Schmidt-Madsen 2014 Repossessing the Past
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Repossessing the Past Authorial Tradition and Scribal Innovation in ivadsa's Vetlapañcaviatik Schmidt-Madsen, Jacob Publication date: 2014 Citation for published version (APA): Schmidt-Madsen, J. (2014). Repossessing the Past: Authorial Tradition and Scribal Innovation in ivadsa's Vetlapañcaviatik. Download date: 30. sep.. 2021 Repossessing the Past - authorial tradition and scribal innovation in Śivadāsa's Vetālapañcaviṃśatikā पप्रारभ्यत त न ख쥁 व픿घ्नभयनत नꅀचचच पप्रारभ्य व픿घ्नव픿वतप्रा व픿रमवन्ति मधप्राच व픿घ्नचच सस्रगव贿तग रवꤿच न्यमप्रानप्राच पप्रारब्धमत्तमगग 贿प्राग न ꤿवरत्यजवन्ति For fear of obstacles, the inferior do not begin (an undertaking) at all; having begun, the mediocre, presented with obstacles, leave off; being hindered by obstacles, even if multiplied by a thousand, those of superior virtue do not abandon an undertaking. - Indian proverb Jacob Schmidt-Madsen Spring 2014 The present paper is a revised edition of my MA thesis submitted in the Department of Indology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in the summer of 2013. I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Kenneth G. Zysk, for his encouragement to take my ideas further and present them to a wider audience. I would also like to thank my girlfriend, Liv Trudsø, for allowing me the space and time to pursue my studies even when they kept me off her rocky island in the Baltic Sea for weeks and months on end. i Preface Before beginning work on the present thesis, I was careful in reminding myself that it was going to be just another paper. I did not want to get bogged down by unrealistic ambitions or an inflated sense of importance. Still, I could not escape the feeling that even if the thesis were indeed going to be just another paper, it were also, irrevocably, going to be the last. Whatever might follow would do so outside the secure environment of a formal academic training programme. Now, if ever, was the time to ask what lies at the end of the road to Indology. In the course of my education I had slowly but surely been led toward the primary literary sources of Sanskritic culture, but now, as I was ready to step off the road and lose myself in them, I suddenly felt unsure as to what actually constituted them. My initial research question was concerned with the frame story of the popular Indian story collection known as the Vetālapañcaviṃśati, or the twenty-five tales of the corpse-possessing spirit, but the lack of critical editions soon made me narrow it down to the version attributed to Śivadāsa which had indeed been critically edited by Heinrich Uhle in 1881. As I went over the many variant readings in Uhle's critical apparatus, a little voice made itself heard in the back of my head, telling me that I was only scratching the surface of what I was trying to get to the bottom of. Not only did the variations seem to point in the direction of other known versions of the story collection; they also seemed to point to a tradition of textual transmission rooted in a manuscript culture which rendered suspect the very idea of a critical edition based on the concept of originality. To what extent, indeed, could we say that different scribes were simply copying the same text? The shock came full force when I began collecting scans of the manuscripts used by Uhle, and started comparing them with the variant readings given by him. The idiosyncracies of the individual manuscripts far exceeded even the impression of a greater variety that had led me to acquire them in the first place. It immediately became clear to me that any attempt at approaching them as just so many corruptions of a single original text would be a failure to appreciate and understand the circumstances under which they had ii been produced, circulated, and used. The critical edition which I had until now believed, or at least wanted to believe, was a perfectly acceptable substitute for the manuscripts it represented, was in fact nothing but a highly elaborate conjecture insisting upon a textual uniformity which had clearly never existed. The thesis presented in the following pages is the result of my attempt to come to terms with the need for a radical revision of our understanding of the primary textual sources of not only Śivadāsa's Vetālapañcaviṃśatikā, but of Indian story literature as a whole, and perhaps of many other genres of literature as well. What began as the study of a particular text has evolved - or, one might say, devolved - into a more general study of what it at all means to be a text in a manuscript culture, existing, as it did, at the interface between orality and literacy. What, then, lies at the end of my road to Indology is a profound wish to go beyond the preservation of the variant readings of our primary sources, hidden away, if at all, in footnotes at the bottom of pages, or in critical apparatuses at the back of books, and to enter into a deeper understanding of the very reason why they should be preserved, not simply as registers of scribal errors and facile emendations, but as testimonies to the life that story literature led before it was stabilized to death by best readings and print media. - Jacob Schmidt-Madsen Copenhagen, July 2013 iii Abbreviations BK - Bṛhatkathā by Guṇādhya BKM - Bṛhatkathāmañjarī by Kṣemendra BMP - Bhaviṣyamahāpurāṇa JVP - Jambhaladatta's version of VP KSS - Kathāsaritsāgara by Somadeva KVP - Kṣemendra's version of VP in BKM SD - The Siṃhāsanadvātriṃśakā cycle of tales ŚVP - Śivadāsa's version of VP ŚVPU - The critical edition of ŚVP in Uhle 1966[1881] SVP - Somadeva's version of VP in KSS VP - The Vetālapañcaviṃśati cycle of tales VVP - Vallabha or Vallabhadāsa's sub-version of ŚVP iv Contents Introduction . p. 1 Part I: Text Critical Approaches to Indian Story Literature . p. 7 At variance with originality . p. 8 The logic of variation . p. 12 Orality in literacy . p. 16 Part II: The Vetālapañcaviṃśati in Sanskrit Literature . p. 20 Oral beginnings . p. 22 Authorial traditions . p. 25 Kṣemendra and Somadeva . p. 28 Śivadāsa . p. 34 Jambhaladatta . p. 38 Other versions . p. 42 Part III: Recontextualising Śivadāsa . p. 45 Vallabhaśivadāsa . p. 46 Time and place . p. 49 Gujarati Sanskrit . p. 53 Śvetāmbara Jain literary culture . p. 55 Traces of orality in ŚVP . p. 58 Part IV: Analysis and Discussion . p. 63 Manuscript overview . p. 65 Narrative structure . p. 69 Prose analysis: The jewel in the fruit . p. 70 v Verse analysis: Distribution and function . p. 74 Significant variations . p. 79 Example #1: The king and the city . p. 80 Example #2: The king's reward . p. 82 Textual criticism and manuscript culture . p. 86 Conclusion . p. 91 Bibliography . p. 94 Appendices . p. 104 Appendix A: Story sequence . p. 104 Appendix B: Manuscripts . p. 106 Appendix C: Narrative Structure . p. 123 Appendix D: Prose Analysis (section e3) . p. 131 Appendix E: Distribution of Verses . p. 134 Appendix F: Verse Analysis (section e6) . p. 144 Appendix G: Significant Content Variations . p. 146 Appendix H: Transliteration (ms. A) . p. 148 vi Introduction When Heinrich Uhle published his critical edition of Śivadāsa's Vetālapañcaviṃśatikā in 1881, he confessed to having struggled with a problem that had been at the root of textual criticism since Karl Lachmann had initiated the great philological quest for the ur-text earlier in the century: how to choose between different readings of the same word, sentence, or passage? Uhle, despairing at the wealth of variants in the eleven manuscripts of the popular story collection at his disposal, decided that since no single, original text could be convincingly recovered from them, a critical edition must be based on the eclectic reading of a more or less internally consistent group of manuscripts. In accordance with the prevailing view of his day - that the more aesthetically pleasing text was also the more original - Uhle chose a group of four manuscripts which he termed the recensio ornatior as his "leitender Faden durch das Wirrsal der unendlichen Varianten" (Uhle 1966[1881]: xxviii). He further narrowed down the selection to the two manuscripts which he believed to have the most in common, but then freely admitted to interpolating readings from other manuscripts as well whenever he found them to be "better" on grounds that he did not state; neither did he feel the need to explain his emendations of what he considered "der offenbarsten und unbedeutendsten Schreibfehler" (ibid. xxix). The result was something rather more akin to the work of a medieval Indian scribe than to the Lachmannian ideal of a critical edition, and later earned Uhle the rebuke from Johannes Hertel that "[e]ine kritische Ausgabe ist kein Lesebuch für Kinder"1 (Hertel 1924: 137). Still, in arguing that each manuscript could almost be considered a version unto itself, Uhle seems to have recognized what many of his contemporaries had not: that the actual multiplicity of manuscripts does not always translate very well into the supposed unity of a critical edition. Thus, the purpose of the present thesis is not simply to challenge the validity of Uhle's methodology, but also, and more importantly, to question the ultimate applicability of traditional text 1 Hertel's sarcasm was further accentuated by the fact that Uhle had since published a Griechische Schulgrammatik (Leipzig, 1883) reprinted several times. 1 critical approaches to the genre of Indian story literature. The version of the Vetālapañcaviṃśati (VP) attributed to Śivadāsa (ŚVP) is neither the earliest nor the most refined version of the tales to have come down to us, but it is probably the one which brings us closest to the original moment in time when they were first committed to writing.