We first decided to take up this project as a contribution to understanding Jagannatha and his oeuvre. Many scholars have cited the Panditarijasataka (PS), but it seems few outside of Andhra had actually read it.
Telugu-speaking Sanskritists who knew the work tended to dismiss it on the grounds that most of its poems were not written by the famous poet, and it was therefore inauthentic and insignificant. Outsiders assumed the work was identical with the first section of the Bhaminivilasa-not without reason since the opening section of the Bhaminivilasa sometimes circulated independently under the name Panditarijasataka.
As early as 2007 we photographed a rare copy of the 1870 edition at the Adyar Library, Chennai. Some months later the co-authors met at the École française d'Extrême Orient in Pondichery and began reading kavya from Jagannatha's works. At that point we made a transliteration of the Telugu text, and began to explore its contents. This initial effort confirmed the prevailing view: the text indeed was more of an anthology than an authorial work. Our transcription, partial translation and notes languished until 2015 when we met again in Pondichery and decided to renew our efforts. We read and translated the text to a certain point and noted the many new poems that could not be found elsewhere. Before departing from India we agreed that this work deserved to be edited and published. Apart from regular correspondence we were also able to meet in 2018 at the 17th World Sanskrit Conference held in Vancouver. The pandemic allowed us to meet more often via Zoom and we further expanded the scope of our sources as it became apparent that no old manuscript of the text was available. In the summer of 2022 we met again for several weeks to finalise our list of sources, expand the critical apparatus and revise the translation. Many institutions have supported this project in various ways. Our institutional homes have been especially supportive. Loyola University, New Orleans awarded sabbatical leave for CAHILL in the spring of 2015 and again in 2022. KAFLE received generous support from Leiden University, The Netherlands and later the University of Napoli (L'Orientale), Italy More recently, Ashoka University has provided ongoing institutional support in various ways. During the final stages of this work, CAHILL received a grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, that allowed the authors to meet in South Asia and finalise certain parts of the book.
We would like to thank the following institutions for providing us with digital versions of sources for this work: the Adyar Library, the Andhra Pradesh State Archives in Hyderabad, the Ecole française d'Extrême Orient, Pondichery, the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai, the Nagarjuna Buddhist Foundation, Gorakhpur, the National Archives of Nepal, Kathmandu, and the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. Special thanks to Professor Lalit Kumar TRIPATHI at the Central Sanskrit University (Prayagraj) for his efficient and generous assistance. We have also benefitted from a group of electronic files shared by individual collectors. Like the amorphous set of floating subhasitas of many centuries ago, these electronic files pass between scholars and friends as tokens of appreciation for common interests. The first distributors will likely forever remain unknown, but the sometimes-faded stamps digitised along with the books themselves provide a lasting clue to those who may or may not be affiliated with the Seminar für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens at the Universität Hamburg, the Central Archaeological Library, and other such educational institutions.
The Panditarijasataka remains something of an enigma, despite enjoying regional popularity as indicated by its early publication and subsequent reprints. We do not know who compiled the work, or when it was completed, although it seems likely that it dates to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. We suspect it has a manuscript history, like most other texts of this genre. Yet the single manuscript that we have obtained presents a very different work and postdates all of the published editions. Several other potential manuscripts bearing this title have turned out to transmit the first section of the Bhaminivilasa. The work incorporates many poems by the famous Jagannatha, a favourite poet of the Mughal court, but hundreds more come from other poets. The two published versions of this anthology available to us provide not a word of context. Even the practice of authorial attribution, in which anthologists offer their best guesses about a poem’s authorship, is missing-apart from the misleading eponymous title.
Our starting point has been, necessarily, the first edition of the anthology, published in 1870 in Telugu script. It contains three hundred and thirty-five short poems, of which ninety-seven belong to the Bhaminivilasa.
of Jagannatha, whose first chapter (vilasa), typically contains about one hundred short poems. This begs the question as to why an eponymous anthology of Jagannatha's poetry would present us with a shortened version of an authorial text when its clear goal was to expand the number of poems credited to the famous poet. This situation becomes all the more intriguing when we realise that over one hundred of the anthology's poems are found in much older anthologies, predating Jagannatha by centuries. Lacking manuscripts that predate the first publication of the text, and with a view to understanding the motivations of our unknown anthologist, we decided to design our investigation along a different path.
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist