Padmaja Vadlamani, Aditi Banerjee, Edward P. Butler, Arbogast Schmitt, John Lenz, Peter K. J. Park, Brooks Schramm, Kirsi I. Stjerna, Alice Crary, Robert Yelle, Graham M. Schweig, Susan Ginsburg and Thomas Komarek: thank you, your interest keeps us writing. Omar Dahbour’s support was vital to continuing this work during a critical transition. Thank you to Ami Naramor, Vincent Rajan, and the entire production team at Anthem for producing such a stunning book. Vishwa thanks Swami Prabuddhananda Sarasvati for rigorously instructing him in the traditions of Mīmāṃsa and Vedānta for over two decades. Through him, the philosophical, logical and text-commentarial tradition of Ādi Śaṅkarācārya and his successors in the Sringeri Sharada Peetham and Kailash Ashrama became accessible. Finally, this book, which was written over a 10-year period with neither public research grants nor university funding, could not have been completed without Joachim Eichner’s steadfast financial support. Kalyan Viswanathan, Krishnan and Indu Ramaswamy and Deepanshu and Silvana Bagchee have been stalwart friends and contributors. Open Access publication was enabled by the Sanatana Dharma Foundation’s ASHEERVADA initiative. Last but not least, Ushakant and Irma Thakkar—your philanthropy, your public service, and your respect for the humanities are an unfailing source of inspiration for us.

Sukthankar’s first (?) attempt at drawing up a stemma codicum of the Ādiparvan versions, dated September 24, 1925.

Source: Reproduced from Katre, Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar and His Contribution to Indology, 485.

PROLOGUE

saṃ gacchadhvaṃ saṃ vadadhvaṃ saṃ vo manāṃsi jānatām | devā bhāgaṃ yathā pūrve saṃjānānā upāsate ||

— Ṛg Veda 1.191.2

Czech artist František Kupka (1871–1957)¹ painted Le Premier Pas or The First Step, reproduced on the cover of this book.² The painting on the cover and this essay accompanying it provide a useful avenue for understanding certain concepts: origins and archetypes, singularity and plurality, emanation and transmission and the parallelism of cosmology and art. These themes are essential to understanding the conceptually difficult task V. S. Sukthankar set for himself when he created the design for the critical edition of the Mahābhārata. Therefore, before we look at the technicalities of a critical edition, we wish to first explore the logic and artistry of creating stemmata through a related medium: abstract art.³

The choice of abstract art to illustrate the concept of a critical edition may seem strange at first, yet it is also obvious when one considers that, like abstract art, stemmata are idealized representations of relationships that have no basis in matter.⁴ Hence, when we approach stemmatics from the perspective of abstract art, we gain a new perspective on textual criticism—one that goes beyond the standard presentations of this field.⁵ The movement known as abstractionism itself originated in the early part of the twentieth century in response to a specific concern: artists wished to free themselves from the constraints of having to represent something.⁶ Abstract art and stemmatics thus both respond to a similar problem: the figurative representation of abstract relations that nonetheless permit us to intuit certain features of reality––features that possibly go beyond what we can intuit with our senses.⁷

By collating various manuscripts, identifying the textual coherences and harmonies, arranging them according to the logic of emanation and carefully distinguishing the original from the archetype, Sukthankar created an intellectual organization that does justice to the complicated architecture and reception of the Sanskrit epic. His work fittingly transcends the crude mechanical models created by the Indologists whose work we analyze in this book.⁸ Trained as a mathematician, with a keen appreciation for the subtle nuances of ideas contained in the text, Sukthankar culled the many extant manuscripts into a single pyramidal architecture.⁹ Scientists who appreciate genetic relationships, as well as artists who understand how plural elements can be meaningfully organized, will no doubt appreciate his creation.¹⁰

Both Sukthankar and Kupka wanted to move beyond the fetishism of facts to an engagement with truth. If Sukthankar mathematically, philosophically and aesthetically transcended philology while doing it full justice, Kupka did something similar with art. He wished to transcend the formal and material dimensions of painting by making it self-consciously intellectual, mathematical and spiritual.¹¹ In 1892, Kupka moved from Prague to the Vienna Academy, where he rea[d] avidly: particularly Greek and German philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Paracelsus, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and German romantics. Also he rea[d] extensively on astronomy, astrology, Theosophy.¹² Whatever the contemporary evaluation of theosophy as a discipline, it was an early protestation against the gross materialism and hemorrhage of meaning inaugurated by modernity.¹³ Artists rather than philosophers and social scientists reacted immediately to these trends—Kupka foremost among them.¹⁴ As with Sukthankar, no opposition appears between the spiritual and the scientific in Kupka—a distinction that itself has its root in the obsessive dichotomy between faith and reason endemic to Christianity.¹⁵ Margit Rowell notes:

Kupka’s most fundamental premises—that nature had a spiritual reality determined by final causes, that the hidden laws of this reality are present in all of nature’s manifestations including man and the artist’s function is to make visible these laws, not by copying nature but by creating a parallel order—spring from Goethe’s aesthetic. […] Through a better understanding of natural causes, rhythms, structures and progressions, he hoped to develop a parallel vision, order and language. His interest in physiology, biology and astronomy therefore had its roots in mystical thought. By extension, he paid acute attention to his own sense impressions and evoked coenesthesis as a form of access to higher knowledge. Through a close observation of his own body’s rhythms, reactions to stimuli, sense perceptions, emotional responses, he attempted to develop a sixth sense, an extrasensory receptivity which he believed led to a state of superconsciousness.¹⁶

These methods and intellectual efforts led Kupka to describe the artist’s relationship to inner visions as follows—a description that provides a model for visualizing not only the intra-textual setup of the Sanskrit epic as containing additional temporal dimensions clarified by avataraṇa or descent but also the pan-Indic relationships that Sukthankar explored in the manuscript tradition:

In our inner visions, the different fragments which float in our heads are incoherently situated in space. Even in remembered so-called representative images of organic complexes, they are so strangely situated that the painter […] who would wish to project them would have to go even beyond the fourth dimension. Some parts penetrate each other; others seem completely detached, disconnected from the organism to which they are supposed to belong. The same is true of purely subjective visions where often only fragments, plexuses of forms, or colors are given. Before we can seize them and set them down, we must draw lines between them and establish a structural coherence.¹⁷

Kupka thus saw in the cosmic rhythms and repetitions a truth that the artist experienced in his visions, and it was the artist’s task to go beyond representing the objects given to the senses and rather depict the intellectual perception of the connections between the fragmentarily given sense data. Concomitant with this purely intellectual approach was a spiritual orientation, which included self-cultivation and a refusal to accept the crude empiricism of modernity.

The creative solution Kupka adopted is not too different from the poetic solutions found in the epic. The frame narratives and the descent of the characters in the Mahābhārata represent a self-conscious repetition that organizes itself by organizing space: descent of gods and titans, or repetition in vertical space, which in turn organizes the field of action (the battlefield), the field of transmutation (sacrifice) and the field of recognition (the forest). By extension, it is these repetitions and rhythms that guide the expansion and proliferation of the manuscripts, not mechanical and extrinsic contamination. Every interpolation thus clarifies the text by providing a new chromatic variation, and Sukthankar’s task can be seen as one of cataloguing and arranging the cosmos of manuscripts in the overall intellectual composition of his enterprise. Kupka, on his part, was aware of this intellectual-spiritual-artistic conceptual constellation. It was the spiritual worldview of many artists of his day. Maurice Tuchman summarizes this worldview as follows:

The universe is a single, living substance; mind and matter also are one; all things evolve in dialectical opposition, thus the universe comprises paired opposites (male–female, light–dark, vertical–horizontal, positive–negative); everything corresponds in a universal analogy, with things above as they are below; imagination is real; and self-realization can come by illumination, accident, or an induced state; the epiphany is suggested by heat, fire or light.¹⁸

It is hard to remember that Tuchman is speaking of the early abstraction movement in art, not about the Mahābhārata. It is even harder to believe that in the annals of Mahābhārata scholarship, not one scholar understands its creative elements so succinctly.¹⁹ The artist, it seems, is the very teacher of the epic.

These insights find their finest expression in The First Step, a painting Kupka executed during 1909–13.²⁰ The painting contains a luminous black background, which evokes a pregnant darkness full of potential, and not merely a blackness of absence. The organization of the various circles creates a map of space and dimensionality within the background, and thus demonstrates that the background is not non-being. The painting itself is a harmonious variation of a single form—the circle—echoed in its appearance or disappearance (in red), its concrete manifestation and endurance (blue and white) and finally its repetition and multiplication (a circumference composed of blue and red circles). The three processes of evocation, manifestation and multiplication create a complex sense of movement. Kupka was experimenting with motion at the time he painted The First Step, as were the Futurists. But the movement Kupka depicts is not mere physical movement, but a complex one of pulsations in existence. Its cosmological meaning was not lost on later commentators. Roger Lipsey comments on his Disks of Newton, a series of works to which The First Step was a prelude:

Kupka’s transformation of color theory diagrams into a rotating, complex, genuinely spirited evocation of cosmos and light represents the high point of what might be called the naïve phase of his work, a phase of mobile search without the hardening that often occurs when answers are attained or, on the contrary, doubt gains the upper hand. The image moves freely and glows, conveying sensations of ease and pleasure. It is, as much as any painting, an Orphic work of strong poetic appeal; sunny and confident, pitched to the scale of the cosmos and approachable. Kupka intersects here and is generally thought to precede Delaunay. Their paintings projecting the humble color wheel out into the cosmos constitute, to my mind, an undeniable manifestation of the spiritual in art. Perhaps neither closely reasoned nor metaphysically elaborate, they are nonetheless a celebration of cosmos that can leave few untouched.²¹

Besides the cosmological and spiritual meanings of the painting, Kupka endowed it with a critical evaluation of art. Kupka himself spoke of a realm of rhythms and signs to shed light on his art:

We have to try […] to separate two incompatible elements, that is to say, the imitative work which today is superfluous, from art itself. This is a realm of rhythms and signs too abstract to be captured easily and which form the leitmotif of all compositions, the basic arabesque, a kind of framework which the painters […] as of old fill with a vocabulary of forms taken from nature. If we sacrificed the intruding element we would of course have to face the danger of talking in an unusual language. Yet there is a kind of pictorial geometry of thought, the only possible one, which forces the painter to lie less. And that is what I am trying to achieve.²²

Kupka’s painting thus illustrates not only a skill, or allegiance to a movement, or incremental innovation (invenzione) or design (disegno). Art can embody thinking, and precisely the kind of thinking that—while reflected in a historical object—transcends history. In Kupka’s painting, art likewise transcends the universe and its coming-into-being and passing away. It does not abolish, but preserves the manifestation and repetitions of the universe. Each of the blue and red instantiations of the one concept, the circle, is different. These differences are preserved, and yet their perfect procession and repetition and also their interaction (see the green ghostly circles) add to an overall sense of continuity in the cosmic order of the circle. The clarification of these existential movements, and the constant presence of a singular reality (here the circle) in the manifold lies less than the representation of a single concrete object. The painting discloses a profound truth: the truth of mimesis, the lesser lie that the truer existence is never what something is historically, but always a play of paradigms that transcend it.²³

The reason for using this image by Kupka as the cover of a book on the study of Mahābhārata manuscripts is simple: the Mahābhārata is a literary creation; it is art. In its materiality, it is of course created within history, but in its intellectual effort it transcends it. Both the painting and epic exploit the contextualization of the macrocosm with the microcosm to break free from the literalism of both. The First Step and the Mahābhārata are essentially cosmological works. Tuchman notes that The First Step is a painting whose imagery is rooted in astrology and pure abstraction. The painting may be interpreted as a diagram of the heavens and as a nonrepresentational, antidirectional image referring to infinity and evoking a belief that one’s inner world is truly linked to the cosmos.²⁴ Like Kupka’s work, the epic is a cosmological work executed as a series of echoes: the intra-textual author Vyāsa’s conceptualization of the epic on the slopes of the axis mundi, Mount Meru; his teaching it to his students in an academic setting; one student’s (VaiŚaṃpāyana’s) repetition at the horrific scene of the sacrificial immolation of snakes; and the bard UgraŚravas’s (literally, the he of the awesome voice) recounting of the narrative in the sylvan and peaceful assemblage of sages in the Naimiṣa Forest. The text itself presents these repetitions. Of another order are the repetitions of vignettes and motifs and messages in the various sectarian bibles: the Purāṇas. A. K. Ramanujan offers the best statement of the mimetic self-consciousness and the inbuilt mechanisms for transmission of the epic.²⁵ Kupka helps us visualize Ramanujan’s insight, one that states that repetition and modulation of repeating elements is itself the structure of the epic:

I’d suggest that the central structuring principle of the epic is a certain kind of repetition. One might say that repetition or replication is the central principle of any structuring. What occurs only once does not allow us to talk of structure. Einmal ist keinmal—it’s as if what happens once does not happen at all. Students of narrative like Propp, Levi-Strauss, Dumezil, and J. Hillis Miller have made this idea a commonplace. Indian artworks, like the Hindu temple, or the decads (pattu) of Tamil classical or bhakti poetry, of the rāgas of Karnatak music, are built on the principle of interacting structures of repetition and elaboration and variation. Not only are there repetitive phrases, similes, and formulaic descriptions that the students of oral poetics (Parry, Lord, et al.) have taught us to recognize, but incidents, scenes, settings, and especially relationships are repeated.²⁶

Kupka’s art self-consciously creates by using repeating patterns. For instance, in 1921 he painted the Hindu Motif, consisting of repetitions and modulations, abstractly recreating the architectural logic of the Hindu temple.²⁷ This work paradigmatically illustrates his interest in Indian thought as well as his ability to recognize the repeating, abstract and symbolic qualities of Indian art. So much for the external, that is, formal aspects of mimesis as concerns the text. Internally, that is, with regard to the narrative and content, the mimetic nature assumes cosmological attributes. The text is presented as if it is a history but the universe presented in this history is itself a mimetic object. The author enters the text and procreates the characters. Besides this literary duplication, there is a cosmological one: all the characters in the world described in the epic are descended from certain prototypes: gods and titans.

The idea of mimesis plays a crucial and enduring role in the Mahābhārata and in the Indian textual tradition. Brahmā, the creator god, always creates the universe according to a paradigm, symbolically given to him by the One Being, called Nārāyaṇa in the epic. The universe is always an artefact, created and recreated, endlessly in cycles. Coming-to-be and passing away is the ultimate indicator of the mimetic nature of our perceived and lived reality. And the epic is careful to present this repetitive cycle, rather than a naïve linear history: one that takes fluxing time as a permanent framework. It is precisely by overcoming history that the epic lies less. Likewise, ideas of rebirth, lack of ultimacy of phenomenal reality and the soteriological presence of Being are ubiquitous elements with which all Indian philosophical systems grapple.

Lurking behind the issue of any witness text of the epic are the usual problems germane to all ancient texts, for example the Nibelungenlied from the German tradition or Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis in the Greek. These include textual variations and insertions and emendations, bequeathing to philology the task of coping with multiplicity in the textual tradition. But the Mahābhārata seems to anticipate and absorb these issues into its very composition. The question of a lost original is trumped not only by the various versions narrated within the text, but more seriously, any historical event is also divested of originality (the characters of gods and titans are merely enacting roles). In fact, the universe itself is a mimetic process, hardly a static object. Originality does not belong in the universe; it remains a feature of unfallen Being (Brahman). To seek either an original event (history) or an original narrative (text) violates the epic’s understanding of itself. Those who seek an original Mahābhārata (as opposed to the original of any other text) are not like the blind men who variously represent the elephant as a snake or a pillar or a wall with respect to its various parts. They are the fools searching for a barren woman’s son.

Sukthankar therefore carefully distinguished older from more developed forms of the texts, and discovered not an original but an archetype. The archetype in Kupka’s painting is not any particular circle but the concept circle, which is essentially abstract, and which lies less. The plural depictions of circles and their variations are essential to the recognition of the concept. Similarly, the plural witness texts are recognizably the Mahābhārata with respect to the archetype recovered in its critical edition. Sukthankar’s critical project negotiates between a method that prefers a fetish original to an actual text and the text’s obsessive disavowal of the category original in its literary and its philosophical vision. Any great philologist can recover a most ancient text, but Sukthankar’s stemmatic arrangement of a plurality of texts as an astrolabe is the work of a philosophical and artistic genius.²⁸ The critical edition does not replace the witness texts; it makes us more confident in appreciating them, and seeing them as singular/plural.²⁹

Unfortunately, few have seen these abstract yet less untrue dimensions of the Mahābhārata critical edition project. This is not surprising. Mahābhārata scholarship has been ravaged by the crudest sort of butchers, untrained in philosophy and aesthetics and lacking the minimal sentience required to distinguish history from fiction. Therefore the need for this book, which serves to remind scholars of the brilliance and rigor of the critical edition scholars’ work, and which hopes to teach the scholars of the future to appreciate the critical edition as a creative project of great subtlety, abstraction and truth that guides the thinker in the textual universe of the itihāsa purāṇa.

Notes

1 Kupka, a pioneer of abstraction in art along with Piet Mondrian, Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, is less well known today than his peers. Yet he was one of the most important figures for the development of the movement known as abstractionism. See Ludmila Vachtová, Frank Kupka, Pioneer of Abstract Art , trans. Zdeněk Lederer, with an introduction by J. P. Hodin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968) and William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Kupka was also an influential theoretician of twentieth-century art, expressing his views widely in articles and magazine interviews. Leighten considers his main work, La Création dans les arts plastiques (1912), the central text of anarchist aesthetics in the modernist period. Patricia Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2013), 15. Many of Kupka’s other writings can be found in the one-volume complete edition of untitled articles written between 1932 and 1936 for the journal Abstraction, création, art non-figuratif (Paris): František Kupka, Abstraction, création, art non-figuratif , 1932–36 (New York: Arno Press, 1968). See also Pierre Brullé and Marketa Theinhardt, Painting Despite Everything: František Kupka on Creation in the Plastic Arts, in Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction, ed. Dorothy Kosinski and Jaroslav Anděl (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997), 151–77 for a discussion.

2 Margit Rowell, ed., František Kupka 1871–1957: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975). This is the catalog for the exhibition Margit Rowell curated, for which Meda Mládek served as the consultant. Containing articles on the painter, his context and his contribution and a discussion of the formal and metaphysical aspects of his work, this volume remains the best resource on Kupka available in English.

3 A stemma (plural: stemmata) is a visual representation of genealogical relationships that takes the form of lines drawn between manuscripts and subfamilies of a work. It is also known as a textual tree or a genealogical tree and usually represents the descent of manuscript copies or apographs from their sources though it may also be used to diagram other sorts of relationships (for example, contamination between two manuscripts).

4 That is to say, the relationships themselves (for example, that a scribe A copied a manuscript a from source b ) do not have any basis in matter; not that the relationships do not exist or that there is no material basis (manuscripts, etc.) for positing these relationships.

5 See, for instance, Otto Stählin, Editionstechnik, Completely Revised Second Edition (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1914); Louis Havet, Manuel de critique verbale appliquée aux textes Latins (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1911); and Paul Maas, Textkritik (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927), with successive editions. (All references in this work are to the 4th edition of 1960.)

6 See Leah Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013).

7 Meecham and Sheldon note that years before the first photographs of the earth from space, Kupka was painting what he believed to be ‘visions’ of the cosmos. Although Kupka never claimed that his ‘inner visions’ were any more than fragments which ‘float in our heads,’ he believed that his clairvoyant vision lent him a transcendence which enabled him to survey the cosmos. Pam Meecham and Julie Sheldon, Modern Art: A Critical Introduction , 2nd edn. (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), 56–57. It is as such a visionary, who had a total, synoptic vision of the Mahābhārata tradition in his head, that we shall try to present Sukthankar here—and defend him against his critics.

8 Of course, we might have studied other Indologists. Extending our analysis back in time, we might have looked at the work of critics Edward W. Hopkins and Adolf Holtzmann Jr. or at Hermann Oldenberg. Likewise, we might have extended our analysis forward in time to study the work of James L. Fitzgerald or Georg von Simson or any other member of the so-called analytic school. The reason we did not do so is that their work has already been subject to a critique in our earlier book The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

9 Sukthankar received a BA degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1906; we do not know why in 1911 he went to Berlin to study philology, but he must also have continued the association with Cambridge, for he received an MA from that university the following year. See S. M. Katre, Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar and His Contribution to Indology, in V. S. Sukthankar Memorial Edition , vol. 2: Analecta , ed. P. K. Gode (Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House, 1945), 464. Incidentally, Katre also arrives at substantially the same assessment: The scientific training which Sukthankar received at Cambridge while preparing himself for the Mathematical Tripos, stood him in good stead during his Berlin days. Although he took up Indian Philology and Philosophy as his main branch of study, this Mathematical training prepared him for a scientific outlook on matters literary or historical, and there was no study or investigation which he considered was low enough for a scholar if it led to proper utilisation of the material available. Ibid., 465–66.

10 For an articulation of this insight within philology, see Sean Alexander Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 188. Gurd’s "goal is to assess the realities involved in the multiple productions of a classical text so as to facilitate a literary philology alive to the fact of plurality. I call this a radical philology. Ibid., 72. Gurd succinctly lays out various theoretical perspectives (Augustine, Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Goldhill, Finley, Page, Diggle, etc.) to show how the valorization of a singular original is a misguided fetishism. He recommends a more complex approach. My central proposition is that critical texts are singular plural—that every single edition models and reflects a plurality of other versions and variants—and that this singular plurality of the critical edition constitutes its sense. Ibid., x. Gurd distinguishes the core of textual criticism from the fetishism of the critical text by analysis that must oppose variability to stability, plurality to unity, and a concrete to a nostalgic idealism." Ibid., 35.

11 Theosophy provided artists of his generation an avenue whereby they could challenge the narrow definitions of rationality and the dehumanizing materialism that were part of the Enlightenment’s legacy. For example, all four pioneers of modern abstract painting were influenced by theosophy, but the list is quite extensive. Through the channels of philosophy opened up by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and through channels of art opened up by theosophy, a living dialogue of ideas progressed, in contrast to the obsession with historical facts and the pseudoscience of Indologie being forged in Germany. Their forensic science (who, why or what killed the K ṣ atriya Urepos ) remains one of the most spectacular blemishes on the human sciences to date.

12 Meda Mládek and Margit Rowell, Chronology, in František Kupka 1871–1957: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975), 306.

13 Increasingly in the 1930s and into the 1940s, mystical and occult beliefs came under suspicion because of their political associations, which were clear and well known. The Nazi theory of Aryan supremacy, for example, was indebted to various versions of theosophy, such as theozoology, which pertains to birth by electric shock into the astral ether, and ariosophy, which fuses ideas of karma, the ether and sun worship with idolatry of Aryan ancestry. "Adolf Hitler’s confidant Otto Wagener explained to Hitler the nineteenth-century occult writer Karl von Reichenbach’s theory of Odic force, according to which ‘every human being has an unknown source of power that produces rays. These not only inhabit the body but also radiate from it, so that a person is surrounded by something like a field laden with this Odic force.’ Hitler immediately applied these ideas to the potential revivification of society by ‘the invisible strength which is transferred from them [storm-trooper divisions] to us like an aura.’ No doubt the perception of a link between alternate belief systems and fascism made critics and historians in these decades reluctant to confront the spiritual associations of abstract art. To use the word spiritual in the late 1930s and 1940s, as Richard Pousette-Dart recently acknowledged, was near-heresy and dangerous to an artist’s career." Maurice Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (New York: Aberville Publishers, 1986), 18. Albeit for different reasons, even today, Indology remains in the grip of political paranoia whenever spiritual aspects of Hinduism are presented. It is virtually taboo for scholars of Hinduism to engage in its theology, ontology or ethics except with great affectations of critical distance.

14 This was true not only in Europe but also in America. "The historian T. J. Jackson Lears has recently argued that anti-modernism is the central notion unifying the leading American thinkers from the transcendentalists through Walt Whitman and William James. Modernism was regarded as something to be fought because it was synonymous with the loss of inner spiritual values. [William] James emphasized that the only way to attain true supremacy and higher consciousness was by losing oneself, by breaking down the confines of personality, and he pointed to the ‘immense elation and freedom as the outlines of confining selfhood melt down.’ In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) James stated, ‘Our normal waking consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.’ He acknowledged that sensory, symbolic elements could ‘play an enormous part in mysticism.’" Ibid., 34.

15 While the Indological philologist earned his bread and butter by laboriously deconstructing texts to separate material fact from spiritual insight, the artist had already moved beyond this distinction, sensing that it was problematic and ultimately untenable. These echoes were felt as deeply as in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, which declared the death of God (section 108) and as far away as Tahiti, where the French-born Paul Gauguin wrote: The Word remains. Nothing of this Word is dead. The Vedas, Brahma, Buddha, Moses, Israel, Greek philosophy, Confucius, the Gospel, all exist. […] From a religious point of view, the Catholic Church no longer exists. It is now too late to save it. Paul Gaugin, Gaugin’s Intimate Journals, trans. Van Wyck Brooks (Mineola, NY: Dover Publishing Company, 1997), 79.

16 Margit Rowell, František Kupka: A Metaphysics of Abstraction, in František Kupka 1871–1957: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975), 76.

17 Kupka, Manuscript II, 28, cited in Rowell, ed., František Kupka 1871–1957: A Retrospective , 77.

18 Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art , 19.

19 The banal, self-serving, self-congratulatory and unscientific theories of the Indologists regarding the Mahābhārata have been sufficiently discussed in our earlier book The Nay Science . Against the contributions of a genius such as Kupka these tired ruminations appear even more facile and pointless.

20 The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired this painting in 1956 and it remains there to this day: The First Step , MoMA no. 562, 1956; 83.2 x 129.6 cm.

21 Roger Lipsey, The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 101, 103.

22 Kupka, cited in ibid., 103.

23 Here also, referring to Gurd is useful. In his book, he makes an attempt to characterize textual criticism as a field defined by multiplicity and variation. It also contains a series of attempts to attend carefully and heedfully to each of its objects. Thus it shares its ambition with every other philological project. But if philology consists for some in training the vision ‘to see a whole landscape in a bean,’ I have tried to see each critical version pulsing with the rich plurality of many others: ‘the universe in a grain of sand.’ Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis , ix.

24 See Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art , 36. Tuchman continues: Years earlier Kupka had written of a mystical experience in which ‘it seemed I was observing the earth from the outside. I was in great empty space and saw the planets rolling quietly.’

25 A. K. Ramanujan, Repetition in the Mahābhārata, in Essays on the Mahābhārata , ed. Arvind Sharma (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007), 419–43.

26 Ibid., 421 – 22.

27 This painting, also known as Graduated Red , was completed between 1919 and 1923. It is currently in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. It features on the cover of our edited volume Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, eds., Argument and Design: The Unity of the Mahābhārata (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016).

28 Sukthankar was aware of these aspects of his project. He explicitly notes that "the Mahābhārata is the whole of the epic tradition: the entire Critical Apparatus. Its separation into the constituted text and the critical notes is only a static representation of a constantly changing epic text—a representation made for the purpose of visualizing, studying and analyzing the panorama of the more grand and less grand thought movements that have crystallized in the shape of the texts handed down to us in our Mahābhārata manuscripts. V. S. Sukthankar, Prolegomena," in The ādiparvan for the First Time Critically Edited , vol. 1 (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933), cii (Sukthankar’s italics). German Indologists, no less than Sukthankar’s Indian detractors, have therefore misunderstood him when they suggest that Sukthankar reduced the Mahābhārata to and/or extracted a core text. Actually, he preserved all its available versions, creating the superset of Mahābhāratas and thus a text embodying, more than ever, its claim: yadihāsti tadanyatra yannehāsti na tatkvacit (whatever is here […] that is found elsewhere. But what is not here is nowhere else; Mahābhārata 1.56.33cd and 18.50.38cd).

29 The critical edition does not eliminate the need to look carefully at witness texts. These serve again and again to refine and gloss over the more archaic material recovered by archetype. To give one example, Hudson’s spectacularly erroneous reading of the Mahābhārata (see Emily T. Hudson, Disorienting Dharma: The Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahābhārata [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013]) could easily have been prevented had she looked at the vulgate, which contains the Kaṇikanīti, an insertion of 230 lines in the vulgate that is moved to the appendices (App. 1, no. 81) in the critical edition. See Vishwa Adluri, Ethics and Hermeneutics in the Mahābhārata, review of Disorienting Dharma: The Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahābhārata, by Emily Hudson, International Journal of Hindu Studies 20, no. 3 (2016): 385–92 and, in still greater detail, Vishwa Adluri, Hindu Studies in a Christian, Secular Academy, International Journal of Dharma Studies 5, no. 1 (2017), doi:10.1186/s40613-016-0037-5.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

Introduction: Ad Fontes, Non Ultra Fontes!

About This Book

The aim of this book and its connection with our first book; the central problem confronting Mahābhārata studies

Why a Critical Edition?

Why a critical text is required and what problem it attempts to solve

What Is a Critical Edition?

A description of the critical edition: its components, how it reduces the plurality of readings to one and what the status of the resultant text, the constituted text, is. Three misconceptions about the critical edition: (1) it is eclectic, (2) it is not a text and (3) it can be replaced by a text with an apparatus of variants

How to Interpret the Critical Edition

The text reconstructed in the critical edition is the archetype of the tradition, defined as the latest common ancestor of the manuscripts examined for that edition. This sense of archetype should not be confused with the archetype as an especially authoritative or unique exemplar, for our stemma is merely hypothetical and models only a part of the historical reality—the part that is either preserved in or can be reconstructed from our manuscripts.

Conclusion

The