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.