Bhandarkar Oriental Research Articles

Evolving Dharma Consciousness of Dharmaputra Yudhishthira within the Mahabharata

The objective of the paper to comprehend a deep implication of what dharma meant to Yudhishthira through the length of historical events related to war and philosophical questioning on the issue. He had to fight through so much in terms of pitting his intuitive understanding of dharma against a whole gamut of mundane ideas of what dharma stood for. For instance, his struggle with his brothers on the complexity of svadhrama and its rejoinder in form of sukshadharma or knowledge of subtle consciousness. His inner conflict continued and there came a time in the last parva, Svargarohana parva, when he just denounced dharma. It was through these trials and tribulations that Yudhishthira was finally able to evolve his own idea of what real truth, conduct, duty, morality and inner consciousness were about. In other words what was true dharma. Through this paper the author attempts to tease out complexities of the philosophical queries that bothered Yudhishthira and also trace his historical trajectory in the quest.
 The method of investigation would include historicizing the text. This means locating our source, the Mahabharata, on a time line and within a geographical expanse so that we get an idea when the logic of dharma mutated and in what particular region. The text had an expansive period of formulation right from the 8th Century BCE to 4th Century CE, that is, what we understand as the Gupta period. But the text had many later regional recensions as well. We are primarily looking at the older Sanskrit version of the text as recorded in V.S.Sukthankar edited Critical edition (Bhandarkar Oriental edition, Poona) of the Mahabharata. The exercise also requires reading of the magnum opus, locating the usage of the term in association with Yudhishthira and raising some significant issues. These may include queries such as what is dharma according to the Mahabharata. Is definition fixed or is it dynamic? Do all people speak of it with the same voice? Is the notion of dharma same for Yuthishthira and his Pandava brothers? Does his wife. Draupadi, subscribe to his idea of dharma? If his notion of dharma changes over time, does it have anything to do with changing consciousness of the society or at least some people within the society? Can we get a sense of a subtle move towards a shift from karma yoga to jnana yoga and finally to bhakti yoga? In this changing paradigm where do we locate the dharma philosophy of Dharmaputra Yudhishthira, especially as there comes a time when he himself begins questioning the idea of dharma? In a sense his character brings out the dilemmas arising out of the differences in meanings and approaches of comprehending the complexities associated with the concept of dharma.
 Another point of our methodology would be to understand the etymology of the term dharma and its location in the ancient language. The Sanskrit root of the word is dhr, 'to support', 'to sustain'. In other words, it means that whereby whatever lives, is sustained, upheld, supported. More often than not, the word dharma in its ancient usage denoted the moral realm in its widest sense, meaning both morality as an ideal— man's eternal quest for the good, the right, the just—as well as the given, actual framework of norms, rules, maxims, principles that guide human action. It was integral to the doctrine of purushartha or that of the four goals of a human being; these being artha (success/material possessions), kama (passion/procreation), dharma (virtue/religious duty), moksha (self-perfection). All the four are intertwined. Throughout the epic we witness the evolution of Yudhishthira’s notion of true dharma. What comes out strongly is his holding fast to the value of nonviolence (anrishṃsya), his identification with the sukshma or subtle nature of dharma, his insistence on constricted use of brute force as a part of Kshatriya dharma, his ultimate benevolence towards his family and people. These were actually revealed to be the cause of his indisputable success in Dharma’s recurrent tests. Somewhere by the end of the epic, Yudhishthira’s error in entering into the game of dice, getting in conflict with his brothers on the issue of his duty and not being able to answer Draupadi’s queries initially appear as stepping stones in self-realization to a deeper understanding of what dharma as duty, conduct, search for truth and morality were all about. The orderly world of dharma, which was so central to his character, was eventually arrived at only through repeated trials and tribulations

Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines by Laetitia Zecchini (review)

Reviewed by: Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines by Laetitia Zecchini Graziano Krätli Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines. Laetitia Zecchini. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. xvii + 248. $110.00 (cloth). It is hard to imagine a modern poet who is more appealing to a researcher’s interests and, at the same time, more refractory to any kind of scholarly investigation than the subject of the book under review. This particular tension, if properly exploited through a combination of sound research and perceptive insights, may go a long way to guarantee the success of a critical study. Fortunately, this is what Laetitia Zecchini, a French researcher at the Centre national de la [End Page 408] recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, achieves in her thorough and eloquent portrait of Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), a reclusive and ruminative literary maverick, whose utter disregard for publication, let alone publicity, long delayed his recognition as one of India’s most significant poets of the twentieth century. As a result, his “work is still in the process of being discovered,” and his published output represents the tip of an iceberg whose underwater portion consists of thousands of pages of “various novel manuscripts, translations, diaries, sketchbooks, drafts, songs, paintings and graphics [which] are still to be brought to light, and for the time being are preserved in cardboard boxes by close friends across Mumbai” (12). Born in a Marathi-speaking Brahmin family from Kolhapur, in southern Maharashtra, Kolatkar moved to Bombay to attend the J. J. School of Art, but he soon dropped out, eventually pursuing a career in advertising and gaining a reputation as one of the most talented art directors in the city, if not the country. This talent he often lent to the little magazines and publishing initiatives he became involved in as a poet and translator, and which nurtured the “post-independence Bombay scene for poetry, art and modernism” (35) during the 1950s through the 1970s. This is clearly a scene that deserves a book of its own, in the absence of which Zecchini provides a suggestive compendium of salient features in the first chapter, “Bombay Bohemianism, Bombay Cosmopolitanism,” stressing the “complex interplay of traditions, affiliations and languages, of world culture and subculture,” as well as the “local or ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism, that articulates the tension and imbrication of deracination and belonging, roots and routes, marginality and worldliness” (59). Zecchini quotes the art historian Partha Mitter’s statement that “colonial cities like Bombay and Calcutta constitute the interface between the local and the global.” If this could be said of virtually any other ancient or modern city, it illustrates well Kolatkar’s poetry and underlying Weltanschauung, focused on the hyperlocal yet nourished by encyclopedic interests and voracious reading habits. (The Kolatkar Papers at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, which Zecchini has explored diligently and in depth, include an extensive collection of books, newspaper clippings, and other documents on a multitude of topics and in several languages.) A poet of the “unpoetic trivial present,” Kolatkar didn’t need to travel far to find suitable subjects and themes for his art. Except for a pilgrimage of sorts to the Khandoba Temple in Jejuri, southeast of Pune, which inspired his best-known book, he found all his material in plain view on the sidewalks of South Bombay. Like George Perec in front of St-Sulpice, taking down notes from the vantage point of three different cafés …, but more accurately still like Constantin Guys, painter of modern life and passionate spectator [in Baudelaire’s 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”] sitting ‘in the window of a coffee-house,’ absorbed in gazing at the crowd, Kolatkar observed the street life of Kala Ghoda. Every week, for more than 15 years, from the vantage point of the same corner window table facing the traffic island in the Wayside Inn café, the poet patiently engaged with the constantly changing ordinary street life in front of him. (99) This patient and sustained engagement, which resulted in the Kala Ghoda Poems (published only weeks before Kolatkar’s death in September 2004), shows a modernist sense of the everydayness that owes as much...

Sanskrit Cosmos-Asian Empire-Pune Fortress

Sanskrit Cosmos-Asian Empire-Pune Fortress

Irreparable Damage: Violence, Ownership, and Voice in an Indian Archive

This paper uses a 2004 destructive incident at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) in Pune, India as a case study to discuss the intersection of caste politics, ownership, and violence in the archives. After a brief overview of the events leading up to, during, and subsequent to the violent destruction of archival documents by an angry lower caste mob, this paper provides the historical context necessary to analyze issues of ownership, politics, and colonialism within the context of a South Asian library, keeping in mind the complex interplay of religion, region, and caste in India. The paper then explores this incident from an archival studies perspective, looking at archives as both sites of violence and as cultural and political symbols, and explores how issues of ownership, political pressure, and access, if not properly addressed, can boil over into violent destruction of the archival record. Finally, this paper argues that violent incidents such as the one described can occur outside of the Indian context, in almost any archival setting, and concludes with recommendations on how to avoid future destruction in archival repositories.

The Bhāgavata-purāṇa Miniature Paintings from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute Manuscript Dated 1648

The Bhāgavata-purāṇa Miniature Paintings from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute Manuscript Dated 1648

Radhakrishnan as advocate of the class/caste system as a universal religio-social system

On January 4,1943, Indian philosopher and statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) in an address to the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute told his listeners: 'While the spirit of India can never die, the social institutions which do not embody it must be scrapped' (1943: 6). One of these social institutions, one might expect, would be the caste system. In his latter writings and speeches he would appear to speak as if there were no place for the caste system in India. In the introduction to The Brahma S?tra, written in 1959, he wrote:

The Vedic Sacrifice in Transition: A Translation and Study of the Trikāṇḍamaṇḍana of Bhāskara Miśra. By Frederick M. Smith. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1987. Bhandarkar Oriental Series 22. xxxii, 520 pp.

The Vedic Sacrifice in Transition: A Translation and Study of the Trikāṇḍamaṇḍana of Bhāskara Miśra. By Frederick M. Smith. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1987. Bhandarkar Oriental Series 22. xxxii, 520 pp. - Volume 51 Issue 2

The Yuga Purāṇa: a footnote

In my critical edition of the Yuga Purāṇa chapter of the Gārgīya Jyotiṣa—a text most noted for its mention of the Yavanas and Śakas in India—I mentioned that there were four known manuscripts of the Gārgīya Jyotiṣa which I had been unable to consult at that time. I was recently able to rectify this situation and discovered as a result that two of those manuscripts do indeed contain the Yuga Purāṇa chapter (together with the entire Gārgīya Jyotiṣa) while the other two do not. The first of the complete manuscripts of the work is in the library of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, catalogued as No. 345 of 1879–80; I have called this manuscript E, and its readings are very similar to those of manuscript H (currently in BHU, Varanasi). The second is No. 1433 in the Itccharam Suryaram Desai collection of Bombay University Library; this I have called manuscript M, and it is closly linked with manuscript B (in Banaras Sanskrit University), even omitting with B some three lines of the work (71a–d and 72a–b).

Ellipsis and syntactic overlapping: current issues in Pāṇinian syntactic theory. By Madhav M. Deshpande. (Post-graduate and Research Department Series No. 24. Pandit Shripad Shastri Deodhar Memorial Lectures, Second Series.) pp. x, 94. Poona, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1985.

Ellipsis and syntactic overlapping: current issues in Pāṇinian syntactic theory. By Madhav M. Deshpande. (Post-graduate and Research Department Series No. 24. Pandit Shripad Shastri Deodhar Memorial Lectures, Second Series.) pp. x, 94. Poona, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1985.

M. R. Yardi: The Yoga of Patañjali, with an introduction, Sanskrit test of the Yogasūtras, English translation and notes. (Bhandarkar Oriental Series, No. 12.) xii, 350 pp. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1979.

M. R. Yardi: The Yoga of Patañjali, with an introduction, Sanskrit test of the Yogasūtras, English translation and notes. (Bhandarkar Oriental Series, No. 12.) xii, 350 pp. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1979.

Synonymic Collocations in the Tipitaka: a study. M.G.Dhadphale.

Synonymic Collocations in the Tipitaka: a study. M.G.Dhadphale. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona 1980. xiii + 267pp. Rs 50

History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India), Vol. 5, pt. 1. By Pandurang Vaman Kane. 718 pp. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, 1958.

History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India), Vol. 5, pt. 1. By Pandurang Vaman Kane. 718 pp. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, 1958.

The Mahābhārata. For the first time critically edited by Vishnu S. Sukthankar (August, 1925–January, 1943) and S. K. Belvakar (since 04, 1943). Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona. - Vol. XV: Śāntiparvan, edited by S. K. Belvakar; pt. 2, fasc. 23, pp. 1265–1624, 1952; and fasc. 24, pp. 1625–2080, 1953. - Vols. VIII and IX: Droṇaparvan, edited by S. K. De,

The Mahābhārata. For the first time critically edited by Vishnu S. Sukthankar (August, 1925–January, 1943) and S. K. Belvakar (since 04, 1943). Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona. - Vol. XV: Śāntiparvan, edited by S. K. Belvakar; pt. 2, fasc. 23, pp. 1265–1624, 1952; and fasc. 24, pp. 1625–2080, 1953. - Vols. VIII and IX: Droṇaparvan, edited by S. K. De, pt. 1, fasc. 25, pp. viii + 264, 1953. - Vol. X: Karṇaparvan, edited by P. L. Vaidya, pt. 2, fasc. 27, pp. ix–lxxviii + 321–697. - Volume 88 Issue 1-2

The Bhagavadgītā. Critically edited by Shripad Krishna Belvalkar (Reprinted from Bhiṣmaparvan, Part I [see above].) pp. xxxii, 108; plates 4.Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1945

The Bhagavadgītā. Critically edited by Shripad Krishna Belvalkar (Reprinted from Bhiṣmaparvan, Part I [see above].) pp. xxxii, 108; plates 4.Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1945

Thirty Years of Historical Research, or Bibliography of the Published Writings of P. K. Gode, Curator Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (From 1916 to 1946)

Thirty Years of Historical Research, or Bibliography of the Published Writings of P. K. Gode, Curator Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (From 1916 to 1946)

History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law). By Pandurang Vaman Kane. Vol. II (2 parts). 9½ × 6, pp. xlvii + 1368. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona. [Government Oriental Series, Class B, No. 6.] 1941.

History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law). By Pandurang Vaman Kane. Vol. II (2 parts). 9½ × 6, pp. xlvii + 1368. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona. [Government Oriental Series, Class B, No. 6.] 1941.

The Āraṇyakaparvan (Part 2). Being the Third Book of the Mahābhārata, the Great Epic of India. For the first time critically edited by Vishnu S. Sukthankar. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1942.

The Āraṇyakaparvan (Part 2). Being the Third Book of the Mahābhārata, the Great Epic of India. For the first time critically edited by Vishnu S. Sukthankar. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1942.

The Mahābhārata. For the first time critically edited by V. S. Sukthankar, with the co-operation of … other scholars. Fascicule 8, Virāṭa-parvan, edited by Raghu Vira, 1936. Fascicule 9, Udyoga-parvan, part i, edited by S. K. De, 1937. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.

The Mahābhārata. For the first time critically edited by V. S. Sukthankar, with the co-operation of … other scholars. Fascicule 8, Virāṭa-parvan, edited by Raghu Vira, 1936. Fascicule 9, Udyoga-parvan, part i, edited by S. K. De, 1937. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.

Bhāgavata Purāna and the Kārikās of Gaudapāda

A Bout three years ago, I sent a paper on “The Date of the Bhāga-vata Purāṇa” to the I.H.Q. The publication of the paper was delayed, and it was forestalled by B. N. Krishnamurti Sarma's paper on the same subject, which appeared in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. xiv, pts. iii-iv. The object of both the papers was the same, viz. to controvert the views of Vaidya and Winternitz who proposed the tenth century A.D. as the date of the Bh.P. Sarma suggests that this Purana was composed in the fifth century, if not earlier. My own view is that the work came into being some time between A.D. 550 and 650. The mention therein of the Huns (ii, 7, 26) and of the Tamil Saints (xi, 5, 38–40) would go against Sarma's hypothesis. Sarma and the present writer adopted somewhat different lines of attack upon the position taken up by Vaidya and Winternitz. It is unnecessary, however, to state the additional matter my paper contained, or to publish it. This will be done if the other view finds a defender who has to be refuted.

The Use of the Cases in Vedic Prose. By Sukumar Sen. Reprint from the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vols. VIII-X. 6½ x 9½, pp. 176. Poona: 1930. - Vedic Studies. By A. Venkatasubbiah. 6½ x 9¾, pp. 292. Mysore: Surabhi and Co., 1932. - On The Interpretation Of Some DoubtfUl Words In The Atharvaveda. By Tarapada Chowdhury.

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