01 īntroduction

Mahābhārata

It is well-known that the Mahābhārata has come down to us in two recensions, the Northern and the Southern. The editors of the Poona Critical Edition (1933-70)1 of the epic determined, in the process of collating and isolating the archetype of the epic, that its Northern Recension (NR) constitutes in general what is called in textual scholarship the editio simplicior, the naive or the original text, and they created the Critical Edition (CE) from the irreducible archetype of the NR texts, the Śārada codex of the Kashmir region in the northwest of South Asia. They found likewise that the Southern Recension (SR) was generically an editio ornatio, an ornate text, a version made consciously and systematically: all hundred Kaurava brothers get named, all but a few with the pejorative du prefix; the 18 parvans of NR rise to 24 in the SR, with many insertions and transpositions of crucial episodes within parvans (those of Śakuntalā and Yayāti, for example, in the Ādiparvan); further, the SR is overlaid with a Brahmanical ideology, already incipient in the NR.

Of even greater interest was their discovery that the Malayalam version of the SR texts was itself an editio simplicior, albeit of the SR-ornatio text: it was the shortest of the SR texts which included the Telugu-Grantha versions of the SR tradition. It also aligned itself with the Śārada version of the NR texts. This made no geographical sense, as was noticed forthrightly by V.S.Sukthankar, the life spirit behind the CE.2 Logically, when a text radiates over a wide area, the versions at the farthest belts of radiation tend to be at greatest variance with the founding text, more so, than those in the inner belts: we see this in the eastward radiation of the Śārada text, the first formation of Sukthankar’s γ- sub-recension (Sukthankar 1933: lxxiii; see below, Section A, for Sukthankar’s master chart of recensions and versions) and the North-Eastern versions in Nepali, Maithili, and Bengali scripts. By a similar logic for the southward radiation of the epic along the well traveled and traditional dakṣiṇāpatha as the transmission route,3 the Malayalam version, being at the outermost extent of the Mahābhārata radiation, should also be far more differentiated than those, like the Tamil (Grantha) and Telugu versions, in the intervening space. Yet it was the shortest of the Southern Recension texts, being to it what the Śārada codex was to the NR (Dandekar 1961 [XI]: xlix). More anomalously, the Malayalam version was also found to align itself regularly with the Śārada text, “a fact all the more impressive because M[alayalam], a Southern version, hails from the province at the opposite end of India from the province of Ś[ārada], a Northern version” (Sukthankar 1933 [I]: lxxiv)—indeed, across the vast buffer zone of the Tamil (Grantha)-Telugu version of the SR Mahābhārata tradition between itself and the Northern Recension texts. In fact, some of the grossest inflations of the text and thus possibly the latest are found to occur in the Tamil (Grantha)-Telugu versions (see below). The preparation of the CE of the Mahābhārata was not contingent on solutions to these anomalies, so we have a consensus Critical Edition of the text, but I believe that the seeming anomalies right themselves out, opening thereby a way to a correct assessment of the textual history of the SR text of the epic and perhaps the Mahābhārata tradition itself, if we approach the entire problem from the perspective of Brahman migrations to the south, the irreducible human agency that brought Sanskrit texts—oral or literate—to peninsular India through the dakṣiṇāpatha. As we will see, all the Mahābhārata manuscripts that went to Poona [Pune] from peninsular India were from Brahman centers of learning, or facilities with intimate links to Brahman communities of the area. The textual history and transmission of the epic are thus inextricably intertwined with the Brahman migrations to the south. We will also see that the Mahābhārata passes on to non-Brahman groups in time, both in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, to form staples of the kūṭiyāṭṭam and kathakaḷi repertories in the former and that of the kūttu repertory in the latter, but there can be little doubt that its first migrations to South India were in Brahman hands.

Migrations

In on-going work,4 I show that two distinct waves of Brahmans arrived in the Tamil-Kerala country in the pre-modern period from the Vedic regions of Northern India, adhering to two separate śrauta praxises, the first wearing their traditional hair tuft– kuṭumi in Tamil–in front and thus collectively known as Pūrvaśikhā, and the second, Aparaśikhā, wearing it toward the back, as a pony tail (See Illustrations A and B respectively).5 I address below the question if other Brahmans or Brahman groups arrived in the Tamil country for our historical period, 50 BCE to 1350 CE. We will see that only these two Brahmans groups can be linked to srautism, and thus to a Vedic home, extant or in epigraphy. Moreover, as we will see, between them, they exhaust all the Brahman groups of the area in Thurston (1909), our most important ethnographic source of Brahman groups.

My specific thesis with respect to the Brahman migrations of the two groups and the epic is that what Sukthankar isolates as the Śārada text, his archetype for the epic and basis for the CE of Mahābhārata epic or a text very close to it, say *Śārada version, came to the Tamil country with the Pūrvaśikhā Brahmans by the beginnings of the Common Era (CE): these Brahmans with their fronted tuft are well attested in the Sangam poetry, ca. 50 BCE to 250 CE, and they created from the *Śārada text what has come down to us as SR in the first four or five centuries of CE. I will designate this *Pūrvaśikhā text of the SR of the Mahābhārata. This *Śārada text present in the Sangam Tamil country, being made in the first half of the millennium CE into the *Pūrvaśikhā SR text, supplied the knowledge of the epic displayed in the poetry of the Sangam anthologies, these perhaps being composed simultaneously with the *Pūrvaśikhā text, the basis perhaps even for a Sangam Era translation of the epic, Perutēvanār’s lost Pāratam.6 At the close of the Sangam period of Tamil history, brought about by the Kaḷabhra Interregnum, ca. 4th to 7th CE, a far-reachingly disruptive moment in Tamil history, a branch of the Pūrvaśikhā Brahmans moved to the Malabar region of Kerala, later the historical Nambudiri Brahmans of Kerala, through the Palghat gaps, a travel route already in long use,7 with the *Pūrvaśikhā text, the text remaining there in relative isolation till 1920’s when summoned to Poona for the CE. Further, the *Pūrvaśikhā text remained behind in the Tamil country as well with the rump Pūrvaśikhā group, the historically Tamil- speaking Śōḻiya Brahmans, the formative Brahman component of the Āḻvār Vaiṣṇavism in 7-9th centuries CE and thus transfusing the Kṛṣṇa myths of the Mahābhārata, especially from its khila (or appendix) portions, the Harivaṃśa, into the emerging Vaiṣṇava Bhakti poetry.

I will be designating this the Σ-text: it is still an SR text and is identical to the text that went to Malabar with the Nambudiri Pūrvaśikhās, but I have designated a Greek letter for it as it will host Sukthankar’s σ-text (see Section A below for Sukthankar’s master chart of the epic’s different recensions and script-based versions): the σ-text is an imaginary text he constructs from the evidence in the manuscripts that came to Poona for collation purposes. He sees that all Grantha-Telugu versions of the epic were of the SR mould, but unlike the Malayalam version of the SR with its allegiance to the *Śārada text of the NR tradition, the Grantha-Telugu texts’ allegiance lies with a longer, inflated version of NR, part of the γ-family of texts. The SR mould in this complex is my Σ-text, the *Pūrvaśikhā text resident in the Tamil country after the departure of the Nambudiri Pūrvaśikhās to Malabar through the Palghat gaps and finding itself hosting the arrival of the Aparaśikhā Brahmans and their NR σ-text. The SR-NR admixture seen in the Grantha-Telugu versions—an SR mould but with great infusions of métier, what comes to be called “excesses” of the SR text, from an NR text– is one of the more direct proofs in support of the thesis advanced here: Sukthankar’s hypothetical σ-text, derived by him entirely from textual evidence of his manuscripts, is verified by the evidence from the Brahman migrations.

I would be suggesting that this text came with the second Brahman group of my study, beginning to arrive at the upper peninsular regions from 5th century CE onward, reaching the Tamil country proper in significant numbers by 8th CE. Their arrival in the Tamil country is one of the best documented instances of large scale migrations of people anywhere in pre-modern history. Elsewhere I characterize them as the Burton Stein Brahmans, after the historian’s path-breaking analysis of their pivotal role in the history Tamil Nadu from the pre-modern times to the modern period although his extreme stress on local autonomy, as a segmentary feature of the Cōḷa state, has been questioned and moderated (Karashima 1984; Champakalakshmi 2001).8 The Pallavas (4th to 10th centuries, CE), later the Cōḻas (10th-14th centuries CE) and the subsequent Pāṇṭiya and Nāyaka kingdoms, are their patrons, and they constitute the subject of the famous Pallava-Cōḷa Copper Plate epigraphy, with every immigrant’s name, the number of shares of the land granted to his family, his Veda śākha in the form of its sūtra, his gotra, his titles of Vedic learning, and in the most elaborate deeds, his place of domicile before arrival in the Tamil country recorded in copper plates that regularly turned up at the tilling of the paddy fields of the Tamil country throughout 20th century. The initial deeds show them settling in the north and north-east parts of the Tamil country, the Tonṭaimanṭalam area and its northern outskirts in the Vēnkata hills and what is southern Andhra Pradesh today, and later deeds, the Kaveri delta. Their places of domicile before arrival in the Tamil country are, in most cases, villages in southern Andhra Pradesh, but these Brahmans as a whole are traceable from their Śrauta Sūtra traditions ultimately to the Mathurā region of the Yamunā river (see below). And these show them to be following different śrauta traditions from those of the Pūrvaśikhā Brahmans. A stemma chart of the Southern Recension of the Mahābhārata epic would look like this:

• *Sārada Text (ca. 150 BCE) ¦ *Pūrvaśikhā Text (ca. 50 BCE-500 CE)
• Nambudiri *Pūrvaśikhā text—————-*Śōḻiya Pūrvaśikhā text (Σ-text)
• (Malayalam version [500-1920’s CE]) —-*Suktankar’s σ-text , Tamil and Telugu versions (>500-1920’s CE)

I seek below to correlate the above stemma chart of the SR, first with its putative agents, the Brahmans and their migrations to the peninsular region from their Vedic homelands, and secondly with the requisite paleography for the literate transcriptions of the texts. We will see that the findings presented here in terms of the relevant human agency and script substantially extend our current understanding of the rise of the Mahābhārata tradition. The communis opinio of our ideas about this may be reduced to what may be called the Hiltebeitel-Witzel model: the Hiltebeitel (2001; 2005) part of the model addressing issues relating to the literate redaction of the epic by a human agency, an inter- or trans-generational “committee of out of sorts Brahmans,” ca. 150 BCE and the Witzel (2005) half providing a possible venue for this textualization event in the reformist Hindu-Vedic kingdom, like the Śuṅga dynasty, promoting the Vedic traditions, possibly the core métier of the epic deriving from a Vedic event, the Ten King’s Battle referred to at ṚV 7.18.5-10; 33. 3, 5. The work presented here may be said to address the default conclusions from this model: can we characterize the Brahmanical redactorial agency with any historical precision? What script aided the redactorial process, and what might have been the physical manuscript aiding the textualization? Further, I address how this nascent text, what I have designated as *Śārada text, came to the south by the Sangam age serving as a template for the creation of the first SR text, the *Pūrvaśikhā text, thus explaining the anomalies of the textual history of the SR listed above from Sukthankar. In sum, then, a version of the epic close to the Śārada text, *Sarada text, leaves North India sometime after its redaction, ca.250-150 BCE, with the Pūrvaśikhā Brahmans in a *Southern Brāhmī script9, most likely the parent of the extant Grantha script, in palm leaf manuscript or birch bark.10 The SR of the epic is forged from this in the following half-millennium, reaching a final form by 500 CE, the *Pūrvaśikhā text, the Grantha script taking shape in the process, the palm leaves of South India with the iron stylus technology of writing serving the transcription. About this time, both the text and script go to the Malabar area of Kerala with one branch of the Pūrvaśikhā group which emerges in time as the historical Nambudiri group, and goes into seeming hibernation for the next 1500 years till summoned to Poona for the preparation of the CE. This is the text that came to Poona in the 20th century, in the 1920’s, which the CE editors found to be the shortest version of the SR texts and thus anomalous. What has not been recognized is that the *Pūrvaśikhā text (the Σ-text in my designation; see below for more details) remains with the rump Śōḻiya Pūrvaśikhā group in the Tamil country, playing a far more active role in the subsequent history of the peninsular region. It shapes the Āḻvār Vaiṣṇavism, emerging in the centuries following the Kaḷabhra Interregnum, all four Brahman Āḻvārs being by tradition Śōḻiya Pūrvaśikhās. It also hosts the σ-Aparaśikhā text as it arrives in the Tamil country ca. 8th century onward and shapes the subsequent textual history of the epic in the Tamil country, resulting in the Tamil and Telugu versions. I present these findings in the following sequence:

• Section A sets forth the relevant details of the epic in its different recensions and versions.
• Section B is concerned with the Pūrvaśikhā Brahmans under the following aspects:
  • i. the origins of the Pūrvaśikhā Brahmans, their śrauta traditions, and their migration southward.
  • ii. their presence in the Sangam Tamil country and the creation of the *Pūrvaśikā text of the Mahābhārata.
  • iii. the Kaḷabhra Interregnum and the dispersal of the Pūrvaśikhā group.
  • iv. the Nambudiri Pūrvaśikhās and *Pūrvaśikhā text in the Malabar area of the emerging Kerala.
  • v. the Śōḻiya Pūrvaśikhās, the *Pūrvaśikhā text, and the Āḻvār Vaiṣṇavism.
  • vi. the *Pūrvaśikhā text and the Poona Critical Edition
• Section C examines the Aparaśikhā Brahmans and their bearing on the textual history of the Mahābhārata:
  • i. the origins of the Aparaśikhā Brahmans, their Śrauta traditions and their arrival in the Tamil country.
  • ii. the Pallava period epigraphy about the Aparaśikhā Brahmans.
  • iii. the Cōḷa period epigraphy about the Aparaśikhā Brahmans.
  • iv. the emergence of the Aparaśikhā Śrīvaiṣṇavism in its Ācārya phase. 10
  • v. the Tamil and Telugu versions of the Mahābhārata.
  • vi. the Tamil and Telugu Mahābhārata and the Poona Critical Edition.
• In Section D, I provide further proof for the above from the history of the Tamil- Malayalam paleography as has been constructed by I. Mahadevan (2003):
  • i. Introduction and an over-view of Mahadevan’s findings
  • ii. the Tamil Brāhmī script and its history
  • iii. the Southern Brāhmī script and its history
  • iv. the Brahmans, the epics and paleography