Evaluating the Critical Edition of the Mahåbhårata: Inferential Mileage and the Apparatus Materials: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

I have always liked the definition of obsession as the response to a situation we can neither change nor cease thinking about. Perhaps one of the most fundamental issues of Mahābhārata (MBh) research—an issue that scholars have typically found impossible to resolve or cease thinking about— is the precise nature and identity of the Bhandarkar or Pune critical text.
Over the course of almost half a century, the editors of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute worked to trace a path through the maze of extant manuscripts of the MBh, in the end identifying a form of the epic which appears to lie at the base of all the extant written Sanskrit manuscripts. This basic form of the poem was then published as the critical text, accompanied by the voluminous manuscript additions and variations preserved in the critical apparatus below the root text, and in appendices at the end of each volume. The basic Critical Edition (CE) text has been characterized in many ways, and has been called “a version of the epic as old as the extant manuscript material will permit us to reach” (Sukthankar 1933 vol.1: ciii), a “written archetype” (Fitzgerald 1991: 152-153), a textual archetype that “takes us back to the text’s first composition” (Hiltebeitel 2005: 459), a “normative redaction.”