Philology and Criticism

Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee

Description

First comprehensive overview of the critical edition of the Mahābhārata.

The Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata, completed between 1933 and 1966, represents a landmark in the textual history of an epic with a nearly 1500-year history. Not only is the epic massive (70,000 verses in the constituted text, with approximately another 24,000 in the Vulgate) verses, but in its various recensions, versions, retellings, and translations it also presents a unique view of the history of texts, narratives, ideas, and their relation to a culture. Yet in spite of the fact that this text has been widely adopted as the standard Mahābhārata text by scholars, there is as yet no work that clarifies the details of the process by which this text was established. Scholars seeking clarification on the manuscripts used or the principles followed in arriving at the Critical Text must either rely on informal scattered hints found throughout academic literature or read the volumes themselves and attempt to follow what the editor did and why he did so at each stage.

This book is the first work that presents a comprehensive review of the Critical Edition, with overviews of the stemmata (textual trees) drawn up, how the logic of the stemmata determined editorial choices, and an in-depth analysis of strengths and drawbacks of the Critical Edition. Not only is this work an invaluable asset to any scholar working on the Mahābhārata today using the Critical Edition, but the publication of an English translation of the Critical Edition by Chicago University Press also makes this book an urgent desideratum.

Furthermore, this volume provides an overview of both historical and contemporary views on the Critical Edition and clarifies strengths and weaknesses in the arguments for and against the text. This book simultaneously surveys the history of Western interpretive approaches to the Indian epic and evaluates them in terms of their cogency and tenability using the tools of textual criticism. It thus subjects many prejudices of nineteenth-century scholarship (e.g., the thesis of a heroic Indo-European epic culture) to a penetrating critique. Intended as a companion volume to our book The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (Oxford University Press), this book is set to become the definitive guide to Mahābhārata textual criticism. As both a guide into the arcane details of textual criticism and a standard reference work on the Mahābhārata manuscript tradition, this book addresses a vital need in scholarship today.

List of Illustrations; Foreword; Preface; Acknowledgments; Prologue; Chapter Summaries; Introduction Ad Fontes, Non Ultra Fontes!; Chapter One Arguments for a Hyperarchetypal Inference; Chapter Two Reconstructing the Source of Contamination; Chapter Three Confusions Regarding Classification; Conclusion: Textual Criticism and Indology; Epilogue; Appendices; Glossary; Annotated Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

• Reference
• General officer
• Social sciences
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 29 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783085781
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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 Mah bh rata 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
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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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.
n r ya ṇ a ṃ namask ṛ tya nara ṃ caiva narottamam | devī ṃ sarasvatī ṃ 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 One Arguments 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 Two Reconstructing 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 Three Confusions 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 Mah bh rata
4. How to Use the Critical Apparatus
5. How Editors Reconstructed the Reading of the Archetype
6. How to Cite the Mah bh rata
7. The Extent of the Mah bh rata’s Books
8. The 18 Parvans and 100 Upaparvans of the Mah bh rata
9. The Arrangement of the Parvans in the Southern Recension
10. Other Narrative Divisions
11. Sukthankar’s Table of the Manuscripts Collated for the diparvan
12. Extent of the rad Codex for the diparvan
13. Abbreviations and Diacritical Signs Used in the Critical Edition
14. Abbreviated Concordance of the Principal Editions of the Mah bh rata
15. Stemmata for the Different Parvans of the Mah bh rata
16. Commentaries on the Mah bh rata
17. Commentaries on the Bhagavadgīt
18. The Use of Venn Diagrams to Depict Manuscript Relationships
Glossary
Annotated Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
1 The two options of a philology oriented toward the text and a philology oriented toward the witness
2 The constituted text along with its critical apparatus: understanding what one is reading
3 The part stands in for the whole
4 The birth and death of manuscripts
5 Textual tree of diparvan versions, illustrating the stemmatic relationships
6 The “real” stemma
7 Maas’s hypothetical stemma, illustrating the distinction between hyparchetype, archetype and original
8 Flores’s argument from the spread of errors, and Bigger’s normative redaction hypothesis
9 Bigger’s argument from the resilience of tradition
10 The stemma as a minimal architecture
11 Our abstract stemma
12 Making the archetype and the normative redaction coincide
13 Bigger’s argument from “empty reference”
14 Bigger’s “prehistory of the normative redaction”
15 Reconstructing the source of contamination
16 Extra-stemmatic contamination into an extant witness
17 The consequences of assuming extra-stemmatic contamination
18 Extra-stemmatic contamination into a direct descendant of the archetype: S as an example
19 The consequences of assuming extra-stemmatic contamination into S
20 S as the original oral epic
21 Extra-stemmatic contamination into a direct descendant of the archetype: N as an example
22 The consequences of assuming extra-stemmatic contamination into N
23 N as the original oral epic
24 The original oral epic as the source of N
25 Contamination via an oral source
26 Recentiores non deteriores
27 Recentiores deteriores
28 Transmission via an oral source and the inevitability of a written intermediary
29 Von Büren’s stemma of the manuscript tradition of Isidore’s Etymologies
30 Hyperarchetypal contamination, extra-stemmatic contamination and the resilience of tradition
31 Eliminatio
32 Grünendahl reproduces Sukthankar’s stemma
33 Sukthankar’s list of manuscripts forming the critical apparatus
34 Sukthankar’s stemma reversed 180 degrees around a central axis
35 Reversed stemma with the subrecensions in turn reversed around a central axis
36 Lüders’s list of the manuscripts collated for his sample critical edition
37 Treating each manuscript as an independent witness
38 Groups versus individual witnesses
39 Mapping the relationship of manuscripts within a group to each other
40 The evolution of northern Br hmī
41 The evolution of southern Br hmī
42 Agreement between independent versions
43 Stemma lectionum of verse 1.29.5
44 Alternative stemma lectionum of verse 1.29.5
45 Contamination, undermining the assumption of independence
46 Contamination, the real nature of the relationships in our stemma
47 Contamination from and into the central subrecension
48 The interpolated passage 321*
49 D as the source of the interpolated passage 321*
50 γ as the source of the interpolated passage 321*
51 (Non)contamination of Ñ4 and D2.5 with K
52 Constituting groups on the basis of additional passages missing from manuscripts
53 Identifying a core K group on the basis of missing additional passages
54 Using the absence of interpolations to refine the classification of manuscripts
55 The descent of S in Grünendahl’s classification
56 The true position of S in Grünendahl’s classification
57 The order of interpolations
58 Unrelated manuscripts on the same stemma
59 The expansion of the text according to Grünendahl
60 Open and closed branches of the tradition
61 Brushing aside the dead ends
62 Hypothetical stemma with K as the archetype
63 Understanding Grünendahl’s model for reconstructing archetypes
64