A Bibliographical Index of Mahānubhāva Works in Marathi Author(s): I. M. P. Raeside Source: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1960), pp. 464-507 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of School of Oriental and African Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/610033 Accessed: 16-09-2017 17:42 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Cambridge University Press, School of Oriental and African Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London This content downloaded from 140.254.87.149 on Sat, 16 Sep 2017 17:42:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX OF MAHANUBHAVA WORKS IN MARATHI By I. M. P. RAESIDE THE two principal obstacles to the study of the older forms of Marathi language and literature are the shortage of definitive texts of early works and the dearth of critical bibliographies from which one might discover what texts are available and in what form they exist. Date's Mardthi-grantha-siuc is of course invaluable for anything published before 1937, but even this work is not exhaustive and the idiosyncrasies of its arrangement according to subject- matter make it sometimes difficult to discover how many of the works of any particular early writer exist in printed form. For an unpublished work, unless one is fortunate enough to find it in the British Museum or India Office Library catalogues of Marathi MSS, one can only consult the index of a general history of Marathi literature such as V. L. Bhave's Mahdrdstra-sdrasvata. There one may well find numerous references to and quotations from the work in question, but only exceptionally will there be any indication of the source of these quotations. One is left to conjecture whether they are from a MS belonging to the author or from some early printed pothi that has escaped the attention of Date. On occasions the same quotation is repeated in a different part of the book with substantial variations in its text,1 and when a work is described but not quoted one can never be sure whether it is in fact extant or whether description and perhaps even short quotations are not taken from some inter- mediate secondary source or commentary. Fortunately Professor Tulpule in his revised edition of Bhave's Sdrasvata has provided summary bibliographies for each chapter, but these relate mainly to the new material and there is still a lack of footnotes and reliable ascriptions in the body of the text. There is, then, throughout the whole field of Marathi studies a great need for detailed bibliographical works from which one could quickly find which texts are extant, which have been published in any form and, in the few cases where this is possible, the MS sources of such publications. The present work is an attempt to do this for one small section of the Marathi field, that of the Mahanubhava writers who form a convenient and compact group, although their works are spread in time from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It is unnecessary to say much about the Mahanubhavas here, since it may be assumed that few people will be concerned to consult this bibliography without having some previous knowledge of its subject. Briefly, the Mahanubhavas are a Hindu sect founded traditionally by Cakradhara at the end of the thirteenth century. Their writings, beginning with the teaching of Cakradhara himself which was arranged into sftras by his immediate disciples, are pre- dominantly religious and didactic in scope, like those of most other contemporary 1 V. L. Bhave, Mahdrastra-sarasvata, 4th ed., 1954, 120-1, 771-2. This content downloaded from 140.254.87.149 on Sat, 16 Sep 2017 17:42:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX OF MAHANUBHAVA WORKS IN MARATHI 465 Indian writers. Like the followers of Jnanadeva, the Mahanubhavas held the Bhagavadgitd in particular reverence, and among the gods they singled out Krsna and Dattatreya for worship. Consequently their writings fall into a few easily foreseeable categories: (1) the original teaching of Cakradhara (the Sutrapatha) and a ramification of commentaries thereon; (2) commentaries on the Gtd ; (3) Krsna poems, based mainly on the tenth and eleventh skandhas of the Bhdgavata-purana; (4) hagiography, or lives of Cakradhara and their own founding fathers, together with lists of their works and descriptions of the holy places associated with them; (5) innumerable works of commentary, grammatical and lexical interpretation, made in succeeding centuries to aid the better understanding of the earlier works. The scene of Cakradhara's enlightenment and his meeting with his guru Govindaprabhu was Rddhipura (modern Ritpur in Berar) and this has become the cult centre of the sect. However, a flourishing offshoot developed in the Punjab in the sixteenth century. Although some of their verse writing is engaging, and even according to its more vigorous supporters beautiful-particularly the Krsna poems of Bhaskara-the main importance of the Mahanubhavas is for Marathi language rather than literature. This is firstly because many of their early works were in prose, and indeed provide almost the only important corpus of prose writing n Marathi before the nineteenth century, and secondly because the manuscripts of all their most holy books are written in cipher. The reason for this is that from the end of the fourteenth century onwards the Mahanubhavas fell into extreme disfavour with their fellow Hindus, partly because they may have received discriminatory treatment at the hands of the Muslims, and partly from a suspicion that they were unsound on the question of caste. It is at least certain that they were anti-Brahmanical. Whatever the reason the Mahanubhavas went underground and began to transmit their sacred books in cipher of a simple letter-substitution type. The result was that the language of these early works was to a large extent fossilized at the stage it had reached at the time of enciphering, instead of being subjected to constant scribal modifications and deliberate modernization as was the fate of a contemporary work like Jndnesvarz. There is no need to insist on the importance of this for any study of the older forms of the language. The Mahanubhavas were rediscovered by Marathi scholars, and notably by V. L. Bhave, during the early years of this century, and partly as a result of a notorious libel suit in the Bombay High Court in 1907 they began to release their scriptures for the benefit of the outside world. These, instead of being of the heretical and possibly pornographic nature attributed to them in popular imagination, proved to be largely on the blameless subjects sketched out above. Nevertheless the expression ' Mahanubhava behaviour ' still persists in common speech with a suggestion of nameless orgies about it.' 1 The fullest account of the Mahanubhavas in English that I know is R. E. Enthoven, The tribes and castes of Bombay, Bombay, 1920-2, ii, 427-33. This content downloaded from 140.254.87.149 on Sat, 16 Sep 2017 17:42:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 466 I. M. P. RAESIDE Between the wars several Marathi scholars devoted themselves to the study and publication of Mahanubhava texts. After Bhave, Y. K. Deshpande, H. N. Nene, V. N. Deshpande, and V. B. Kolte were outstanding, and the last two are still actively engaged in this work.' Recently Professor Tulpule in the revised edition of Bhave's Mahdr.stra-sarasvata has, as I have already mentioned, summarized the advances made in this field up to 1954. The present bibliography is based entirely on the published works of these and other scholars which have appeared during the last 30 or 40 years. From them I have abstracted all references to Mahanubhava works in Marathi,2 whether extant, lost, or merely conjectural, together with as many relevant details as I could find, and simply listed them in alphabetic order of their titles. The deficiencies of such a bibliography are quite apparent. Obviously it would have been preferable to include much more on the MSS, but this is a different and much greater task. Apart from a small collection started by Tulpule at the University of Poona, most of the Mahanubhava MSS are still in private hands or formed into semi-private collections at a few cult centres and monasteries, and as such are quite inaccessible to me at present.3 I have there- fore confined myself to listing only those titles that appear in secondary works 4 and have attempted to give some sort of order to these and to resolve some of the many apparent confusions and discrepancies. This bibliography should in fact be considered as a framework which I expect, and indeed hope, will be enlarged and modified by subsequent criticism. It should in the meantime be of some use to Western scholars who need to find their way amidst the material so far available. Strictly speaking this is not the first list of Mahanubhava works in Marathi, for in 1924 Bhave published his Mahanubhava kavi-kavya suct, a list of Mahanubhava writers with their works.