Ballantyne's 1855 edition of the Mahābhāṣya

I'm glad to have found Ballantyne's edition of the Mahābhāṣya with Kaiyaṭa and Nāgeśa's commentaries, in the Digital Library of India collection. The edition is from Mirzapore, 1855 (bibliographical details).

Here are some representative pages from it:

Title page:

Mahābhāṣyam

bhāṣyapradīpena vivaraṇena ca sahitaṃ

kāśyāṃ rājakīyapāṭhālaye śrīmadvālaṇṭainnāmaka-

tadadhyakṣaprestais tatratyaiḥ

***

śrīnārāyaṇaśāstridevadatta-

durgodattaśarmabhirvyākaraṇapaṇḍitaiḥ

śrīmaccaturvedahīrānandaśarmabhir

alaṅkārapaṇḍitaiś ca saṃśodhitaṃ

sāṃkhyaśāstrādhyāpakaśrīmatkāśīnāthaśāstribhir

nidhyātaṃ

***

mirjāpurapattane trivedidurbaliśarmaṇā saṃśodhya mudrākṣariar upanibaddhaṃ

bhāratavarṣīya-

paścimottarapradeśādhyakṣaniyogān mudritam

// san 1855 īsvī //

So now we know that Ballantyne was aided by Nārāyaṇaśāstrī [and?] Devadattadurgodattaśarmā, specialist(s) in vyākaraṇa, and with Caturveda Hīrānandaśarmā, an alaṅkāra paṇḍit. These pandits

edited the text. The sāṃkhya professor Kāśīnāthaśāstrī reflected upon the

text (nidhyātaṃ), which presumably means that he edited the text for content.

The text was edited and typeset in Mirjāpurapattana by Durbaliśarmā.

And here are the first two and the last pages of the text:

Yet again on Goldstücker's Mahābhāṣya editions

A few weeks ago I went into Cambridge University Library and had a look at Goldstücker's editions of the Mahābhāṣya. The entry by Haas in the BL catalogue (see previous blog post) gives no sense of the sheer physical size of these publications. These are seriously big volumes. They filled all the shelves of a delivery trolley. They gave me a sense of some quixotic mission in Goldstücker's mind, that somehow reproducing these raw, unprocessed mss in London, at enormous cost, could achieve a socio-political end, could establish in Europe a renewed respect for India's intellectual traditions.

There are three publications here, each being an unadorned photocopy (in modern terms) of a Sanskrit manuscript in Devanāgarī script:

1. Mbh. 1 vol.
   
2. Mbh with Kaiyyaṭa. 3 vols.
   
3. Mbh with Kaiyyaṭa and Nāgeśa. 2 vols.
   

Here are some notes:

1. Patanjali's Mahābhāshya. Reproduced ... samvat, 1751. In one volume.

The first 20 ff. of this ms. (pp. 2-41) are from a different ms. than the remainder. Ends: iti ata parāṇivo yathānyāsam iti kaścātra ... ukāraśca na tau staḥ yad iha tau syātāṃ//

p.43, scribe's fol. 8r,: tāv evāyam upadiśet nanu

It's a lovely Jaina ms, magnificently written.
Ends, v.2, p.697: saṃvat 1751 varṣe poṣaśukla trayodaśyāṃ tithau vudhāvasare śrīsarasāmadhye likhitā pratiriyaṃ ṣrī kharataragacche śrīśrī ṣagaracaṃdrasūrisāṣāyāṃ vācanācārya śrīsukhani?dhāna?gaṇīnāṃ tacchiṣyavācanācārya ... āṇaṃdadhīra likhitaṃ ... ṣrījinadattasūri jnnakuśalasūriprasādāt/

2. Title page:

Patanjali's Mahābhāshya with Kaiyyaṭa's Bhāshyapradīpa ... from an undated manuscript. In three volumes.

Vol.3, p.2218 has post-colophon:
kāṣyāṃ gṛhītaṃ makarasthe gurau saṃvat// iti mahābhāṣye aṣṭamo dhyāyaḥ// ṣrī rāhakaṣṇāya namostu// rāmamahābhāṣyasya pustakam idam āhnika 7

3. Title page:

Nāgojibhaṭṭa's Bhāṣyapradīpoddyota on Kaiyyaṭa's Bhāshyapradīpa. Reproduced by photo-lithography under supervision of Professor T. H. Goldstücker from a manuscript dated samvat, 1871. In two volumes. London: India Museum 1874. (Camb. UL. S833.a.87.6)

This is a ms. of saṃ 1811, sāke 1676 [AD 1754] vakratuṇḍasamīpe, manikarṇikāghāt, kāśī, copied by Udaigaja kāyastha.

Therefore, it looks as if G. may have misread 1811 as 1871. Or perhaps the printers who prepared the t.p. (after G. had died) made the mistake.

More on early editions of the Mahābhāṣya

The 1876 Catalogue of Sanskrit and Pali Books in the British Museum, by Haas, p.100, contains the entries on the right for Mahābhāṣya editions:

Thus, there was the beginning of an edition by Ballantyne in 1855-1856, which is very early. Although this is only a small part of the whole text, the Navāhnika is a seminally important part of the work.  It is interesting to see that even in this very early edition, the commentary of Kaiyaṭa and the subcommentary of Nāgeśa are included. Ballantyne usually worked in close collaboration with paṇḍits, whom he was generous in acknowledging. I will be interesting to know with whom he produced this edition.

Then there's an edition fifteen years later, in Varanasi in 1870. This looks like a real "paṇḍit's" edition, also with the important commentary of Kaiyaṭa but with only notes from the editors and from Nāgeśa and by the paṇḍits themselves. Its production, just over a century after Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa's death, and in his home town, is likely to embody at least to some extent a direct lineage of the interpretation of the text from the great Varanasi grammarians of earlier times, including Vaidyanātha Payaguṇḍa, Nāgeśa and Bhaṭṭoji Dikṣita.

And then the 1876 Haas catalogue gives the entry on the left, which refers to the lithograph discussed in my post of October 16, 2007, about the lithographer William Griggs and the shockingly expensive lithograph he produced. Haas has identified or corrected the date of the manuscript (saṃ 1751 = AD 1808/9). I have not seen the edition yet, but I would hazard that the manuscript is part of the old IOLR collection in the BL. This lithograph was published in London in 1874, in a limited edition of 50 copies. There's this copy in the British Library, and I would expect to find copies in Oxford and Cambridge at least.

So now we know that the impulse behind this old lithographic edition came from Theodore Goldstücker (1821-1872), who was at that time a professor at University College London, having been invited to move from Germany to England by H. H. Wilson in 1850. Goldstücker was a "Forty-Eighter" in the sense of being a refugee from the German Revolution of 1848-1849. This lithograph edition of the Mahābhāṣya was published posthumously.

It would seem, though, that even at the time of its publication, the London edition has already been partially superseded by the Varanasi edition of four years earlier. However, the London edition provided the whole of Nāgeśa's subcommentary, where the Varanasi edition only gave extracted notes, so it certainly pushed the boundary of knowledge forward.

Goldstücker had earlier written a book about Pāṇinian grammar that was important and impressively penetrating for its time. The title of the 1861 edition of the book in the BL online catalogue is Panini, his place in Sanscrit Literature ... A separate impression of the preface to the Fac-Simile of MS. No. 17 in the Library of Her Majesty’s Home Government for India, etc. (BL classmark 14092.cc.4.). The text had first appeared as a preface to his edition of the Mānava-kalpa-sūtra, and was only published as a separate book in 1861. It was reprinted in Allahabad in 1914, Benares 1965, and may still be reprinted occasionally in India.

The excellent entry on Goldstücker in the DNB written by Nick Allen (doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10925) throws valuable light on the interaction between Goldstücker's personality and his scholarship. He had a private income, and never drew a full salary from any university. Goldstücker functioned on the pattern of an eighteenth-century enlightenment gentleman scholar, in Steve Shapin's sense (A Social History of Truth), free from the prejudicial taint of employment and thus able to pursue truth impartially. He was very clever, very talented, and very hard-working. But his ambitions for scholarly achievement were so high that he judged much of his own writing to be unready for actual publication. Although kind and friendly on a personal level, he engaged in severe, even savage, criticism of other published Western scholars, but published little of his own work. Several of his books, including the Mahābhāṣya edition, were in fact facsimile or typeset reproductions of Indian scholastic manuscripts. In his introduction to one such edition, of the Jaiminīyanyāyamālāvistara by Mādhava, Goldstücker lays out his intention to publish a European equivalent of the famous Bibliotheca Indica series, with a special mission of publishing the manuscripts of the Colebrooke collection in the British Museum and, if possible, manuscripts from the Sarasvati Mahal library in Thanjavur that would be brought from Thanjavur to London by His Serene Highness Prince Frederic of Schleswig-Holstein, who was a Sanskritist.

As Allen notes, "For so learned a scholar Goldstücker's output was disappointing, and exercised only limited influence." Several of his main research projects ballooned in size and detail out of all proportion, becoming entirely unwieldy and impossible to complete or to publish. Thus he left a trail of unfinished works behind him. Two volumes of his minor articles and lectures were published posthumously in London in 1879. His papers were deposited in the British Museum, with a stipulation that they would not be published until after 1920, but by that time the Great War and subsequent scholarly progress and shifts in perspective meant that his works would no longer be viewed as worth the labour of editing and publication. As Allen further noted, "Critics have also said that, for all his zeal and fastidiousness, he lacked sound judgement, and was insufficiently critical of native Indian scholarly tradition." Golstücker held enormous admiration for the tradition of Sanskrit scholarship in India, and believed that Indian culture and society would gain immeasurably through the recovery of its ancient intellectual achievements, and that this was most appropriately achieved through a synthesis of Indian and European scholarly effort. Yet his own efforts to achieve his goals and to advance Sanskrit scholarship were, finally, Quixotic: grandiose, severe, and ultimately vain when compared with his undoubted talents.

Earliest edition of the Mahābhāṣya?

William Griggs (1832–1911) was the inventor of a photolithographic process. The DNB entry on him has the following extraordinary information:

Griggs was as successful in bringing down the price of reproducing old manuscripts and letterpress texts as he had been in reducing costs in chromolithography. His production of fifty copies of the Mahabhasya (the standard authority on Sanskrit grammar), consisting of 4674 pages (1871), was carried out for £6000 less than the estimate for a tracing of the original manuscript by hand, an enormous sum at the time. More widely known were his Shakespeare quartos, with critical introductions by Frederick James Furnivall and others, in forty-three volumes (1881–91); hand-traced facsimiles of the same works by E. W. Ashbee, superintended by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, had been sold at more than eight times the price.

I was unaware of this piece of printing history, and it would be interesting to find out who commissioned this particular work, and to see copies of the photolithograph. It seems implausible that it would have cost much more than £6000 to commission scribes to copy out the Mahābhāṣya in the late 19 century. Griggs worked in London, in close association with the India Office.