The Hagiographies of Anantadas: the Bhakti Poets of North India.

• Author: Gaeffke, Peter
• Position: Book Review

By WINAND M. CALLEWAERT, in collaboration with Dr. SWAPNA SHARMA. Richmond, Surrey: CURZON PRESS, 2000. Pp. viii + 414.

In 1588 the Ramanandi Anantadas brought together the oral legends about the "lives" of bhakti poets in North India. He composed verses on Namdev, Kabir, Dhana, Trilocan, Pipa, Raidas Angad, and Seu Saman. Narrators and singer performed the hagiographies for at least two centuries. Recent studies of bhakti literature have met always with the difficulty that oral transmission does not allow us to trace back the manuscript collections of one singer of bhakti songs to a single manuscript which could be regarded as very close to the voice of the author. It is therefore understandable that the research of European and American scholars has taken notice of the vitae of the bhakti saints in the hope of leaving behind the difficulties of oral transmission of the bhakti poems.

Winand Callewaert, the best scholar of manuscript-based research on old Hindi and its dialects, has collected manuscripts for an edition of the hagiographies of Anantadas for more than twenty years. His hope was that the hagiographies would offer a better field for the application of text critical methods so successfully developed in classical scholarship, to find a stemma which would identify the most trustworthy manuscript. But during the long period of research Callewaert had to revise his position, and he also encountered scholarly disagreements over the nature of his material.

His change in concept was necessary because the manuscripts were completely contaminated, making it impossible to construct relationships between them. In this he shared the experience of Sanskrit philologists, as can be read in the attempt to text critically edit Vacaspati Misra's Tattvakaumudi by S. A. Srinivasan (Hamburg, 1967). The number of variae lectiones was so great in this case that for two lines of texts two pages of small print were necessary to accommodate the variants. The result of all this work was the insight that the twenty-five manuscripts used did not allow a stemma to be constructed. Srinivasan could only surmise that the contamination was due to the long period between composition and the start of manuscript transmission.

However, in the case of Anantadas the time gap is very short, because the first manuscripts are only a few decennia away from the date of the original composition (1588). Still Callewaert had to accept an oral transmission by singers or...