Philology and criticism : a guide to Mahābhārata textual criticism

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. "In the early twentieth century, one of the largest attempts at producing a critical edition of any text in any language got underway in India. Headed by V.S. Sukthankar, editors at the Bhandarkar Institute proposed producing a critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, a text that in its vulgate or popular edition spans nearly one hundred thousand verses. This book is the story of what this critical edition tells us about the science of textual criticism, and how that science was used (and sometimes abused). Against the critics of the project, this book undertakes a defense of the critical edition. It demonstrates that the edition, far from dismissing the various regional versions, undertakes to preserve a pan-Indic Mahābhārata tradition. The critical edition's gesture is essentially conservative, and inclusive. Rather than discard additional passages, it preserves them in an appendix. Rather than give precedence to the critics' theories of a heroic original Âryan epic riddled with Brahmanic "corruptions, " it bases itself on the manuscript evidence to show that there was never any other epic but this: the Mahābhārata with its eighteen-parvan architecture, a work of philosophy, law, cosmology, and didactics. By exposing and critiquing many misconceptions regarding the Mahābhārata critical edition (above all, those of Andreas Bigger and Reinhold Grunendahl), this book aims to provide readers not only with a guide to this edition but also with an assessment of its true place in intellectual history. Extensive appendices, detailed drawings of stemmata, and discussions of the basic principles at work in different contexts make this book an essential resource for the student of the Mahābhārata as well as of textual and literary criticism"--Résumé de l'éditeur "In the early twentieth century, one of the largest attempts at producing a critical edition of any text in any language got underway in India. Headed by V.S. Sukthankar, editors at the Bhandarkar Institute proposed producing a critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, a text that in its vulgate or popular edition spans nearly one hundred thousand verses. This book is the story of what this critical edition tells us about the science of textual criticism, and how that science was used (and sometimes abused). Against the critics of the project, this book undertakes a defense of the critical edition. It demonstrates that the edition, far from dismissing the various regional versions, undertakes to preserve a pan-Indic Mahābhārata tradition. The critical edition's gesture is essentially conservative, and inclusive. Rather than discard additional passages, it preserves them in an appendix. Rather than give precedence to the critics' theories of a heroic original Âryan epic riddled with Brahmanic "corruptions," it bases itself on the manuscript evidence to show that there was never any other epic but this: the Mahābhārata with its eighteen-parvan architecture, a work of philosophy, law, cosmology, and didactics. By exposing and critiquing many misconceptions regarding the Mahābhārata critical edition (above all, those of Andreas Bigger and Reinhold Grunendahl), this book aims to provide readers not only with a guide to this edition but also with an assessment of its true place in intellectual history. Extensive appendices, detailed drawings of stemmata, and discussions of the basic principles at work in different contexts make this book an essential resource for the student of the Mahābhārata as well as of textual and literary criticism"-- Provided by publisher The first book to present a comprehensive review of the Mahābhārata Critical Edition, with overviews of stemmata (textual trees), how the logic of the stemmata determined editorial choices, and an in-depth analysis of the edition's strengths and drawbacks. An invaluable asset to any scholar working contemplating serious work on the Mahābhārata