ФИЛОСОФИЯ И РЕЛИГИЯ НА ВОСТОКЕ
NILAKANTHA IN HIS HISTORICAL CONTEXT1
© 2008 Christopher MINKOWSKI
INTRODUCTION
Readers of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, who attempt to study the vast work in its original language share something in common: reliance on a Sanskrit commentary called the Bharatabhavadipa, "Light on the Deep Meaning of the [Maha]bharata". This commentary was written by an author whose name was Nilakantha.
Nilakantha's "Light" has been included in editions of the Mahabharata since the middle of the nineteenth century, when the epic first began to be published2. The commentary was known to the earliest European scholars of the epic. Franz Bopp, for example, who is best known to posterity as a comparative historical linguist, but who also published some of the earliest studies of the Mahabharata, made use of manuscripts of Nilakantha's commentary (for example, in Bopp, 1829). To this day, Nilakantha commentary is the only Sanskrit commentary on the whole epic that is available in print. The work thus occupies a prominent position in the literature of epic studies.
Does it deserve this position of prominence? Some have not thought so. Readers often express frustrations with Nilakantha's method and style: he remains silent on difficult passages, so the complaints go, and yet sometimes speaks in learned detail about obvious matters - about words that have no special contextual meaning, for example, but that can easily be understood by referring to a dictionary. When he comes to the "battle books", the epic's lengthy description of the great war that lies at the heart of the story, and to which the entire narrative builds, Nila-kantha falls almost entirely silent, leaving the melée to go on nearly without him. In this he is rather like the epic character Balarama, who refused to participate in the war, and who went off on a tour of sacred pilgrimage places instead.
What is worse, Nilakantha subjects some of the most memorable episodes of the epic to an allegorizing interpretation, or else to a reading oriented toward the non-dualist philosophical position known as Advaita Vedanta, even when this does not seem to be the epic's inherent message. Especially when it does not, some complain. Sometimes the non-dualism and the allegory can even be combined.
Nilakantha established a text of the Mahabharata as the basis on which to write his commentary. In his introduction to the commentary he reports that he assembled many manuscripts from different regions of the country, and from them selected the best readings for his edition3. In this way he was a sort of textual critic avant la lettre. The text that he established was widely disseminated, and is today considered the "vulgate". But Nilakantha has been roundly criticized, for his
1 This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0135069. My thanks to Dr. S. Serebriany for useful comments in preparing this paper for publication in "Vostok (Oriens)".
2 In this paper references to Nilakantha's commentary will be made to the Chitrashala Press edition edited by Ra-macandrasastri Kimjavadekara [Mahabharata, 1929-1936]. References to the Mahabharata (further MBh) will be made to the Critical Edition (further CE) of the Bhandarkar Institute in Poona [Mahabharata, 1933-1966].
3 Verse 6 of the introduction to the commentary on the Ádiparvan [Mahabharata. 1929-1936, p. 1].
editorial efforts, by the editors of the critical edition of the Mahabharata produced by the Bhan-darkar Institute in Pune. His text was "smooth and eclectic but inferior", they charged, his textual method regrettably conflationist [Sukthankar, 1933, p. 1xv-1xix].
Although Nilakantha's commentary enjoys a position of prominence in epic studies and is used by every serious reader of the epic, he is often read with frustration and disappointment.
CONTEXT AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICISM
For all that, beyond these uses and reliances, complaints and rejections, there has been little further reflection on Nilakantha and his work. What if one were to study Nilakantha in his own right? What if one were to shift the focus from the epic to the commentary on the epic; to treat the commentary not as a clear window through which to view the Mahabharata, but rather as a window in stained glass, with its own interesting opacities, refractions, and distortions, as an intellectual creation of its own sort?
If we were to succeed in understanding Nilakantha's intellectual project (and this would first require that we accept the proposition that a Sanskrit commentator can have such a thing as an intellectual project), we might, as a first result, locate the causes for our own frustrations in using his commentary. The only danger would be that we might lose some of our confidence in his reliability for passages where we now find him useful.
Since Nilakantha lived relatively recently, in the later seventeenth century, studying him opens up for scholars an unusual possibility - that of placing an individual Sanskrit author in his historical context. This possibility comes from the greater supply of historical information about Nilakantha, his social and cultural setting, and about South Asia generally. The historical data is far from perfect, but it is much richer than it is for Sanskrit literature from earlier periods, on which Indologists have usually concentrated.
That a literary work should be understood in relation to the author' s time, place, and intellectual moment is taken for granted in the study of European and American literature, and often in the study of literature in other parts of the world as well. Yet in Indological studies the historicist approach has been rather under-used. Sanskrit works are usually not studied with regard to the historical conditions in which they arose, or with a sensitivity to the individual authorial voice that might be heard in them. Literary history in Sanskrit has usually not risen above relative chronology, most often articulated in a simple sequence of texts with no implication of progression or direction.
This is because it is not a trivial matter to place a Sanskrit author in an historical context. Authors in Sanskrit show little obvious interest in reflecting on their own immediate circumstances. To write and think in Sanskrit meant for most literati the opportunity to enter into a world of discourse in which the local and the contemporary were transcended, and in which one could converse in an undifferentiated present with Sanskrit authors who lived in any place or time. If something local or contemporary were to be discussed, the panegyric of a local king for example, the logic of expression in Sanskrit tended to effect a transposition of the current and specific into the archetypal and universal. Given these literary predilections, an attempt to historicize a Sanskrit author might seem to be an alien intellectual undertaking.
Except that the availability to Sanskrit literati of their cosmopolitan opportunity was no accident. There had been active efforts made to create and sustain it, especially by the school of Vedic exegesis, the Mimamsa school, which sought by a variety of arguments to disconnect the Vedic literature from history and authorial context. Other texts which were affiliated with the sacred Vedas began to be treated as similarly ahistorical. The Mahabharata came to be considered a fifth Veda, the counterpart in narrative of the four ancient and canonical Vedas. Commentaries on Vedic and related works sustained these ideological claims of Vedic status.
If Indologists have lately been criticized for constructing a vision of Sanskrit literature that is agentless and timeless, it should be noted that they have not been the inventors of this picture of an unconditioned Sanskrit literature so much as its reproducers, their fault being not too much
imagination but too little. One might instead adopt a stance that is sympathetic but unpersuaded, in the interest of greater understanding but greater dispassion. To place a Sanskrit author in his historical context, in a manner in which he would not place himself, need not then be seen as the imposition of a history, but rather as the recovery of one.
SANSKRIT AUTHORS IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
Even from a point of view internal to the Sanskrit literary world, there was something noticeably different in the attitudes of Sanskrit authors who lived in the seventeenth century. Intellectuals became self-conscious about their relation to their predecessors. They expressed a sense of what was new in their own literary efforts. This sense of newness was itself something new, and characteristic of a period that is usefully called "early modern" [see: Pollock, 2001].
My own research on Nilakantha forms part of an international group project on the "Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism", which proposes to investigate the structure and social context of Sanskrit science and knowledge from ca. 1550 up to ca. 17504. This was a flourishing period for Sanskrit literary activity, but remains largely unstudied, both in its details and in its general outlines. My efforts in this project are directed not at establishing the grand narrative of the period, but at investigating individual cases. It is particularly figures who were visible but not ordinary that are of interest here. Although he has been treated by modern scholars as a "typical" or "traditional" commentator, even a "medieval" one, I would argue that Nilakantha was unusual, inventive in his own day and that his literary success was the result of his innovation, not his conservatism. Nilakantha's works are filled with idiosyncracies and eccentricities, and that is what makes him interesting.
Nilakantha and Banaras
Nilakantha Caturdhara was a Marathi-speaking Brahmin who flourished in the middle and later seventeenth century. The family name Caturdhara is a back-formation into Sans
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