Volume 70, Issue 2 -

This article presents philological observations which may help to establish a relative chronology of some of the works attributed to Śaṅkara. Commentaries on the Upaniṣads ascribed to Śaṅkara are compared to his commentaries on those parts of Brahma-Sūtras that discuss the same Upaniṣadic passages. Closer investigation of some of these passages might lead to some conclusions about the chronology of these works. The article investigates examples from Taittirīya-Upaniṣad 2.1–5 and Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad 3.7 respectively discussed in Brahmasūtra-Bhāṣya 1.1.12–1.1.19 and 1.2.18–20, an example from Kaṭha - Upaniṣad 1.3.1 (3.1), which is presented both in Brahmasūtra-Bhāṣya 1.2.11–12 and in Kaṭhopaniṣad-Bhāṣya 1.3.1, together with some examples of interpretations of the same verses in different Upaniṣads, such as the verse which occurs as Muṇḍaka - Upaniṣad 2.2.10 and Kaṭha - Upaniṣad 2.2.15 (5.15) and two verses shared by Īśā - Upaniṣad , Kaṭha - Upaniṣad and Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad . These examples will reveal some textual parallels in these commentaries, which might provide some clues for establishing a chronology of these passages.

This article explores the Roman Catholic intellectual milieu and the articulated perspective of theologians and missionaries on Hinduism in the period between the two World Wars. In the aftermath of World War I, the Roman Catholic Church elaborated a vision of Christian missions that would continue the civilization of India when the political power of Western nations vanishes. In this context, the new science of missiology absorbed the modern valorization of method in studying non-Christian religions, including Hinduism, while maintaining theological concerns about the truth of Christianity.

Au regard de trois corpus littéraires d’Inde du Nord, de langues, de genre et d’époques différents (Les Chants de Mira Bai; le roman Pinjar d’Amrita Pritam; le roman Sārā ākāś de Rajendra Yadav), cet article a pour ambition de montrer la façon dont l’exil féconde le discours et la représentation du féminin en Asie du Sud et dont, en conséquence, s’opère une sexuation de l’exil dont témoignèrent par exemple les violences genrées de la Partition de 1947. Il vise ainsi à mettre en évidence un déplacement imaginaire, nourri tant par les mythes que par leur interprétation, de l’exil et de la dépossession vers le domaine du féminin, qui justifie les déportations et les dépossessions réelles comme condition sociale des femmes.

It is undisputed that Bāṇa’s Kādambarī has marked a turning point in the history of Indian literature not only because it introduced an elegant prose form into the kāvya style, but also because it evinced a unitary and complex plot that was a complete innovation as compared to the juxtaposed structure of contemporary works like Daṇḍin’s Daśakumāracarita . As a much admired work, Kādambarī is known to have influenced many poets and playwrights in the following centuries throughout India. However, it is often ignored that with its romantic themes and narrative structures Bāṇa’s work has also inspired several Jain ‘novels’ named after a heroine in various forms and languages from the eighth to the eleventh century. The aim of the following paper is to concentrate on the Jain heroine ‘novels’ in Prakrit and to examine which aesthetic or religious reasons motivated the Jain monk-poets, to begin with Uddyotana, to deviate from the usual structure of a long Jain narrative, such as Haribhadra’s Samarāiccakahā , and to adopt for their heroine ‘novels’ in Prakrit a difficult and totally new model of narration.

Switzerland has been an important place in the reception of Buddhism since the nineteenth century. Especially during the Second World War and the 1950s, the Buddhist Community Zürich, with its founder Max Ladner (1898–1963), was one of the most prominent institutions in making Buddhist teachings available in Europe. Ladner wrote four books and several articles, which demonstrate his interpretation of a presumed “authentic” Buddhism (“Urbuddhismus”) preserved in the Pāli-canon. For Ladner, self-responsibility and independent thinking were of utmost importance. He saw these values represented in Theravāda Buddhism. His interpretation of Buddhism was at first formulated in a critique of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Buddhism. Ladner aimed at refuting Nietzsche’s portrayal of Buddhism as a pessimistic and nihilistic doctrine. With the foundation of the Buddhist Community Zürich in 1942, Ladner intended to bring together like-minded people and thus to refine his own understanding of Buddhism. Besides that, he corresponded with Buddhists and intellectuals all over the world, which was a major factor in spreading Buddhist ideas and connecting Buddhists in Europe.

This article explores some facets of literary urbanity in modern South Asian literatures such as Urdu, Bengali, Hindi and Marathi. Taking the proliferation of megacity research in present-day urban studies as my starting point, I intend to show that literatures in the regional languages of South Asia provide a rich archive of city representations and discourses about urbanity – an archive that is highly neglected particularly if compared to the corpus of English writings along these lines. Sections on genres such as the Urdu šahr āšob, Bengali nakˈśā, Marathi humourism, Bengali theatre and the Hindi and Bengali novel, among others, will provide ample glimpses and some analysis of this archive stretching from the eighteenth century to the present. One of the guiding lines of investigation will be the quest for an alternative urbanism in these non-English sources.

This paper presents what the Satsaṅgijīvanam, a text by Śatānanda-Muni about the life and teachings of Sahajānanda, the founder of the Swaminarayana Movement, in two different passages reports about the authorship of the Śikṣāpatrī. It would appear that Swaminarayana (the name by which the founder came to be known) wrote the Śikṣāpatrī well before Śatānanda produced the version included in the Satsaṅgijīvanam. What the Satsaṅgijīvanam tells us about the authorship and the process of transmission of the Satsaṅgijīvanam itself complicates the evaluation of the Satsaṅgijīvanam as a historical document. Yet, the fact that the text shows that Swaminarayana may not be the author of the currently known Śikṣāpatrī invites reflection about the function of texts in the traditional self-perception and in the history of the Swaminarayana Movement.

The name of Devabodha is well-known to specialists of Mahābhārata textual traditions: author of the Jñānadīpikā or “Lamp of Knowledge”, the earliest extant commentary on the Great Epic, he has been duly referred to by the critical editors of this text along with his successors such as Vimalabodha, Arjunamiśra and Nīlakaṇṭha. Yet Devabodha remains an almost complete mystery regarding the period or the place he lived in, or even the conditions that urged him to compose a commentary. Since he commented on a version of the Mahābhārata belonging to the Northern recension and was quoted by Vimalabodha between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he has been approximately assigned to eleventh-century Northern India or Kashmir, but till now no positive evidence has been brought forth to validate this opinion. The purpose of the present paper is to shed some light on this important author by proving that, contrary to a prejudice rehearsed in every history of Indian literature, he is one and the same person with a medieval poet and dramatist called Devabodha or sometimes Devabodhi. Then follows a critical and synthetic account on what we can know about Devabodha’s life and career from all the available sources.

Explosive as well as exploded, global as well as fragmented, the Hindi novel Kh ālī jagah (2006, An Empty Space ) of Geetanjali Shree fully belongs to the contemporary world. Thoroughly inscribed in the twenty-first century, it questions the classical pattern of exile by contrasting it with the postmodern notions of emptiness, fragmented identities and loss of values. In this era of terrorism, the loss resulting from the bomb and its effects is perceived as inexplicable and unspeakable, because it is first of all born from an unpredictable world, seemingly deprived of any rule and any root. It is argued in this paper that the “empty space”, which results from this loss and illustrates the questions and doubts of the narrator, invites us to consider contemporary history mainly as a history of absence, of emptiness and of the fundamental impossibility to belong to any place or homeland.

The study of literary traditions of medieval India is, to a large extent, dependent on the analysis of extant manuscripts as primary sources of information. Knowledge of their absolute and relative chronology, together with the development of their internal structure and format, can throw more light on their uses and roles in the process of the formation of the communities that produced them. Possible methodological approaches and tools for acquiring and evaluating the desired sets of data are here demonstrated on a small sample of text, a collection of sākhī s or couplets attributed to the sant Kabīr (ca. 1440–1518) and included in manuscript textual corpora compiled by members of the communtity of Dādūpanth in seventeenth century Rājasthān. A comparison of the internal structure of two kindred sākhī collections, namely a so far unedited Dādūpanthī manuscript and the existing edition of the Kabīr granthāvalī of Śyāmasundaradāsa A note on the transliteration of Devanāgarī: the IAST system of transliteration has been used throughout, with two exceptions: vocalic ŗ is transliterated (in the absence of the letter r with subscript ring in the Unicode) with cedilla, to distinguish it from the retroflex ṛ, where the subscript dot properly belongs. Superscript dot used indiscriminately in the old Hindī manuscripts for both vowel nasalizations and homorganic nasals has been transliterated in all its occurrences by ṁ with superscript dot. (1928), combined with data in the colophons of the former, and along with other circumstantial information, allows us to postulate their relationship to other preexisting models that bring us to the very beginnings of the scriptural traditions of Dādūpanth. The gradual accumulation and internal rearrangement of the material that is evident in the manuscript copy under study reveals the emergence of the idea of a pañc-vāṇī , or a compendium of texts by the five most revered sants , in the later history of Dādūpanth considered to be canonical.

Economic principal-agent theory deals with asymmetric information. It has two aspects. (i) If one person is better informed than another one, the former may outwit the latter. Kauṭilya , the Arthaśāstra ’s author, and other artha or dharma authors had a very good understanding of outwitting. (ii) Economic theory teaches that the person in command of superior knowledge may not always be able to benefit from this knowledge. He may need the uninformed side to agree to some mutually beneficial venture. The very fact of asymmetric information may then harm also the informed side. Judging from the literature surveyed by the author, the artha and dharma literature had no explicit (openly expressed) understanding of this second aspect. In the author’s mind, this discussion is related to the “ Varuṇa rule”. This rule (specified in the Manusmṛti ) stipulates that the king is to throw confiscated property into water. We explain this apparent waste of resources as an implicit solution to the second aspect of principal-agent theory mentioned above.