Sukthankar’s wisdom

The critical edition of the Mahābhārata is founded on deeply thought methodological assumptions. The main architect of the project, V.S. Sukthankar, took into consideration the main options available to him, such as striving for a stemma and using a single best manuscript. He concluded, however, that the MBh was most likely transmitted orally for a long time, before being put into written form independently in different parts of the Subcontinent.

To trace a genealogy between such geographically and chronologically distant textual witnesses would have been impervious and perhaps absurd, given the hypothesis that the major variant readings were the product not of scribal innovations, but rather of oral transformations.

In the Prolegomena of the first volume (LXXXVI), he concludes that the only text that can be reconstructed is the oldest form of the text which is possible to reach, on the basis of the manuscript material available.

Concretely, as I understand it this means that he is trying to represent in his critical edition (to be understood as a dynamic aggregate of text and apparatus) the two recensions of the text, Southern and Northern, as circulating before the oldest mss, and we are talking of 14th and 15th century.

Das Glasperlenspiel

L’astrazione delle strutture dagli individui percepiti e la messa in relazione di tali strutture tra di loro è una caratteristica della ricerca scientifica. Senza radici in una qualche realtà storica, l’unico possibile fondamento resta un presupposto teologico. Oppure si tratta di pura attività ludica.

“Voi contate le vocali di un verso e le mettete in relazione all’orbita dei pianeti”, diceve padre Jacobus.

Movable characters

As I understand it, Indian editions of Sanskrit works in the late 18th and early 19th c. were typeset using movable lead types. I was wondering how the glyphs involving vowel mātras above and below lines were designed.

In fact, 14 (vowel signs) multiplied by 33 (consonants) builds a number of glyphs too high to imagine such a set of punches, especially because a typographer would not be able to handle it conveniently.

It is thus realistic to imagine a set of vowel-sign punches to be combined with the 33 consonant punches as the occasion arises. As further evidence, I noticed an instance in the editio princeps of the Nyāyamañjarī of an e-sign above the line (के), repeated again and again in combination with different consonants, that is peculiarly missing a portion, revealing an imperfection in the original punch, in the matrix or in the cast lead type.

Shanti Graheli, University of Udine, Italy, kindly suggests that the system used for Greek spirits may have been used, as in this images taken from P. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (19952), and I believe she might be right.

Cladistics and Stemmatics

I am presently fully engaged in the collation work of the Nyāyamañjarī (sixth āhnika). So far I collated a portion of NM6 (about one-tenth of the āhnika) using all the available sources, and traced a preliminary stemma For this purpose I used Cladistics software (Paups and McClade), and found it is a useful tool, especially to save time in statistic examination of the data and in checking possible combinations with a good graphic interface.

The tree produced by the software, however, needs to be elaborated into a real genealogic stemma; the software basically is focused on showing similarities and dissimalarities between the “taxa” (i.e. the mss) so it shows them all at the bottom of the tree, reconstructing possible branchings and nodes (i.e. archetypes) that have lead to their evolution. Each textual variant is read by the software as a “character”, and different readings of the same variants in different mss are read as “states” of the same “character” (for example the dimension (state) of the tail (character) in different stages of evolution from ape to human being). In the example here, the tree shows the positions of the taxa (mss) in relation to the character (variant) “bhotsyase” and its various states (bhotsyase, votsusa etc.).

A major problem of the cladistic software is that it reasons in bipartitic terms, that is: from a node it always generates two branches, although in the real world of textual transmission from a single archetype any number of copies may have been produced. This is a serious issue in stemmatics that needs to be sorted out.

In my present stemma, the Allahabad (Ad) and Mysore (Md) mss are likely to be one the transcript of the other (I am not yet sure which one of the two is the apograph). Although it is early to give other verdicts, I am under the impression that the Calicut (Cm in my sigla) and the Pune Bühler (PBs) mss preserve important readings not found elsewhere. Also, I did not find evidence of contamination between sources, except for the Sanskrit College ms (VCd) which has marginalia clearly coming from horizontal tradition. The position of the Deccan College (PDd), Srinagar (Ss) and Kolkata (Kd) mss in the tree is still particularly problematic.

It seems overall a good situation towards a feasible stemma.

Stemmatics, copy-text or eclecticism?

To sum up, in 1913 Joseph Bediér noticed how the stemmata codicum of medieval texts were in the overwhelming majority bipartitic, which means that all the conjectured archetypes were copied twice into apographs, or that only the discendents of two apographs are extant. Bediér also added (inspired by M. Roques) that there is a psychological twist in this predicament: the philologist is driven to seek more and more connections between groups of codices and build up more and more comprehensive groups, until the fundamental groups are two and two only. There is a restlessness in the philologist, an anxiety that the investigation is not complete, until the bifurcation (and as such the impossibility to proceed further) puts this anxiety at rest.

Bediér went to extent to propose that every attempt of "recensio" should be abandonment, and that using “a good manuscript” is instead a lesser evil. But what is the “best manuscript”? The oldest? The most correct? Writes Bediér: “Scholars of lore, scholiasts, humanists in Renaissance or modern age chose as they could, with more or less ability, out of intuition”. And he adds that the stemma cannot be used to reconstruct a composite text, which amounts to eclecticism, but is legitimate only if a single manuscript is reproduced faithfully. The Lachman method is legitimate to help the individuation of the best manuscript.

Sebastiano Timpanaro (La genesi del metodo del Lachman, 1981, second edition) thinks this to be an absurd proposal and that the recensio is fully useful and justified even if the critism to stemmatology stands valid:

“... non è affatto vero che, là dove non si può ricostruire alcuno stemma il minor male è di seguire un codice solo. Il minor male, in questi casi, è di scegliere le varianti secondo criteri interni, senza rinunciare a dare una valutazione complessiva di ciascun codice... Respingere tale procedimento come eclettico è insensato. Ogni volta che più copisti trascrivono un modello, si crea oggettivamente un eclettismo, in quanto, tranne rari casi, essi commettono errori diversi in punti diversi del testo. A questo eclettismo casuale e irrazionale dobbiamo contrapporre la nostra scelta, che, proprio perché ragionata, non è eclettica in senso deteriore.”

So Timpanaro advocates internal criteria, using the evidences of more codices, to reconstruct the text, instead of relying on a single codex.

Indian scribes

How did Indian scribes write? I mean, what were their tools, method, sitting position? I read today a wonderful essay by Dain on the technique of (Western) medieval scribes. Very stimulating, to undertake similar research in the Indological field.

For instance, did Jayanta compose the whole Nyayamanjari from the first folio to the last, without looking back? Or did he take notes, wrote a first draft, corrected it and the wrote (or had someone writing it) anew? Did he write his notes and drafts on birch bark? Was there any other support, such as wax boards, in use for quick notes?

What about copists? How were they sitting, what was their modus operandi?

Among many other interesting things, Dain writes that a straining position (desks came to use much later) while writing meant frequent stops. Stopping and resuming writing meant in many cases some slight change in the graphy, which is misenterpreted by some philologists as a change of scribe. In scriptoria, the director of the scriptorium used to correct and emend the resulting manuscripts. So marginalia and interlinear emendation with a different hand may have been done right after completion, although in some cases cross checked with other sources (still contamination, thus). Paper was at one point disdained, in favour of pergamen, because of its scarce durability.

Besides the curiosity factor, the answer to some of these questions may prove of invaluable use in textual criticism and codicology.

More on typography and philology

A typographical difficulty of devanagari in movable type kind of press is the high number of ligatures. To have single glyphs for every consonant-consontant and consonant-vowel combination seems unlikely. Upon close observation, it seems that vowel signs were independent types. But, when these were descendents and ascendents, these must have required room above and below the main lines, perhaps to be filled by blanks wherever ascendent and descendents were not there. In the NM editio princeps the leading (space between lines) is quite large, and a possible explanation (I doubt that at that time, given the costs of paper, there were aesthetic or readability reasons to keep wide leading) is the presence of these extra lines of ascendent and descendent vowel signs.