Materials For A Critical Edition of The Kasikavrutti

It is indeed a matter of great pleasure and pride for Kavikulaguru Kalidas Sanskrit University, Ramtek to have this rarest opportunity of hosting the 50th session of All India Oriental Conference at Nagpur. This AIOC-50th session at Nagpur will be forever remembered by all as the year 2019 also happens to be the year of Centenary Celebration of AIOC. The premier objective with which the great scholars of yester years had contemplated and established this national academic event called All India Oriental Conference has been achieved through these years with scores of young scholars contributing significantly to the treasure house of knowledge through their valuable research work.

The research of yore and of the present should be properly recorded so as to make it easily available to all lovers of knowledge and wisdom in the years to come. With this objective, we have contemplated to commemorate the 100th year of this grand event of 50th session of AIOC by way of publishing 100 monographs on different subjects in four languages viz., Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and English. It is no doubt a herculean task but still worth of it, for the reason that these 100 monographs will inspire many young scholars to take upon a fresh study and research of the oriental subjects with more vigor and zeal.

The AIOC Centenary Publication Series includes wide variety of subjects like Literature, Language, Veda, Indian Philosophy, Sanskrit Grammar, Law, Children Literature, Yoga, Astronomy and Astrology, Ayurveda, Pali, Prakrit, Jain, Buddhism, Education, Library Science, Poetics, Aesthetics, and Indology. It also includes reprint of some rare texts of academic importance which have gone out of print are not easily available. We wish to mark these centenary celebrations with this series that connects the glory of the past and aspirations of future. I place on record my sincere gratitude to all the authors of these monographs who have kindly contributed to the richness of this series.

I am confident that the books published in these series will definitely inspire the lovers of Oriental Learning in general and of Sanskrit Language and Literature in particular.

On this occasion, we have published a memorable book of all the speeches of Section-Presidents of all previous sessions of AIOC. It is indeed a very capacious addition to any collection. I with all respect thank two eminent scholars of our times - Prof. Gautam Patel, President and Prof. Saroj a Bhate, General Secretary, the torch bearers of AIOC who have not only encouraged us in this venture but also made all efforts to provide these valuable historical speeches for us. I thank all executive members of AIOC and my colleagues of the varsity for making this event a grand success.

My words fall short in describing the painstaking efforts and scholarly commitment of my esteemed colleague Prof. Madhusudan Penna, local secretary of this session in bringing out this series.

I also take this opportunity to profusely thank Shri. Subhash Jain and Shri Deepak Jain, the proprietors of New Bharatiya Book Corporation, New Delhi for their enthusiastic approach and timely work with all precision and grace.

Let us all sanctify ourselves in the eternal flow of wisdom by reading these books and recommending these to others also!

It gives us great pleasure to place in the hands of scholars this small volume containing materials that are deemed useful towards the preparation and presentation of a critical edition of the Kasikavrtti (KV), the desideratum of which is ever increasingly felt after reading the review of the Hyderabad edition of 1969 of the KV included in this volume.

Robert Birwe reviewed the 1969 edition of the KV published by Osmania University, Hyderabad, and stated that it was not a critical edition in the true sense of the word. He also highlighted the need for a critical edition that will take into account the extant witnesses of the KV and show the interrelation between manuscripts. This detailed review points out several lacunae in the Hyderabad edition which made us undertake the task of critically editing the text of the KV. This review was originally published in German in Zeitschrift der Deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft (ZDMG) in 1973 and is not available in many parts of India. We decided to provide an English rendering of this important review and to make it available to the general scholarly public in India and abroad.

Once you embark upon the task of editing the text of the KV critically, with the background created by Birwe's review, the next step is to create tools that help bring about the stipulated goal. One such tool was already published by Malhar Kulkarni in 2002 which contained more than 1000 quotations from the KV as found in the later paninian grammatical literature. These quotations show the text of the KV as it was found in many of the later texts of the Paninian grammatical tradition starting from the 11^th century CE up to the 18^th century CE. Part of this work pertaining to the KV on Astadhyayi (A) 1.1, is presented in this volume. Kulkarni also mentioned in his 2002 book that the other important tool for critically editing the text of the KV is the collection of the text of the KV as available from the two most important commentaries on it, namely the Nyasa (NY) and the Padamanjari (Pm). There he also mentioned that he himself had undertaken to collect and publish such a material. Part of that material is presented in this volume. Here we show how the collected material makes the text of the KV available from reconstruction and we show this by taking a small sample of the KV on A 1.1.

We present the text of the KV on A 1.1 as is available in the Nyasa separately from the one that is available in the Padamanjari. We also present the text of the KV in a particular manner which suits a particular function as part of a structure. We number each and every part of the text of the KV accordingly. We have removed the punctuation marks as well as references and the apparatus for obvious reasons.

As is visible below, we have divided the text of the KV into sections. The reasoning employed in such a division is explained in Kulkarni 2012. This division of the text of the KV in sections is not part of the printed Hyderabad edition. The sentences that form these sections are however part of the Hyderabad edition. We have retained all the sentences available in the Hyderabad edition. We have also followed a policy of focusing on a danda as a mark of the end of a sentence. We have decided not to follow the other punctuation marks in deciding about the exact shape of the sentence. We have also decided to present this text with the sandhi dissolved. This proved useful for us in tracking down variants in a less cumbersome and cohesive way.

In our methodology for preparing a critical edition, we subject each and every section of the text presented below to textual investigation and present our comments on each and every section.

The material that is available through the NY and the Pm is useful in many ways. The evidence they provide us with can be divided into two broad categories, namely, direct and indirect. Direct evidence is what is called a `pratika' and the indirect evidence is the reference of the word in the text of the commentary. The indirect evidence is characterized by pratyaksa, paroksa as well as atiparoksa. These three groups are further divided into various types of evidence.

There are three scenarios that seem to arise from the evidence available from the NY and the Pm. They are: (i) The text of the KV as available from both the NY and the Pm which is exactly the same, (ii) The text as available in the NY which is different from the one available in the Pm, and (iii) The absence of the text of the KV as available in both the NY and the Pm.