NILAKANTHA IN HIS HISTORICAL CONTEXT1

INTRODUCTION

Readers of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, who attempt to study the vast work in its original language share something in common: reliance on a Sanskrit commentary called the Bharatabhavadipa, "Light on the Deep Meaning of the [Maha]bharata". This commentary was written by an author whose name was Nilakantha.

Nilakantha's "Light" has been included in editions of the Mahabharata since the middle of the nineteenth century, when the epic first began to be published2. The commentary was known to the earliest European scholars of the epic. Franz Bopp, for example, who is best known to posterity as a comparative historical linguist, but who also published some of the earliest studies of the Mahabharata, made use of manuscripts of Nilakantha's commentary (for example, in Bopp, 1829). To this day, Nilakantha commentary is the only Sanskrit commentary on the whole epic that is available in print. The work thus occupies a prominent position in the literature of epic studies.

Does it deserve this position of prominence? Some have not thought so. Readers often express frustrations with Nilakantha's method and style: he remains silent on difficult passages, so the complaints go, and yet sometimes speaks in learned detail about obvious matters - about words that have no special contextual meaning, for example, but that can easily be understood by referring to a dictionary. When he comes to the "battle books", the epic's lengthy description of the great war that lies at the heart of the story, and to which the entire narrative builds, Nilakantha falls almost entirely silent, leaving the melée to go on nearly without him. In this he is rather like the epic character Balarama, who refused to participate in the war, and who went off on a tour of sacred pilgrimage places instead.

What is worse, Nilakantha subjects some of the most memorable episodes of the epic to an allegorizing interpretation, or else to a reading oriented toward the non-dualist philosophical position known as Advaita Vedanta, even when this does not seem to be the epic's inherent message. Especially when it does not, some complain. Sometimes the non-dualism and the allegory can even be combined.

Nilakantha established a text of the Mahabharata as the basis on which to write his commentary. In his introduction to the commentary he reports that he assembled many manuscripts from different regions of the country, and from them selected the best readings for his edition3. In this way he was a sort of textual critic avant la lettre. The text that he established was widely disseminated, and is today considered the "vulgate". But Nilakantha has been roundly criticized, for his

1 This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0135069. My thanks to Dr. S. Serebriany for useful comments in preparing this paper for publication in "Vostok (Oriens)".

2 In this paper references to Nilakantha's commentary will be made to the Chitrashala Press edition edited by Ramacandrasastri Kimjavadekara [Mahabharata, 1929 - 1936]. References to the Mahabharata (further MBh) will be made to the Critical Edition (further CE) of the Bhandarkar Institute in Poona [Mahabharata, 1933 - 1966].

3 Verse 6 of the introduction to the commentary on the Adiparvan [Mahabharata. 1929 - 1936, p. 1].

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editorial efforts, by the editors of the critical edition of the Mahabharata produced by the Bhandarkar Institute in Pune. His text was "smooth and eclectic but inferior", they charged, his textual method regrettably conflationist [Sukthankar, 1933, p. lxv - lxix].

Although Nilakantha's commentary enjoys a position of prominence in epic studies and is used by every serious reader of the epic, he is often read with frustration and disappointment.

CONTEXT AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICISM

For all that, beyond these uses and reliances, complaints and rejections, there has been little further reflection on Nilakantha and his work. What if one were to study Nilakantha in his own right? What if one were to shift the focus from the epic to the commentary on the epic; to treat the commentary not as a clear window through which to view the Mahabharata, but rather as a window in stained glass, with its own interesting opacities, refractions, and distortions, as an intellectual creation of its own sort?

If we were to succeed in understanding Nilakantha's intellectual project (and this would first require that we accept the proposition that a Sanskrit commentator can have such a thing as an intellectual project), we might, as a first result, locate the causes for our own frustrations in using his commentary. The only danger would be that we might lose some of our confidence in his reliability for passages where we now find him useful.

Since Nilakantha lived relatively recently, in the later seventeenth century, studying him opens up for scholars an unusual possibility - that of placing an individual Sanskrit author in his historical context. This possibility comes from the greater supply of historical information about Nilakantha, his social and cultural setting, and about South Asia generally. The historical data is far from perfect, but it is much richer than it is for Sanskrit literature from earlier periods, on which Indologists have usually concentrated.

That a literary work should be understood in relation to the author's time, place, and intellectual moment is taken for granted in the study of European and American literature, and often in the study of literature in other parts of the world as well. Yet in Indological studies the historicist approach has been rather under-used. Sanskrit works are usually not studied with regard to the historical conditions in which they arose, or with a sensitivity to the individual authorial voice that might be heard in them. Literary history in Sanskrit has usually not risen above relative chronology, most often articulated in a simple sequence of texts with no implication of progression or direction.

This is because it is not a trivial matter to place a Sanskrit author in an historical context. Authors in Sanskrit show little obvious interest in reflecting on their own immediate circumstances. To write and think in Sanskrit meant for most literati the opportunity to enter into a world of discourse in which the local and the contemporary were transcended, and in which one could converse in an undifferentiated present with Sanskrit authors who lived in any place or time. If something local or contemporary were to be discussed, the panegyric of a local king for example, the logic of expression in Sanskrit tended to effect a transposition of the current and specific into the archetypal and universal. Given these literary predilections, an attempt to historicize a Sanskrit author might seem to be an alien intellectual undertaking.

Except that the availability to Sanskrit literati of their cosmopolitan opportunity was no accident. There had been active efforts made to create and sustain it, especially by the school of Vedic exegesis, the Mimamsa school, which sought by a variety of arguments to disconnect the Vedic literature from history and authorial context. Other texts which were affiliated with the sacred Vedas began to be treated as similarly ahistorical. The Mahabharata came to be considered a fifth Veda, the counterpart in narrative of the four ancient and canonical Vedas. Commentaries on Vedic and related works sustained these ideological claims of Vedic status.

If Indologists have lately been criticized for constructing a vision of Sanskrit literature that is agentless and timeless, it should be noted that they have not been the inventors of this picture of an unconditioned Sanskrit literature so much as its reproducers, their fault being not too much

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imagination but too little. One might instead adopt a stance that is sympathetic but unpersuaded, in the interest of greater understanding but greater dispassion. To place a Sanskrit author in his historical context, in a manner in which he would not place himself, need not then be seen as the imposition of a history, but rather as the recovery of one.

SANSKRIT AUTHORS IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD

Even from a point of view internal to the Sanskrit literary world, there was something noticeably different in the attitudes of Sanskrit authors who lived in the seventeenth century. Intellectuals became self-conscious about their relation to their predecessors. They expressed a sense of what was new in their own literary efforts. This sense of newness was itself something new, and characteristic of a period that is usefully called "early modern" [see: Pollock, 2001].

My own research on Nilakantha forms part of an international group project on the "Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism", which proposes to investigate the structure and social context of Sanskrit science and knowledge from ca. 1550 up to ca. 17504. This was a flourishing period for Sanskrit literary activity, but remains largely unstudied, both in its details and in its general outlines. My efforts in this project are directed not at establishing the grand narrative of the period, but at investigating individual cases. It is particularly figures who were visible but not ordinary that are of interest here. Although he has been treated by modern scholars as a "typical" or "traditional" commentator, even a "medieval" one, I would argue that Nilakantha was unusual, inventive in his own day and that his literary success was the result of his innovation, not his conservatism. Nilakantha's works are filled with idiosyncracies and eccentricities, and that is what makes him interesting.

Nilakantha and Banaras

Nilakantha Caturdhara was a Marathi-speaking Brahmin who flourished in the middle and later seventeenth century. The family name Caturdhara is a back-formation into Sanskrit of Chaudhuri, the occupational name in Hindavi for a type of village headman. This was not a title ordinarily used in Maharastra, however, and one of Nilakantha's ancestors probably moved south from somewhere in the Ganges valley where the family had been given this name. Nilakantha's father was a learned Brahmin named Govinda Suri; his mother was called Phullambika. The family was based in Kopargaon, a temple town along the banks of the Godavari river in what is now Ahmadnagar district [Gode, 1942; see also: Printz, 1911, p. 70 - 74]. From there, Nilakantha moved to Banaras for his education, and remained there for the duration of his literary career.

Nilakantha took advantage of the density and breadth of learning in Banaras at that time and studied many disciplines with many teachers5. His teacher for Vedanta - the philosophy of the ultimate oneness of reality - was Laksmanarya, whom he mentions in the introduction and / or conclusion to many of his works, and who was the author of an influential work on non-dualism, the Advaitasudha6.

Nilakantha was not the only Brahmin to move to Banaras in this period. The city was filled with families of learned Brahmins from the Deccan, many from the Godavari region. Deccani panditas had been migrating into Banaras in significant numbers for more than a century by the time Nilakantha arrived. Some Deccani families dominated the intellectual scene in Banaras for generations.

Why did so many Sanskrit literati move to Banaras in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? In most earlier periods the motivation for the migration of Brahmin families from one place

4 The project is more fully described on its website: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pollock/sks/

5 Disciplines included Veda and Vedariga, Mimamsa, Srauta, Yoga, Saiva texts, Tarka, and Advaita Vedanta. See the passages from Nilakantha's work cited in: [Gode, 1956, p. 52 - 53].

6 So P. K. Gode argues [Gode, 1956]. Gode has also suggested that the Narayana Tirtha whom Nilakantha mentions as his teacher is identical with the author of the Bhattabhasaprakasika and other works of Mimamsa [Gode, 1942, p. 141].

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to another had been the prospect of support. Although the history of the patronage of panditas in early modern Banaras is not yet written, it is clear that the city enjoyed the effects of a "virtuous cycle" at this time. As the city became renowned once again as a center of Sanskritic learning, scholars active there were able to attract more support from more patrons, both nearby and distant. In turn, the prospect of support attracted more learned sastris to the city. Banaras became an exceptionally influential hub, linked to networks of circulation that reached throughout the subcontinent. The processes that made Banaras central were tied to the ones that effected the growing centrality of the Mughal political formation.

A chronicle of the migration from a town on the Godavari river to Banaras by one of the preeminent Deccani Brahmin families, the Bhattas, in the early sixteenth century was composed by one of its Banaras-based members in the late sixteenth century, and is still extant7. While the narrative does not say explicitly what the attraction of Banaras was for Ramesvara Bhatta, the one who made the move, it is made clear that he wished not to become a courtly protégé: neither in the Nizam Shahl court in the Ahmadnagar kingdom where he began, nor in the Vijayanagara court in the South that he visited, despite generous offers from the rulers of both.

The appeal of Banaras appears to have been that the sources and types of support available were so varied. Patronage came into the city from large contending political entities - Mughal, Rajput and Maratha - and from rulers of small kingdoms both inside and outside the Mughal political sphere. In Banaras one need not be beholden to any single political figure, during an unstable political period. Sanskrit intellectuals and poets in Banaras were supported in many ways: by stipends from distant rulers, by land revenues from village grants given elsewhere, by occasional gifts from powerful and or generous visitors to the city, by piecemeal literary or copying work done on commission, and, least desirably, by remunerations for priestly and divinatory services for pilgrims. Some pursued their literary careers as a sideline to other occupations, ministerial or scribal.

Who were Nilakantha's patrons? We know for certain in only one case. Nilakantha dedicated a commentary on a tantric text about magic squares to Anupasimha, the Maharaja of Bikaner from 1669 until 1698, a noted bibliophile and sometime general in the service of the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb8. Nilakantha wrote the work on commission, as a sort of scholarly "hired gun".

An outcome of the concentration of Sanskrit literati in Banaras in this period (under the prevailing conditions of support multiple but sporadic, and with the prospect of a pan-Indian reputation held out for the sastri who might excel there) was a glowing intensity of competition among the large number of highly trained intellectuals. This produced certain distinctive results: an emphasis on polymathia, a predilection for the official compendious and encyclopedic treatise, and an unprecedented focus on the creation of pedagogical materials, especially concise introductory works. In short, the creative tensions realized themselves in impulses to create new fusions of disciplines or else to innovate in a conservative mode, that is, to make retrieval of the classical a form of newness [see: Pollock, 2001; see also: Bronner, 2002; McCrea, 2002].

The cultural vectors that one might detect impinging on sastris in this moment are related to new inroads into the Sanskrit literary terrain made by the anti-elitist (and even anti-intellectual) religious devotional movements (bhakti), and to the newly challenging presence of Indopersian intellectuals and artists, especially at court, where they often enjoyed a favored status.

NILAKANTHA'S LITERARY BIOGRAPHY

How do we place Niakantha in this cultural moment? By considering his literary career. It is possible to reconstruct to a great degree the order in which Nilakantha composed his works from

7 Samkarabhatta's Gadhivamsavarnana. For bibliography and a study, see: [Benson, 2001].

8 The commentary was on the Sivatandavatantra, Book I, Chapters 12 - 14. This work was completed in 1680 [see: Minkowski, forthcoming (N 2); on Anupasimha see: Pingree, 1997, p. 91 - 103].

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references internal to the texts9. From this reconstruction a picture of development emerges. It becomes clear that Nilakantha worked on sections of the Mahabharata commentary through much of his career, and that the work itself reflects a transition in Nilakantha's literary maturity and creativity.

Vedantakataka

Nilakantha started with a plan to write a capacious work of non-dualist Vedanta, a text he entitled the Vedantakataka, the 'Clearing-nut of Vedanta'10. What survives under this title is a work in two parts, the first an exposition of methodological principles and the second a direct commentary on the first half of the foundational text of systematic Vedanta, the Brahmasutra. The aim of the work is to argue for the non-dualist interpretation of Vedanta as laid down by his predecessors, against rival interpretations11. A further aim is a harmonizing one, to demonstrate the agreement of views found in many non-Upanisadic sources with the non-dualist reading of the primary scriptural passages of the Upanisads.

Another work from this early stage of the career is the Sattantrisara, the 'Epitome of the Six Systems'. This doxographic survey formed the fourth part of a larger work (presumably the Vedantakataka) in which, Nilakantha says, he has shown the topic of non-dualism to be in perfect agreement with a vast array of sacred texts - all the Puranas, all the Tantras, and all the srutis12. Taken together, Nilakantha's early statements show how his intellectual project was first formulated, and why he began to extend himself to commentaries on texts not canonically discussed by Vedantin authors. A concern with the harmony, in non-dualist terms, of a wide range of textual sources is a central interest of Nilakantha's in every work.

It was also in this early period, and for this expansive reason, that Nilakantha wrote a commentary on the Vedastuti, the "Praise by the Vedas", a chapter of the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana, the great document of religious devotion that had become hugely influential, even among conservative Brahmins, in this period13. The Vedastuti had often been read as an independent text, and had received the attention of many commentators of the preceding centuries, of several different philosophical and religious leanings. Nilakantha's commentary on the Vedastuti constitutes the first application of his non-dualist philosophical position to a non-Vedic text.

From the commentary on the Vedastuti it would have been a short step to comment on some philosophical sections of the Mahabharata: the Bhagavad-gita and the Sanatsujatiya, and parts of the epic's huge, discursive twelfth book or Santiparvan. It appears that Nilakantha wrote the commentaries on these philosophical sections first and only subsequently decided to extend the commentary to more of the epic. The epic commentary as we have it today remains very brief for long stretches, as if Nilakantha were saving his strength for passages that struck him as having especial theoretical or philosophical interest. If we suppose that the commentary on the Santiparvan was composed relatively early because of the philosophical contents of that book, that would

9 For a more complete version of this reconstruction see Minkowski, 2005. Most of Nilakantha's works are unpublished and unstudied, and this reconstruction depends on my reading of MSS of his work made available to me by curators of the several libraries mentioned below, whom I thank in more detail elsewhere.

10 A kataka is a "clearing-nut", which, when dropped into a murky liquid, makes it turn clear. It is evident from the introductory and concluding verses of the extant work that Nilakantha thinks of his Vedantakataka as clarifying the ambrosia (amrta) of Upanisadic teaching.

11 In the third concluding verse of the second part of the Vedantakataka, Nilakantha explains himself as following the path of two Advaitins, Nrsimhasrama (mid-sixteenth century) and Madhusudana Sarasvati (late sixteenth century), who have rescued Vedanta from "that pack of brigands of cheap argument, such as Madhva". The Vedantakataka is as yet unedited and unpublished. A manuscript of the second part of the text is found as Sarasvati Bhavan (Varanasi) 27519, of the first part as Sarasvati Bhavan 27520. The verse mentioned above appears on SB 27519, folio 58v, lines 7 - 9.

12 The Sattantrisara is also not edited or published. There is a copy in the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (Reel A1332 - 20, from the Rastriyabhilekhalaya collection). See folio 1v 11. 1 - 2.

13 On this work, and for the textual references mentioned in the work see: [Minkowski, 2004a].

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explain why the oldest surviving manuscript of any part of the commentary is of the "Light" on the Santiparvan14.

Mantrarahasyaprakasa

Nilakantha produced his most distinctive works after much of the commentary on the Mahabharata was completed. These works belonged to a genre that Nilakantha called mantra-rahasyaprakasa, "Illumination of the Secrets of the (Vedic) Mantras". In these highly idiosyncratic works, Nilakantha assembled verses taken from the most ancient Sanskrit text, the Rgveda, and constructed an interpretation of them in such a way as to elicit the narrative of the epic Ramayana, or of the Bhagavata Purana, or of other later, non-Vedic works. This juxtaposition of classical narrative with ancient Rgvedic verses was something no one had tried to do before, or had wanted to. The earliest of Nilakantha's texts to appear was the Mantraramayana, followed by the Mantrabhagavata15. Then came the Mantrasariraka, a very unusual text; it is a rendering via Rgvedic verses of the extremely concise Brahmasutra, the foundational text of Vedanta on which Nilakantha had already written a direct commentary. Finally Nilakantha composed the Mantrakasikhanda, which gives the same Vedic treatment of the Kasikhanda, a pilgrimage text about Banaras16.

There are some foreshadowings of Nilakantha's vedicizing method in the early parts of the Mahabharata commentary, especially in the introduction to the first book or Adiparvan. He had already been experimenting with this much more individual and creative style while writing the commentary. It was only after writing the mantrarahasya works, however, that Nilakantha turned to the culminating portion of his epic commentary, the part devoted to the Harivamsa, the vast appendix text that focuses on devotion to Krsna. There Nilakantha's vedicizing method is fully displayed17.

The text of the epic commentary on the Harivamsa therefore incorporates the development of Nilakantha's thoughts and interests over a long part of his literary career, from those of a rather doctrinaire non-dualist to those of an author who is extending himself to epic and mythological subjects in unusual ways, and who is developing a distinctive, even idiosyncratic way of commentary18.

LIGHT ON NILAKANTHA'S COMMENTARY

How does all this help us with Nilakantha's "Light" on the Mahabharata? First of all, it helps us to distinguish features of the commentary that are distinctive, even idiosyncratic, to Nilakantha from others that are not; and second, it enables us to place those distinctive features in a context that makes them meaningful.

14 The manuscript, in the Chandra Shum Shere collection, is dated to 1669 see: [Brockington, 1999, p. 117].

15 On these two works see Minkowski, forthcoming (N 1). Both works are named in Nilakantha's introduction to the Sivatandavatantra commentary, written in 1680.

16 On this text see: [Minkowski, 2002, p. 329 - 344]. The Mantraramayana and Mantrabhagavata are both named in the commentary on the Sivatandavatantra, completed in 1680. The earliest known manuscript of the Mantrabhagavata is dated to 1671 [Mitra, 1878, p. 104]. In the Mantrakasikhanda, Nilakantha refers to the Mahabharata commentary, the Mantrabhagavata, and the Mantrasariraka.

17 There Nilakantha makes reference to his own Mantrakasikhanda. The reference occurs in the commentary to Harivamsa 1.29.66 [Mahabharata, 1929 - 1936, vol. 7, p. 77].

18 Two more of Nilakantha's works can be placed approximately in this chronology. The commentary on the Ganesagita is later, dated by Nilakantha himself to 1693 [Gode, 1942, p. 146]. The Saurapauranikamatasamarthana, a work attempting to reconcile the cosmology of the Hindu theistic Puranas with the cosmology of the astronomical treatises or Siddhantas, was written after the "Light" on the Bhismaparvan was completed [Minkowski, 2000, p. 35 - 37]. Its oldest manuscript, Sarasvati Bhavan 37122, is dated to 1679. Three other works are more difficult to position because of lack of data in either colophons or the body of the texts: Ratnatrayapanksavyakhya, Vidhiduradhanavicara, and Rudrasarasamgrahavyakhya. The latter two are Vedic texts, the former a commentary on a Vedantic text by Appayya Diksita, the prominent South Indian polymath of the late sixteenth century who produced especially influential works on Vedanta and on literary theory.

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Nilakantha was not the first to comment on the Mahabharata. There were perhaps as many as a dozen commentators who preceded him. Nilakantha knew at least five of these. He referred to their work and even re-used it in his own [Sukthankar, 1933, p. lxvi]. Commentaries on the total Mahabharata emerged from a much briefer, less discursive textual genre: the compendia of difficult words and passages. Early commentaries were written as explanations only of difficult bits of the text, and followed the commentarial practice of many scholastic traditions of the world, that is, glossing19. An entire comment might consist of a word from the text followed by a synonym or paraphrase. For example, consider the entire comment of the earliest known extant commentator, Devabodha (who lived before 1150), on a verse in the story of King Yayati. The verse is as follows:

eka-pada-sthitas câsit / san masan anilâsanah
punya-kirtis tatah svargam / jagamâvrtya rodasi

(MBh/CE 1.81.16 = MBh/Chitrashala 1.86.17.)

For six months, subsisting only on air, he remained standing on one foot, and then went to heaven, famous for his religious merit, having filled the two worlds (with his glory).

Here is Devabodha's commentary: "avrtya (means) "filled", rodasi (means) 'heaven and earth'"20. Two words are glossed, and the comment is finished. Indeed, the names of many of the Mahabharata commentaries show their preoccupation with the explanation of difficult words. For example, Vimalabodha's commentary was called the Durbodhapadabhañjani - "the Analysis of Words that are Hard to Understand"21.

On the small scale of individual verses and even episodes, Nilakantha's commentary can appear to operate as other commentaries do. One finds simple glosses and simple explications of individual terms and sentences. At close range, furthermore, these comments do not appear to pursue a single-minded exegetical agenda. Consider for example the following from the "Light" on the same verse from the Yayati story on which Devabodha's commentary was cited above: "avrtya (means) "filled" rodasi (means) "heaven and earth". The sense (of the second half of the verse is that) he became foremost in heaven, as he was on earth"22. Here are two glosses and a brief interpretation occasioned by a slightly troublesome reading in the line23. The interpretation is arguable, but there is nothing here that allegorizes, or in another way subverts what earlier commentators might have said. Here as elsewhere, Nilakantha relies on the work of his predecessors.

Sometimes Nilakantha will refer explicitly to the earlier commentators he is using; often he does not [Sukthankar, 1933, p. lxv - lxvi]. Free borrowing of the glosses of predecessors is a common practice for Sanskrit commentators24. In this respect, Nilakantha represents a commentarial approach that is continuous with his predecessors and does transmit understandings of the text that can be traced back to earlier centuries. And yet Nilakantha does not recycle all of the glosses

19 On the annotative style of the earliest extant Mahabharata commentators, see: [Dandekar, 1941, p. i].

20 avrtya vyapya / rodasi dyavaprthivyau [Dandekar, 1941 ad loc].

21 Vimalabodha's commentary is also called the "Annotation of Thorny Verses" (Kutaslokatika). Similarly there are the anonymous "Illumination of (Hard) Words in the [Maha]bharata" Bharatapadaprakasa) and the "Explanation of Thorny (Words)" (Kutavyakhya), and the "Annotation of Verses that are Rough Going" (Visamaslokatika) of Ramakimkara Nyayalarikara.

22 avrtya vyapya / rodasi dyavabhumi / prthivyam iva svarge 'pi mukhyo 'bhud ity artha [Mahabharata 1929 - 1936, p. 162].

23 The "vulgate" text (i. e. the text of the Mahabharata commented by Nilakantha) has the variant svarge for svargam (in CE), which makes the meaning of the line less clear.

24 See: [Sukthankar, 1935 - 1936, p. 198 - 200]. Re-using is a widespread phenomenon in Sanskrit commentary, especially among the Vedic commentators.

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of his predecessors. In the battle books he makes few comments of any kind, though the comments of his predecessors were available to him. Furthermore, Nilakantha can make unusual changes and choices even on this ordinary level of commenting.

THREE PECULIAR FEATURES

It can therefore be granted that in his "Light" Nilakantha engages in commentarial activities that are more or less expected from commentators. These generic features do not require explanation here (though the phenomenon of commentary in Sanskrit merits a thorough consideration elsewhere). Let us concentrate our attention on distinctive features that do. I have chosen three examples of practices that come up in the commentary and that strike readers as peculiar, or ought to. These are examples of Nilakantha's practices of vedanticizing, vedicizing, and anachronizing.

A. Vedanticizing

That Nilakantha "vedanticizes", that is, makes allegorizing comments in the Vedantic mode, from the perspective of Advaita - the doctrine of radical non-dualism of self and ultimate being - is well-known to readers of the epic. For example, there is the epic's version of the story of the Flood (MBh/CE III. 185, or MBh/Chitrashala III. 187), which was of great interest to early comparativists like William Jones and Franz Bopp.

In the Mahabharata version, the central figure, called Manu, is warned by a fish of the impending deluge. The fish instructs Manu to build a boat and to go aboard with the seven sages and a collection of seeds. This Manu does. The flood comes and the boat is floated on the waters. When Manu summons him, the fish reappears and tows the boat, which enables it to weather high seas and buffeting winds. Eventually the boat is brought to dry land on a high peak of the Himalaya. Here the story ends with the revelation that the fish who has saved Manu is the deity.

According to Nilakantha, the story's problematic is the ontological possibility of jivanmukti, that is, the possibility of continuing embodied life after spiritual enlightenment25. In the story, Manu is the mistaken egoism (ahamkara); the fish is the jiva, the delimited form of the monistic ultimate reality or meta-Brahman, which is ensouled in a succession of gross bodies. The boat that Manu builds is his last human embodiment. Tying the boat to the mountain is the ending of self-ignorance (avidya), and the jiva vanishes just as the fish does, since the egoism subsides upon re-identification with Brahman. Life of an individual can go on for a while even after enlightenment, the story teaches us, just as a spinning wheel continues to turn for a while on its own momentum.

Nilakantha then sustains this interpretation in the comments he provides for the verses. The seven sages are the life-breaths and the sense-powers. The seeds Manu stores on board are the unseen past karmas. The waters are the interpenetrating network of births and deaths.

Given Nilakantha's intellectual biography as outlined above, his penchant for the non-dualist interpretation is not difficult to explain. It is part of his grand intellectual project of extending the non-dualist's view to literature outside the immediate textual orbit of Vedanta. What needs to be given here is not an explanation of why Nilakantha engages in this vedanticizing. This predilection for philosophizing is taken for granted by modern readers, even if they find it annoying. What needs to be noted, rather, is that in its own day Nilakantha's vedanticizing was a peculiar feature of his commentary, though it is not noticed as one now.

25 Bharatabhavadipa on vs. 1. "Previously the tree of created existence, whose root is self-ignorance (avidya), arose on the earth of consciousness. When self-ignorance is destroyed, it dissolves into the earth, such has been the teaching. Once self-ignorance has been destroyed, then, there should be no apparent cycling of the wheel of births and deaths (samsara). And yet the cycle appears to continue for Markandeya and other enlightened sages, whose self-ignorance has been destroyed, just as it does for (unenlightened) people like us. The king, wondering about embodied life after enlightenment (jivanmukti), speaks to Markandeya". Markandeya is a sage who, according to this section of the Mahabharata, is immortal, and lives on through the periodic dissolutions and recreations of the world.

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Currently there is such a saturation of Indian literary studies with neo-Vedantic explanations, based upon a modern reconfiguration of Advaita, that serious Sanskrit scholars tend to groan upon confronting it. They may accept its presence, but usually as the most predictable (and tedious) contemporary literary response; yet it was not always so. In fact, no commentator before Nilakantha had attempted to read the Mahabharata from the non-dualist's perspective. His vedanticizing constituted something novel. It probably was the reason for the immediate success of the commentary.

Nilakantha's contribution here takes us into an as yet unwritten history of cultural conflict in the seventeenth century: that between saiva non-dualists and Vaisnava devotionalists. That this was one of the more important cultural dynamics of the period is clear from evidence of many kinds. For example, the biographies of the Bengali Vaisnava leaders of the period depict Banaras as the epicentre of the opposing camp, populated by saiva non-dualist Vedantins. In Nilakantha's many works we see a version of the Vedantin's intellectual strategy: the reassertion of a total picture of literature, featuring Advaitin texts at the summit, coupled with the incorporation, inclusion, and neutralization of the rival view. Nilakantha's "Light" participates in this project.

B. Vedicizing

Yet Nilakantha's method in his commentary is far from conservative. Readers often notice his peculiar tendency to "vedicize" the epic text in an unprecedented way. This so bothered P.L. Vaidya, the editor of the critical edition of the Harivamsa, that he devoted a section of his introduction to deploring it. The section was headed by a question: "Is Harivamsa an Elaboration of Vedic Mantras?" There Vaidya described the phenomenon in Nilakantha's commentary in which verses of the Rgveda are introduced and read in such a way as to reveal episodes in the Harivamsa. Vaidya claimed that there were "more than 60 Vedic passages in which Nilakantha finds references to incidents referred to in the Harivamsa". Vaidya cited two examples, gave a brief mention of Nilakantha's apparent rationale, and then concluded that these passages of the commentary were "expressions of [Nilakantha's] pedantry" (Harivamsa, 1969, p. L).

In fact there are not sixty Vedicizing passages in Nilakantha's commentary on the Harivamsa, but something more like twenty-one [see: Minkowski, 2005]. Almost all of them, and the commentaries that go with them, are recycled from the Mantrabhagavata, one of Nilakantha's man-trarahasya texts, with some modifications. We can thus place Nilakantha's vedicizing practice in the context of the intellectual portrait of Nilakantha given above: it appears especially in the Harivamsa commentary as part of Nilakantha's mature intellectual interests.

Traces of Nilakantha's idiosyncratic vedicizing appear earlier in his "Light", however, even in the commentary on the Mahabharata's first chapter. What appears there provides the most apt example for our purposes, since it is central to Nilakantha's rationale for his interaction with Vedic passages. This rationale is always expressed as a desire for elaboration of the Veda - vedasya upabrmhanam. The principle that Nilakantha has in mind is encapsulated in a traditional half-verse found in the Mahabharata: "One should bolster (sam + upa + brmh) the Veda with Itihasa and Purana", that is, with epic and classical mythological passages26. The collocation of the preposition upa with the verbal root brmh is rather rare, and ought to have a meaning of bolstering: either as strengthening or supporting. The context would seem to suggest a meaning of amplification or elaboration: one should further amplify or elaborate the meaning of an obscure Vedic verse by recourse to relevant passages from the epic and mythological material.

In Nilakantha's comment on this verse he says that the epic texts must of necessity be studied by one who wishes to know the meaning of the Veda. As an example he cites part of a Rgvedic verse. The passage runs:

yád dha tyám mayinam mrgám / tám u tvám mayáyavadhlr (RV 1.80.7c)

26 itihasapuranabhyam vedam samupabrmhayet (MBh/CE 1.1 204ab = MBh/Chitrashala I.1.267cd).

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The standard translation for Vedists, following the German translator, K. F. Geldner, would be as follows:

"(O Indra), when you (attacked) the cunning beast, then you slayed it by means of (your) cunning".

The passage occurs in a hymn to the Vedic god Indra and alludes to some legendary exploit of his, probably his slaying of the arch-fiend, Vrtra. Yet for Nilakantha this Vedic passage is to be understood as a reference to the other Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, in which, in one episode, the hero-deity Rama shoots with his arrow a magical golden deer, or really a demon disguised as a magical deer. The Sanskrit expression for this magical deer in the Ramayana is maydmrga- or mayin- mrga-, and hence the ancient Rgvedic verse contains, in retrospect, an echo of the Ramayana's language. Only those who know the Ramayana epic are able to elaborate (upa + brmh) this passage correctly, says Nilakantha. And indeed, this entire Rgvedic verse appears with a fuller explanation in Nilakantha's first contribution to the mantrarahasya genre, his Mantraramayana27.

There is something unexpected in this vedicizing, however, despite its ostensible rationale. What we would expect for an elaboration of a Vedic passage should proceed from the assumption that Vedic meanings are insufficiently clear in themselves and need to be filled out from relevant narrative passages of the epics. Here, though, the received understanding internal to the tradition of vaidika scholars had always been that the Ramayana epic is not mentioned in the early Vedic texts. For Nilakantha, however, the Ramayana becomes the master key for unlocking the Rgveda's meaning. It is no longer that the Ramayana has value because it can be shown to be based in Vedic authority, but rather that the Vedas have value because they are capable of revealing Rama, or Krsna, to us. This is upabrmhana in a different sense, not an elaboration of the Vedas by the later literature, but a bolstering of the Vedas by rereading them.

It is no accident that the majority of Nilakantha's vedicizing interventions occur in the commentary on the Harivamsa. There Nilakantha introduces the findings of his mantrarahasya text on the Bhagavata Purana, the Mantrabhagavata. He thus seeks to insert into the commentary on the Mahabharata his particular appropriation of the Bhagavata Purana, the textual cornerstone of the intellectual claims made by the Vaisnava devotional movements. At the same time, the Vedas are not left unchanged. The Bhagavata Purana has been made part of the Vedas, and the guide to their interpretation. Again, Nilakantha's intentions in his commentary are understood by reference to his intellectual career and his historical context.

C. Anachronism

What was the nature of Nilakantha's own awareness of his historical context? This brings us to our third example. Perhaps the best known peculiarity of Nilakantha's commentary on the Mahabharata is his explanation of epic weaponry by reference to the technology current in his own day, most notoriously as cannons and muskets28. These explanations were singled out by scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the clearest instances of what they considered to be Nilakantha's "anachronistic" approach to interpreting the epic.

The most frequently cited instance is found in Nilakantha's comment on a passage from the epic's second book or Sabhaparvan. The verse is taken from a conversation in which the sage Narada asks prince Yudhisthira about the governance of the new city he has built, and whether he is fulfilling the expectations of a king. Narada asks: "Is the treatise on city fortifications (yantrasutram nagaram) constantly studied in your city?" Here Nilakantha explains the term yantra as machines which are made of iron and which shoot bullets made of lead, brass, and stone. These weapons are called nal in the vernacular language, Nilakantha adds.

The epic weaponry is thus understood by Nilakantha to be contemporary. Nilakantha even uses a language other than Sanskrit to explain them, something that Sanskrit commentators do

27 Nilakantha Caturdhara. Mantraramayana 1910, verse 55.

28 The following is based closely on [Minkowski, 2004, p. 365 - 385].

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not do. Yet cannons and muskets made their way into the Indian subcontinent only in the late fifteenth century29., then, was not chronologically correct if what he meant to do was to assign firearms to the era of the epic. But to charge him with a general anachronism creates a problem for us. For our assumption must then be that it is desirable for a scholarly commentary in Sanskrit to preserve and even recover the authentic meaning of the epic, possibly the original meaning, as it was communicated in its own days. And yet we surely cannot expect the Sanskrit commentators to share the scholarly methods, assumptions and historical consciousness of the scholars of our own era. Would not that expectation itself be anachronism of another kind?

Let us return instead to the initial premise of this study. The salient point here is that Nilakantha is not evenly "anachronistic" everywhere. He explains the text in contemporary terms only in a limited number of places, particularly in discussions of war technology. Here the work of Wilhelm Printz [Printz, 1911] is of considerable use, for it shows that Nilakantha's unusual glosses of the weaponry also have a distinctively vernacular dimension. Nilakantha uses vernacular terms as glosses in his commentary, and the sizable majority of these vernacular glosses refer to military matters [Printz, 1911, p. 74]30. Consider the passage given above, where Nilakantha invokes the vernacular word nal in his description of cannons.

Printz' results also show that commonly cites terms from the mleccha ("barbarous") languages. In itself the term mleccha can mean either "barbarous" insiders or outsiders31. It becomes clear that means Turkish, Persian, and Arabic words. For example, in the description of the fortification of the city of Dvaraka, Nilakantha explains one term, cakragrahani (MBh/Chitrashala 3.15.6 = MBh/CE 3.16.6), by the word morca, which he identifies as a mleccha term. This is Persian morca, meaning fortification, or emplacement.

Nilakantha, in short, relies on the vernacular and even foreign terminology circulating in his day to speak especially of weaponry and war instruments. The appearance of borrowed terms in the vernacular languages reflects a broader cultural change, as a transformation in war technology took hold through most of the subcontinent. It had never been unusual for a commentator to appeal to worldly experience, but the world appealed to has become noticeably newer in the seventeenth century, as it were32.

What then explains this "anachronistic" feature of the commentary? We can begin by ruling some explanations out. It is not the case that the modern weaponry serves Nilakantha's other interests in the commentary. Neither his vedanticizing nor his vedicizing would be aided by concern with the contemporary, ephemeral world. Nor is this a vision on Nilakantha's part of some sort of epic ethnography: no distinction is made between the users of the weapons. It is not that some Indian ethnies use the modern weapons, and others do not. Nor is there a 'civilizational' distinction made here: it is not that Aryans do not use the weapons, while "barbarians" do.

As it turns out, Nilakantha does not treat all weapons in the epic in this unusual way. He offers no glosses that we would call anachronistic for any of the most central armaments: the weapons that identify the main characters, or the weapons that are crucial to the plot. If Nilakantha is not interested in making all of the weaponry contemporary, then where precisely does he focus these efforts? The short answer is that he focuses on the defensive fortifications of cities, as both examples given above attest. Contemporary weaponry glosses do not occur much on the open field of battle, where most of the epic's battle scenes take place.

29 See: [Iqtidar Alam Khan, 2001, p. 321 - 336]. Gunpowder was used in various ways other than in guns for some centuries before that.

30 W. Printz thinks that this is a natural outcome of the epic's containing many battle scenes, yet this is not necessarily so. And most of the glosses he identifies are found outside the battle books.

31 On the use of the term mleccha and its appropriate translation see: [Parasher, 1991].

32 On the early modern in South Asia I am guided by the formulation of the historian Sanjay Subramaniam see: [Subramaniam 2001, especially Chapter 7: "Hearing Voices: Vignettes of early modernity in South Asia 1400 - 1750"].

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It would appear therefore that Nilakantha wishes to index the understanding of certain epic passages to his own present. But then the question is, which present? Certainly there are cultural, military and political realities that are pertinent, but the way that Nilakantha approaches them is through literary reflections of these realities. This is because by Nilakantha's day it had become possible to speak of firearms in a Sanskrit text. Instances of firearms in Sanskrit literature closely contemporary with Nilakantha are found in historical writings in Sanskrit, especially works celebrating the military accomplishments of contemporary kings [Gode, 1960]. In these passages, the kings are depicted in, and celebrated for, their use of modern armaments.

In these Sanskrit "annals", furthermore, the predominant mode of combat described involves the attack and defense of fortified cities. Persian annals of the period similarly focus rather consistently on the investitures of fortified cities, and of battles outside them33. These literary preoccupations reflect the conditions of warfare in North and Central India in the seventeenth century, even though they need not be assumed to be accurate or objective representations of them. Nilakantha came from the Godavari region that had been part of the old Ahmadnagar kingdom, and members of his family continued to live there. This territory was fought over through most of the seventeenth century by various political entities and military dynasties. Descriptions of this sort of fortress warfare would have been vivid to Nilakantha and lie behind, I think, his anachronistic glosses.

CONCLUSION

Here, then, are some ways of understanding the commentary's idiosyncrasies. They are made possible by positioning Nilakantha in his cultural historical moment. They are ways of making sense of his intellectual turns without explaining them away. It would be a mistake to smooth Nilakantha's wrinkles out to the point at which nothing particular or unusual about him remains, making him entirely conditioned by his circumstances, just as it has in the past been wrong to understand him as a "typical" commentator, or a "traditional" one.

Careful comparison of Nilakantha's commentary with those of his predecessors is not yet possible because, to this day, Nilakantha remains the only commentator on the whole Mahabharata whose work is fully in print. There is clearly a need for well-edited versions of all of the epic's commentaries. In fact it is rather shocking, given the amount of ongoing interest that there is in the Mahabharata, that all its commentaries are not in print. This would be a vast scholarly project no doubt, but it is crucial for an understanding of any one of the commentaries, and in turn for working out the history of the meaning of the Mahabharata to its community of readers in later periods, and thereby, potentially, for clarifying the meaning of the epic in earlier periods.

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33 For example, the Burhan-i-Ma'asir, the chronicle of the Nizam Shahi rulers of Ahmadnagar, composed in the late sixteenth century by Sayyid Ali, the Tankh-i-Firishta, the history of India composed in the early seventeenth century on behalf of a ruler of Bijapur, and the Ma'asir-i-Alamgir, history of the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, composed in the early eighteenth century by Musta'idd Khan.

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Gode P. K. The Exact Date of the Advaitasudha of Laksmana Pandita (A. D. 1663) and his possible identity with Laksmanarya, the Vedanta teacher of Nilakantha Caturdhara, the Commentator of the Mahabharata // Poona Orientalist X. 1945. N 1 - 2.

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Mitra R. Notices of Sanskrit Manuscripts. Vol. IV.2. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1878.

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Parasher A. Mlecchas in Early India. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1991.

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Printz W. Bhasa-Wörter in Nilakantha's Bharatabhavadipa usw // Kuhn's Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung. 1911. N44.

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