Studi Giainici.

AuthorCort, John E.
PositionBrief Reviews - Book Review

Studi Giainici. By LUIGO PIO TESSITORI. Introduction by Nalini Balbir. Bibliotheca Indica, Opera omnia di Luigi Pio Tessitori, vol. II. Udine: SOCIETA INDOLOGICA LUIGI PIO TESSITORI, 2000.

This is the second in a planned series of seven volumes of the collected works of the brilliant but short-lived Italian Indologist Luigi Pio Tessitori (1887-1919). (The first volume, Opera Giovanili, was published in 1996.) Tessitori is best known for his extensive work in the languages that he termed Old Western Rajasthani, nowadays termed Old Gujarati, Marwari, Braj, and Pingala, collective representatives of the New Indo-Aryan (NIA) languages. He also was knowledgeable in the various Prakrits and Apabhramsa, in addition to Sanskrit and modern vernacular Hindi, Marwari, and Gujarati. Much of Tessitori's early scholarship dealt with Jain literature, an interest he never fully abandoned even after he shifted his focus to the NIA bardic literatures of Rajasthan.

Tessitori's works are of interest on the one hand because of his philological skill as a critical editor, and on the other because he studied a part of the ocean of Jain literature that has been relatively understudied. The pioneering European scholars of Jainism focused on the early Prakrit literatures, especially the Svetambara literature in Ardha-Magadhi and Maharastri. This trend has continued, joined by increasing attention to literature in Sanskrit and fieldwork-based studies in contemporary Hindi and Gujarati. But the late medieval literature in NIA continues to be under-represented in Jain studies, both in India and elsewhere. Had Tessitori's career not tragically been cut short, his vast scholarly energies inevitably would have resulted in a much better knowledge of this literature--and therefore of late medieval Jainism in western India--than we have at present.

That having been said, the bulk of what Tessitori did accomplish in Jain studies was on medieval works in Maharastri Prakrit, as his studies of NIA literature after he went to India in 1914 consisted largely of non-Jain bardic materials. On the basis of manuscripts in Italian collections, supplemented by several in British collections, he provided critical editions of three important Maharastri Prakrit texts, all published in the Giornale della Societa Asiatica Italiana between 1909 and 1917. His edition of the Uvaesamala (Sanskrit Upadesamala) of Dharmadasagani, which Nalini Balbir adjudges "the philological masterpiece of this...

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