Pandit Devidas viracit Pravacanasarabhasakavitt.

• Position: Book review

Pandit Devidas viracit Pravacanasarabhasakavitt. Edited and Hindi translation by SRIYANSKUMAR SINGHAI. Jaipur: BHARATIYA SRUTI DARSAN KENDRA, 2006. Available from: Pandit Todarmal Smarak Trust, A-4 Bapunagar. Jaipur 302015.

The seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in northern India saw an extensive program of commentarial translation of many of the classics of Digambar Jain literature into the vernacular (bhusa) by a number of pandits or lay intellectuals. Urban centers such as Agra, Delhi. Jaipur. Gwalior, and Bharatpur were home to circles (gosthi. mandali, saili) of men who gathered regularly to discuss classical Digambar philosophical and devotional texts, translate these texts into the common tongue, compose their own texts, and sing bhajans. The text at hand is evidence that this activity was also important in the Bundelkhand region of central India.

Pandit Devidas was a Bundelkhand intellectual and poet who was active between 1753 and 1767. He lived most of his life in several villages in the kingdom of Orccha, in what is now Tikamgarh District of Madhya Pradesh. While almost nothing is known of his life, oral tradition has it that he was a cloth dealer, and that he may have visited the Digambar intellectual centers of Agra and Jaipur. He authored several dozen texts on philosophical, practical, and devotional topics. Many of these, especially the shorter, more devotional works, were collected into the Devidas Vilas ("Sport of Devidas"). an edition of which was published in 1994 from a single manuscript in Banaras. (1)

Among his philosophical works was this poetic commentarial translation of Kundakunda's Pravacana-sara, which he completed in VS 1824 (C.E. 1767). The two manuscripts of the text from which this critical edition was produced--one from the Anekant Bhavan in Bina, Madhya Pradesh, the other from the library of the Bara Terapanth Mandir in Jaipur--are respectively from VS 1828 and 1921 (C.E. 1771 and 1864), and were copied in Chatrapur and Jhansi. The editor is reader and head of the Department of Jain Philosophy at the Government Sanskrit Institute in Jaipur, and so well placed for the task at hand. His lengthy introduction also provides a good foundation on Kundakunda and his text, as well as the later reception of this text in the Digambar commentarial tradition.

Devidas was not the first Hindi author to write a commentary on Kundakunda's Pravacanasara, and he is explicit about his debt to the earlier Hindi Balavabodh...