Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi – Manuscripts, Editorial Apparatus

[We take great pleasure in commencing a series on Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi, a Sanskrit treatise on Poetics authored by Sāyaṇācārya. The text is critically edited for the first time by Śatāvadhānī Dr. R Ganesh and Shashi Kiran B N, and will be published by the Oriental Research Institute, Mysuru. This series constitutes a major portion of the editors’ introduction to Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi. We thank Dr. D P Madhusudan Acharya, the Director of Oriental Research Institute, for permitting us to publish the introduction. —Ed.]

Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi is a hitherto unpublished treatise on Poetics by Sāyaṇācārya, the celebrated author of commentaries on the Vedas. It is composed in the traditional format comprising expository verses (kārikā), explanation in prose (vṛtti) and illustrative verses (udāharaṇa). It provides remarkable insights into the life and personality of the author through illustrative verses composed by Bhoganātha, Sāyaṇācārya’s younger brother. It is also significant to the cultural history of the Vijayanagara period. 

The work serves as a compendium of the major concepts of Indian Poetics, adhering to the vision of Dhvanyāloka and following standard works such as Kāvya-prakāśa and Daśa-rūpaka. A close study of this text helps reveal the vibrant intellectual milieu of the period, marked by a profuse exchange of ideas.

The manuscript of Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi was discovered by R Narasimhachar in 1908. From the report published by the Mysore Archaeological Department, we gather that the manuscript was only a fragment.^[1] Although the text has been known to the scholarly fraternity for more than a century, it has not been edited and published till date. Scholars such as R Narasimhachar, D V Gundappa, Yoganarasimha, M P L Sastri, S K De, P V Kane and P Sriramamurti have discussed various aspects of this treatise.^[2] A paper by D C Sarasvati is particularly worth noting, for it presents a detailed analysis of the contents.^[3] Apart from these scholars, historians working on the Vijayanagara Empire have mentioned the work in passing. The present edition draws from all these studies and attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of the treatise along with the critically constituted text.

1. Manuscripts, Editorial Apparatus

The New Catalogus Catalogorum notes four manuscripts of Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi deposited in the Oriental Research Institute, Mysuru.^[4] Of these, two are written on palm leaves and the other two on paper. One of the paper manuscripts (A. 615) is now unserviceable. Dr. V Raghavan’s personal collection of manuscripts, preserved at the Adyar Library and Research Institute, Chennai, includes two paper manuscripts.^[5] Further, a paper manuscript of a different work bearing the same title is preserved at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune (No. 409 / 1892–95). It is authored by Gaṇapati, who was perhaps posterior to Sāyaṇācārya.

The following table provides the details of all the available manuscript material:

When we began working on this endeavour, we were in possession of only the material preserved at ORI, Mysuru. We knew that scholars who have worked on Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi in the past, such as R Narasimhachar and D V Gundappa, had consulted the Kannada manuscript and its transcript.^[6] We also knew that D C Sarasvati had consulted the Devanāgarī manuscript and had based her analysis on its contents.^[7] Unfortunately, this was not available to us. The Telugu manuscript also remained elusive. The Kannada manuscript and its transcript in our possession were in fairly good condition. However, the Grantha manuscript, which is perhaps the oldest and has preserved better readings, was severely damaged and worm-eaten. Resigning ourselves to using the available material, we began to work in all earnest and prepared the first draft of the text. 

At this stage we happened to learn about Dr. V Raghavan’s personal collection of manuscripts—which included Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi—through our young friend, Srinidhi Ramachandra. We immediately got in touch with the authorities at the Adyar Library and procured the material available with them. To our amazement, these were the same paper manuscripts—Telugu and Devanāgarī—that we were looking for! Apparently, the palm leaf manuscripts on which these paper ones are based were once preserved at ORI, Mysuru but went missing later.

We finally possessed all the material required to prepare a critical edition of Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi.

We noticed that the Devanāgarī paper manuscript included readings from all the other manuscripts, mainly the Grantha. We also learnt that the resident scholars of ORI, Mysuru—Vidvān N S Venkatanathacharya and Vidvān K S Varadacharya—had collated these readings at the behest of Dr. V Raghavan.^[8] Their scholarly effort proved a blessing for us, because we now had access to several new portions of the text. Going by these readings we surmise that the resident scholars must have collated portions from the Grantha manuscript when it was in a better condition than now.

We cannot say anything definitively about the genealogy of the manuscripts. Examining the readings preserved in each, we infer that: (1) Grantha is the oldest – most of its readings are authentic and large portions of it are not found in any other manuscript (2) Telugu and Devanāgarī transcripts are perhaps based on the same source (3) Kannada is an independent source by itself.

Because the oldest source (Grantha) is severely damaged, we have primarily relied on the Kannada manuscript (referred to as ‘K’ henceforth) and have used the readings from other sources as appropriate. We have noted important textual variants in the footnotes.

‘K’ seems to have changed hands at the twenty-fifth folio, for the writing has modified and remained the same till the end. The text ends abruptly at the thirty-fourth folio, and a different text titled Śṛṅgāra-tilaka begins from the next. The other manuscripts close at around the same juncture. Consequently, only a portion of the third chapter of Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi is available. Further, the opening portion of the text is preserved only in the Grantha variant – as a collated section in the Devanāgarī transcript.

A little-known commentary on Abhijñāna-śākuntala has quoted several verses and prose passages from Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi. We have used these readings to reconstruct some problematic portions of the text. The author of this commentary is Śrīnivāsācārya, a scholar who perhaps lived in the nineteenth century CE. A commentary on Veṅkaṭādhvarī’s Lakṣmī-sahasra authored by Śrīkṛṣṇa-brahmatantra-yatīndra, the thirty-first adhipati of Parakāla-maṭha, Mysuru, also quotes some verses from this treatise. Furthermore, a work on Poetics titled Sāhitya-kallolinī authored by Bhāskarācārya quotes a few verses that appear to be from this text.^[9] These verses relate to the fame acquired through poetry, and appear in Śrīnivāsācārya’s commentary on Abhijñāna-śākuntala as well. Interestingly, the name of the scribe who copied Sāhitya-kallolinī was also Śrīnivāsācārya! A collection of verses on various aspects of Bharata-śāstra titled Rasika-jana-manollāsinī-sāra-saṅgraha-bharata-śāstra, compiled by Veṅkaṭa-sundarāsāni and printed in the Kannada script, also includes these verses. None of these texts expressly mentions the source. Yet we believe this set of verses is indeed quoted from Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi – because we find several other verses before and after this set that are seen in the manuscripts of Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi. There are, however, some verses that are not found in any manuscript, and we have noted these in a footnote.

Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi itself has heavily borrowed from two sources: (1) Sāhitya-cūḍāmaṇi, Bhaṭṭa-gopāla’s commentary on Kāvya-prakāśa and (2) Daśa-rūpaka. Other works on which it relies include Kāvyālaṅkāra-sāra-saṅgraha, Kāvyālaṅkāra-sūtra-vṛtti, Dhvanyāloka, Alaṅkāra-sarvasva and Ekāvalī. These have helped us in arriving at correct readings when all the manuscripts seemed inadequate or faulty. At several places we have emended the kārikās based on these works by sticking to the metrical pattern of the original. 

Although the writing in ‘K’ is fairly legible, it has a few ticklish issues. The scribe confounds the letters ‘ta’ and ‘na’, ‘na’ and ‘ṇa’, ‘ḍa’ and ‘ḍha’, ‘ra’ and ‘la’, ‘ḍa’ and ‘ḻa’ at many places. He uses ‘yya’ in the place of ‘ya’ when such a construction is unwarranted. Further, he does not include anusvāra and visarga at several places. Scribal errors are abundant, of which we mention only one: while describing the idiosyncrasies of various nāyikās, the text reads ‘ramaṇaṃ prati ramaṇīnāṃ’. The scribe has interchanged the letters ra and ma in the first word, and has thus turned a lover (ramaṇa) into death (maraṇa)! We have worked hard to iron out such errors. The text uses ‘ḻa’ in the place of ‘la’ possibly because of its Southern origin. We have used ‘la’ throughout. It calls the kārikās as sutras at times. We have not corrected such usages.

Furthermore, we have followed sandhi rules where they have been flouted in the text, and have used the avagraha sign (not seen in the manuscript) to indicate the pūrvarūpa-sandhi. The expository and illustrative verses are metrically flawed at a few places. We have attempted to present the correct metrical form. Apart from metrical errors there are some instances of grammatical slipups and infelicitous constructions.^[10] In such cases we have indicated the correct usage in the footnotes. Further, we have noted in the footnotes those illustrative verses that appear multiple times in the text.

We have shown all our emendations within square brackets ‘[ ]’. We have used flower brackets ‘{ }’ to indicate: (1) textual variations in manuscripts, (2) portions of the text reconstructed with the help of other treatises. Despite our best efforts we could not reconstruct some portions of the text. The reason for this is twofold: the palm leaf manuscripts as they are available now are damaged at many places, and no manuscript has preserved the text in its entirety. While we could fill the lacunae in several verses, we could not do the same with the vṛtti passages. Verses couched in metre have a definite rhythm and length, and so it is easy to emend them – we can follow the metrical scansion and supply the missing letters. The vṛtti, on the other hand, is written in prose, which has no definite structure. This makes it difficult to know the exact extent of the lacuna. We have shown a blank line ‘___’ to indicate those portions of the text we could not reconstruct. At some instances we could not decipher the meaning of the text; we have used a question mark ‘(?)’ to indicate such places.

Additionally, we have added sub-headings, split the text into intelligible paragraphs and numbered the kārikās sequentially. While most of the kārikās comprise four feet, some have an additional two.^[11] Yet others are in the form of half-verses with only two feet. We have added a superscript to the verse number to indicate extra feet, and have assigned independent numbers to half-verses. Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi quotes freely from several sources. We have indicated these sources in the footnotes to the best of our knowledge. At the end of the work we have included eight appendices that we believe will prove useful to students and scholars alike: index of kārikās, index of illustrative verses, index of illustrative verses grouped under various headings, index of poetic metres used in the illustrative verses, index of verses quoted in Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi, list of works that cite Alaṅkāra-sudhānidhi, bibliography and illustrations of citra-bandhas.