Nilakantha Caturdhara's Mantrakasikhanda.

• Author: Minkowski, Christopher
• Position: Text on interpretation of Vedic verses

NILAKANTHA AND HIS WORKS

WE (1) ALL USE NILAKANTHA CATURDHARA'S commentary on the Mahabharata, but what do we know about him? Who was he and when did he live, and where? What was going on in the intellectual world he inhabited, and in the larger world?

We know that he was a Marathi-speaking Brahmin who flourished in the second half of the seventeenth century; (2) that his family had been established in a town on the banks of the Godavari; that Nilakantha moved to Banaras, where he undertook the study of Veda and Vedanga, Mimamsa, Srauta, Yoga, Saiva texts, Tarka, and especially Advaita Vedanta, with a variety of teachers. (3) In Banaras Nilakantha found many long-established families of eminent sastris from the Deccan, and it was in this Banaras in the era of Aurangzeb that Nilakantha pursued his literary career.

In addition to his commentary on the Mahabharata, Nilakantha wrote about fifteen other works, mostly in the form of commentaries on Puranic and Vedantic texts. Nilakantha specified the date in two of these works, one in 1680, and one in 1693.(4) The work of 1680 was a commentary on the Sivatandavatantra, books 12-14, written at the request of Anupasimha, Maharaja of Bikaner from 1669-1698, a noted bibliophile and sometime general in the service of Aurangzeb. (5)

NILAKANTHA IN HIS TIME AND PLACE

No study has yet been made of Nilakantha's placement in the cultural, much less political, historical moment in which he lived. For that matter it is only recently that the placement of Sanskrit literati of the seventeenth century in their historical context has been posed as a problem at all. (6) In what senses can we say that Nilakantha was a man of his time and place? The question is theoretically far from a simple one to ask, but that does not prevent us from assembling some materials for consideration. (7)

Aside from Nilakantha's composing a work commissioned by a temporal ruler, Anupasimha, there is also a range of bhasa languages he resorted to as part of his commentarial method. Printz has demonstrated that, in commenting on the Mahabharata, Nilakantha made regular use in his glosses of Marathi and Hindavi / Hindustani, some loanwords of Dravidian, Persian, and Arabic, and possibly some Bhojpuri. (8) Nilakantha explicated using Kannada in at least one place in the Mantrabhagavata. (9)

This reliance on bhasa languages reflects a development that is perhaps characteristic of intellectuals of his day. Some philosophers in Sanskrit of the seventeenth century proposed to redefine the status of vernacular languages as communicative systems by proposing that vernacular languages had the independent capacity to express meaning, a capacity regularly denied them by earlier philosophers in Sanskrit. Pollock has recently argued that these proposals constituted an innovation of the early modem period. (10) Nilakantha endorsed a version of this position when discussing vernacular mantras (bhasamantra) in the introduction to his commentary on the Sivatandavatantra. (11)

Another way in which we might speak of Nilakantha as a man of his day can be found in the glosses that we now judge to be anachronistic. For example, it is well known that in the BhBhD Nilakantha sometimes glosses terms like yantra in military passages of the epic as referring to guns or cannons. (12) In fact anachronism has come to be a criticism of Nilakantha generally, who in this sense is judged too much a man of his own day. (13)

In this study I would like to consider an unknown work that Nilakantha wrote in an innovative genre, because, as I shall argue, this work could afford us an insight into how Nilakantha might have thought of himself as participating in the larger cultural, and possibly even the political, work of his moment.

THE MANTRARAHASYAPRAKASIKA GENRE

Nilakantha wrote at least three, and possibly more, works in a genre of his own creation. He subtitled all of these works mantrarahasyaprakasika 'the illumination of the hidden meaning of (Vedic) mantras'. The two better known of these texts, each published twice in the last century, are the Mantraramayana and the Mantrabhagavata, in which verses drawn from the Rgveda are arranged and read in such a way that they reveal the story and theology of the Ramayana in one case, and of the Bhagavata in the other. I recently contributed a study on the subject of those two texts, and will not discuss them further here, except to say that they were well known in their day and after, and that each survives in at least a dozen manuscripts. (14)

Nilakantha had already been experimenting with the style when he wrote his commentary on the Harivamsa. About sixty verses from the RV are introduced into Nilakantha's commentary there and read in such a way that they reveal the episodes of the Harivamsa. (15) Some features of this commentarial approach, which became so distinctive of Nilakantha are already found in the commentary on the Mahabharata proper. (16)

THE MANTRAKASIKHANDA

Nilakantha's Mantrakasikhanda (MKKh) is another text in this genre. It has never been published. The title suggests that the purpose of the text is to read Vedic verses so as to reveal the Skandapurana's Kasikhanda, the most widely known tirthamahatmya of the sacred city of Kasi, Nilkantha's adopted home.

There are five known manuscripts, of which I have been able to examine three. (17) All three manuscripts share certain features which suggest that they are all descendants of a manuscript that presented the first half of the work in a tripathi style, i.e., with Vedic verses and padapatha in the center, and the commentary written above and below. (18) The source manuscript must have also provided a numbering scheme and an index of verses, as the extant manuscripts reproduce the same flawed numbering system and the same index of Vedic verses. More on this index, with its rather arbitrary choices, below.

THE KASIKHANDA

Before discussing the contents of the MKKh a few comments should be made about the Kasikhanda itself. This is the "most popular section" of the Skandapurana, and is the "most famous and extensive" of the mahatmyas of Banaras. (19) It is a predominantly Saiva text. In its published form it consists of 100 chapters and roughly 10,000 verses, and is probably datable to the mid-fourteenth century. (20) It had a life of its own as a text independent of the Skandapurana, and has long been in circulation in independent manuscripts, with several learned commentaries available, and several old translations, including one in Telugu and one in Tamil. (21) There have been Sanskrit summaries, abstracts, indices, and even a campu based on the Kasikhanda. (22) To date there is neither a critical edition of the text nor a study of its literary merits, which are considerably higher than what one expects to find in a Puranic work.

In the Skandapurana the Kasikhanda is mechanically divided into two halves of fifty adhyayas each, but a more organic division would be into the framing narrative (1-6), the opening story of Sivasarma (7-24), and then the account of the tirthas (25-100).

The Kasikhanda is something of an unusual text as a mahatmya, in that it begins with the story of Agastya's departure from Kasi for the south, and includes lengthy descriptions of pilgrimage sites other than Kasi. (23) The main body of the text (25-100) is narrated to Agastya by Skanda while they are sitting at Srisaila, a major Saiva temple site in the Andhra country. Among the myths included in the text is an extended one about Siva's period of exile from the city during the reign of the king Divodasa (39-63). (24) Thus, in addition to the careful accounts of the temples and bathing places in the city, and in addition to recommendations of routes to take through the city's sacred spaces, the text embeds a strong sentiment of separation from Kasi and longing for it from a distance. (25) Indeed the frame of the story and the opening sections suggest a special relation of this text with the south, when taken together with the early success of the text there. (26) In any case, the Kasikhanda is not only about Kasi, and not only about Kasi as the best of all tirthas, but about Kasi's centrality to, and dominating interconnection with what one might call the "cosmological imaginary" of Hinduism. (27)

The argument for the primacy of Kasi is based in the Kasikhanda on the doctrine of Kasimaranamukti, the doctrine that death in Banaras confers liberation on the soul of the dying person, regardless of the person's behavior in life. (28) This doctrine had already been articulated in earlier Puranic texts, but the vision of the great god Siva himself whispering the liberative teaching, the taraka brahma, into the ear of any person dying in Kasi is found frequently in the Kasikhanda. (29)

CHRONOLOGY OF TEXTS

The Mantrakasikhanda refers to the Mantrasaririka, as yet unpublished and unstudied, and to the Mantrabhagavata, which was probably written after the Mantraramayana. (30) It also refers to Nilakantha's commentary on the Mahabharata. (31) Thus the relative chronology of the genre would seem to run from the first essays in the BhBhD, especially its last section on the Harivamsa, to the independent texts in the order Mantraramayana, Mantrabhagavata, and Mantrasariraka. The MKKh appears to have been the last text of the genre that Nilakantha wrote. An absolute terminus ante quem for the Mantrabhagavata is provided by the dating of the Bikaner manuscript to Samvat 1594 or A.D. 1672. (32)

HOW MANY VERSES?

It is difficult to say exactly how many Vedic verses should be counted as making up the MKKh. This is because neither Nilakantha nor the manuscripts are consistent in their presentation of the verses. All three MSS number thirty-seven sections of the text, with three additional verses listed in the mantroddhara section at the end. All three MSS, on the other hand, furnish the same index at the end, which enumerates forty-seven Vedic verses. However only...