Further information and calls for applications: https://www.written-artefacts.uni-hamburg.de/en/vacant-positions.html

You can therefore read on the 2017 issue of the Journal of World Philosophies the (Open Access) papers on philosophy of language which are the result of a project led by Malcolm Keating and myself (see here). I am grateful to the journal’s editor, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach for her help and support throughout the process.

On the 2017 issue Kervan you can read the lead papers on epistemology of testimony, printed cultures and conceptualisation of sexuality which are the result of the 2013 Coffee Break Conference held in Turin and edited by Daniele Cuneo, Camillo Formigatti and myself. I am grateful to the journal’s editor, Mauro Tosco for his help and support throughout the process.

Enjoy and please let me know your comments and criticisms!

Until now, the SM has neither been critically edited, nor translated or studied. Even more interestingly, the SM presents itself as a commentary on the Pūrvamīmāṃsāsūtra, the foundational text of the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā school which consists of eight books, each including four or eight chapters, but the published portion of the SM covers only on the first two chapters of the first book.
The SM has been published four times, in 1902, 1940, 1971 and 1981. The most recent of these editions is only a reproduction of a previous time and can thus be altogether ignored. As for the others, none of them includes a foreword, an introduction nor a critical apparatus, so that a reader has no idea at all about the manuscript basis they rely upon. It is not even clear whether the occasional divergences between the three editions are due to additional manuscripts consulted by the latter two or, more probably, only to emendations ope ingenii by the editors of the 1940 and the 1971 editions.

Within my current research project (FWF V 400), I planned to focus on a study of Veṅkaṭanātha’s synthesis as reflected in his SM, but for this sake I needed to verify the reliability of the published text. I thus identified several manuscripts of the SM and started collating them. In doing it, I have two main goals:

1. the elaboration of the first critical edition of the SM
2. the answer to the conundrum of the real extant covered by the SM

As for the first goal, possibly each text deserves a critical edition and this is even more true in the case of intrinsically relevant texts, of badly edited and of (partially or completely) unpublished texts. The SM fits all these criteria, since for the published portion we have no indication proving its reliability (it could have been prepared on the basis of a single unreliable manuscript and have been corrected by the various editors according to their own expectations of what the text should say). Moreover, the editors themselves acknowledged to be at times helpless by adding alternative possible readings in round or square brackets or by signalling a crux with question marks. The frequence of such crux increases in the second chapter of the SM, where there may be even more than one question mark per line, so that the text becomes at times not understandable. All these reasons make a new and critical edition of the SM a desideratum of primary importance for the study of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta.

(this post is meant to be a general introduction to the topic, accessible to non-initiated readers. Should you find something in it not understandable, please let me know with a comment below.)

Of the Seśvaramīmāṃsā, two books have been published, representing the commentary on Pūrva Mīmāṃsā Sūtra 1.1. and 1.2. It seems however awkward that Veṅkaṭanātha would have stopped just at the end of the second book, instead of stopping, for instance, at the same point as Kumārila’s Tantravārttika.
The two manuscripts mentioned above contain the entire published portion of the SM which they repeat with minor variants in the case of the first book and with more significant ones in the case of the second –something which could depend also on the poor state of the edition of SM ad PMS 1.2. The variants in the Grantha manuscript are also often the result of misspelt/misread words, sautes du même au même and the like. The Telegu manuscript is more precise and adheres to the published edition almost closely—and in this sense it is also less interesting.

What is really exciting, however, is that both go further on after the published portion. The Telegu manuscript contains also the commentary on PMS 1.3.1 and 1.3.2, the other one contains surely the commentary on PMS 1.3.1 and perhaps something else. This uncertainty is due to the weird fact that the “new” portion is at first identical in both manuscripts, but after approximately seven lines and starting from amid a sentence, they start following two completely different ways. Since both texts relate to PMS 1.3.1 one wonders whether they are different fragments of the SM.

1. At the end of the training phase, I was able to collate one folio per day of the former (written in a modern notebook with 38 lines per page). This means that I will be able to collate it in full in 66 days, almost three working months. Supposing that I just register variants in a file which has already the text I am editing, I will probably save one third of the time, so let me settle for two months but the last pages of the manuscript contain an unpublished text, so that these needed to be collated anyway.

2. I just measured the time I need for the Grantha palm leaf manuscript after the training phase: 90 minutes for each side of a folio. Since the manuscript has 58 folios, this means I will need 174 hours to collate it, which means 43,5 working days (I can only collate for about 4–5 hours a day, since I cannot focus for longer than one hour on collating and I need to do something else in between), which means little more than two months. If I forget about a separate collation and just insert variants, I will probably need less, perhaps one month and ten days.

3. Next I will collate a damaged palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha containing 35 folios, which will take me little more than one month or two and a half weeks.

4. Then, a further palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha counting 153 folios, which amounts to little less than six months or four months.

5. Then, a last palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha counting 22 folios, which amounts to less than one month or two weeks.

6.–7. Last, I have a two transcripts on paper, written in Grantha in a modern notebooks, summing up to 638 pages. This risks to mean that I will have to invest 4 years on them (!). They contain an unpublished text and the collation cannot be avoided in their case.

This being said, collating in full is better than registering variants (since the latter process inclines one to read what one has in the model instead of reading the manuscript afresh) and preparing critical editions is better than accepting published texts uncritically. Still, it is extremely time-demanding (unless one enjoys collating and does it as her hobby). How important must be the text in order for a scholar to engage in a critical edition? How flawed the edition, in case of published texts? How important must be the text in order to engage in the collation of several manuscripts of an unpublished work?

Part of the problem lies also in the fact that some answers are only found while working on the manuscript(s) and the edition(s), so that an a priori answer is impossible. Thus, I test each manuscript by:

1. collating some folios at the beginning, middle and end
2. collating in any case the maṅgala and the colophon(s)
3. preparing a (keyword) description of the manuscript
4. comparing it with further manuscripts in order to detect possible transcripts, which can then be left out
5. comparing it with the extant editions in order to check whether they have already been used (which makes the possiblity of adding something significant through their collation dependent on the quality of the edition)

What are your strategies? When do you decide that collating is worthwile?

After several years, I could finally hold grasp of the editio princeps of Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā. I found it in the University library in Kiel (too good that German Indology has managed to acquire so many important books!), in a volume collecting other works (see below), presumably because they were all parts of the same series.

The editio princeps of the SM was printed in Kanci (Conjeeveram in the English title page) in 1902 at the Sri Sudarsana Press. It is No. 16 of the series Sastramuktavali, where other works by V. have been published, namely the Mimamsapaduka (1900, No. 3 of the Series); the commentary, called Gitarthasangraharaksa, of Yamuna’s Gitarthasangraha (1901, No. 10 in the Series); the Satadusani (accompanied by the commentary Candamaruta).

The volume I have encompasses all the above, beginning with No. 10, then Satadusani, which is here incomplete, then No. 3 and then No. 16. In my volume, the Satadusani encompasses only vadas 16 to 26 and ends abruptly during the vada 26, after that there is a further portion —16 pages in total— of the Satadusani with Candamaruta in which the page numbers begin anew and which might correspond to the beginning of the Satadusani —I will check as soon as I can reach my office and my books).

The Kiel volume lacks any colophon for the Satadusani and has a Bhumika only before No. 10 (this might also have been the reason for putting it first). In it, the Venkatanatha-program of the publishing house is already clear, since the editor (sampadaka) of the Sudarsana Press explains that also the MP, SD and SM have either been already printed or are in press. He further says that he has decided to print them in devanagari (nagaralipi) in order to make it further accessible (sarvadesaprasrmaraya sarvadibhutaya nagarilipyavasyakartavyam addhyavasyadbhir asmabhih). The editor signs as Sri Sudarsana Padapadmasevi.

I am having some pain to locate this Sri Sudarsana Press, which might have been a smaller publishing house, focusing especially on Visistadvaita VeaAnta.

All these volumes have been edited by Prativadi Bhayankara Anantacarya (Ananthacharyar), which is simply presented as “Sanskrit Pandit” in the English title page (whereas academics are usually presented with their full titles, at least in my experience, around that time). A volume by Raymond Brady Williams let me ascertain that he lived from 1874 to 1936 and that he was a great Sri Vaisnava savant. Through the information about him in the yahoo group of the institute dedicated to him I could also know that “As a publisher, he is well known as the first South Indian publisher of old Sanskrit works in Devanagari-script form once that were, [sic] in Grantha or Telugu scripts”.

This information harmonises with what I read in the Bhumika mentioned above, so that one might wonder whether the two were the same person. Could “Sri Sudarsana Padapadmasevi” be just an epithet?

A further interesting detail: I acquired through Oliver Frey (University of Vienna, but I suspect that he is in fact the reincarnation of some great Bodhisattva) the photos of the Telugu transcript of a SM manuscript. The transcript is dated “December 1893” and the copyist signs (in Roman alphabet) “Gadhir Anantacharya”. At first I thought of a relative of our P.B. Ananthacharyar, who prepared the work for him. But then, again on the webpages of the P.B. Ananthacharya Institute, I found that he was also known as “Gadi”, which might perhaps be the Sanskritised version of “Gadhir”? I have only collated the first folio, but so far the transcript corresponds perfectly to the text in the editio princeps.

How is your experience with early publishing houses in India? How many books were published each year?
And, by the way, do you happen to know something else about the Sri Sudarsana Press or about Sri Sudarsana Padapadmasevi and Prativadi Bhayankar Ananthacharyar (and his family)?

For further details concerning my quest for the Sudarsana Press you can read this post.