A young Sanskrit scholar used to wait patiently on the banks of a river on solar or lunar eclipse days or on festive days hoping that somebody would throw into the river rare and ancient Sanskrit manuscripts. It is the practice among some Hindu families to offer to the ‘Ganga’ ancient scripts they have inherited if they felt they could no longer keep them or if there is any illness or difficulty in the house. If anybody threw any manuscripts the young scholar had men ready to dive into the river and pick up the manuscripts.
The scholar is Prof. K. T. Pandurangi, at present Head of the Sanskrit Depanment of the Bangalore University. He began his ‘hunt’ for ancient scriptures two and a half decadcs ago and to-day he has a collection of 2,500 interesting Sanskrit manuscripts on palm leaf, plates made out of bamboo, and country-papers. What began as a one-man adventure in 1946 has now become an institution under the title ‘Sri Vidyadhisha Sanskrit Manuscripts Library’. A team of half a dozen research workers and Sanskrit teachers are assisting the collection of manuscripts and their critical edition. Every year a week of copying manuscripts is observed when very rare manuscripts which are in a state of decay are copied by nearly two dozen scholars. The library has already published a descriptive catalogue of about 800 manuscripts. Prof. Pandurangi, who has an ambitious programme to unearth as many ancient manuscripts as possible in the State, has planned to tour Kolar district shortly. “I utilise winter and summer vacation to visit some districts and meet descendants of ancient scholars to see if I could secure any valuable manuscript”, he said.
How did you develop an interest in the collection of manu-scripts? To this question Prof. Pandurangi said that the Literary exhibition of Sanskrit books, particularly of Dvaita philosophy in Dharwar in 1946, kindled his interest. He secured about 18 manuscripts from the descendants of traditional scholars for the exhibition and to his surprise he found nearly a dozen of those unpublished and rare. In his own home in Thumminakatti village on the banks of the river Tungabhadra, he found a big collection of manuscripts most of which had been damaged irreparably. He was able to pick out 300 manuscripts concerning works on Dvaita philosophy, Purvameemamsa, commentaries on the Mahabharata and Vishnupurana. ‘I was encouraged by the success in my first attempt. My next target was Honnali where I secured manuscripts of the works of Srinivasa Teertha who lived in the seventeenth century’, Prof. Pandurangi said. Prof. Pandurangi who used to visit places selected at random in the beginning, later chalked out a plan and prepared a list of villages and Agraharas where Sanskrit learning flourished. He also prepared a questionnaire and sought information about manuscripts which were known by tradition or by reference but were not actually aviilable. In reminiscent mood Prof. Pandu-rangi recalled how he had even to prepare a chart of the possible movement of manuscripts from the teacher to the taught, and the father to the son or son-in-law. The lists in the beginning were confined to four districts of North Karnataka and a survey of Sanskrit manuscripts in private collections in these districts was undertaken with the financial assistance of the then Bombay Government. The survey proved very useful. “I had to encounter many difficulties and experience many interesting situations while securing the manuscripts”, said Prof. Pandurangi unfolding a single volume of country paper running to about 1,500 pages. “In many houses I was welcomed with warmth but the encourter ended with disappointment when the house-owner told me that the manuscripts were destroyed during the last rainy season or they were thrown into a river a few months ago because some one was ill in the house,” he recalled. In some places he visited, Prof. Pandurangi got an evasive reply because the owner of the manuscripts was shy to show them as they were kept in a miserable condition. In some cases the owners were reluctant to part with their valuable possessions.
“I used to engage them in long conversations and convince them how they could make the world· know about the great contribution of their ancestors by giving the manuscripts to me” he said adding it was easy to tackle the younger generation than the older ones. Prof. Pandurangi said in his anxiety to lay hand on as many manuscripts as possible, he had even established contact with dealers in waste papers in important cities and offered them, for Sanskrit manuscripts, four times the price at which they sold old paper. Prof. Pandurangi admitted that some people who came to know his interest offered manuscripts voluntarily. He said that in the last 25 years he was able to collect about 10,000 pieces of which only 2,500· could be retained and the rest had to be dis-carded because they were in bad shape and some were unimportant and already printed.
In this prized collection of Prof. Pandurangi is a manuscript of the Mahabharata written in 1591 Sarnvat Era (or 1535 A.D.). It was procured in Munavalli in Belgaum district. The manuscript has 14 beautiful illustrations depicting ‘Sabhaparvan ‘. The wooden sheet cqvering this manuscript contained, according to Prof. Pandurangi, the names of all ‘Parvans’ indicating that once all the Parvans were tied together. However the other Parvans had not been traced so far excepting the Virataparvan portion. The scribe has given his name as Govinda Pandita, son of Ratnakara. He has also mentioned his patron’s name as Maharaja Dhyanataraja Timmaji Pandita and his place as Chalitagrama. Another interesting manuscript contains the minutes of a philosophical disputation between Rangojibhatta, the maternal uncle of the famous grammarian Kondabhatta, and Vidyadhisha Teertha. The debate took place at the court of Venkatappa Naik of Keladi. “This small manuscript throws a flood of light on the scholarship in those days”, says Prof. Pandurangi. A group of small treatises on Vedic accent, splitting of words, indexing of Vedic words, variation in pronunciation of cerebrals, dentals and nasals in Yajurveda have been secured from Kundagol. Prof. Pandurangi said these treatises gave an impression that they were prepared as a part and as aids to a big project of Vedic interpretation probably while preparing the encyclopaedic Bhashya of Sayana on the Vedas.
A large share of the collections, Prof. Pandurangi. said, con-sisted of the works on Dvaita Vedanta, works of Padmanabha Teertha, Narahari Teertha, Vadiraja, Vijayindra, Vidyadhisha and others. The works of Ananda Bhattaraka, Keshava Bhatta-raka, Ratnamala Narasimha of the Pandurangi family have also been preserved, he said. The collections also include nearly 200 manuscripts of Navya-nyaya of Navadeepa in Bengal. It was interesting to find manuscripts of scholars like Shashadhara and Dharmadasa, in Karnataka. Those manuscripts, he said, were rare in Bengal. Prof. Pandurangi’ s manuscript-treasure also included a com-mentary on Amarkosha by one Lingabhatta of Bijapur. It is a multi-lingual piece and is in Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu and Marathi. How is the age of a particular manuscript fixed and do the manuscripts give their dates? To this Prof. Pandurangi said that nearly one-third of the manuscripts secured, particularly the later ones, gave their dates in the colophon: Generally the names of ‘Samvatsara’, ‘Tithi’ and the day of completion of copying were mentioned and the ‘Saka’ and ‘Era’ were given in figures. But one had to be careful to note whether the date was that of the source manuscript or of this copy, if the manuscript were a copy of another manuscript. In some manuscripts the scribes give the names of their teachers and patrons. That would help to decipher the dates. Is not the manuscript collection a laborious one? Prof. Pandurangi’s reply is : ‘A manuscriptologist develops a passionate attachment for the authors and scribes of different centuries and for the different shades of thinking and enjoys a thrill in his association with them.’
-By courtesy, The Hindu Dated: April 22, 1971. included in a book THE WEALTH OF SANSKRIT MANUSCRIPTS IN INDIA AND ABROAD authored by Prof. K.T. Pandurangi (1997).