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Fixing Up Of Some Vairants From Kālidāsa
Tapasvi Nandi
The object of this small paper is to draw attention of all learned scholars towards a very important missing link in the field of text-criticism of the works of Kálidāsa.
In our humble opinion the efforts in the direction of Kālidāsa-textCriticism seem to be incomplete and even the so-called critical editions of Kālidāsa's works such as those by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi are sadly wanting in certain respects.
The point is that a careful editor of a given work should utilize and weigh all the available research tools, and every ms. should be handled as something sacred. This has not happened in the task of editing the works of Kālidāsa. We know that in their works, alamkārikas draw upon freely from Kālidāsa to illustrate this point or that. From Vāmana, down to Visvanatha onwards they seek inspiration from Kālidāsa. These alamkāra works had ary number of brilliant commentaries and the Vāgdevatāvatāra Mammata is said to have claimed a commentary from every house-gshe-gshe. We have seen that these commentators are in the habit of discussing a particular variant with a terse remark such as 'ayaṁ sādhupathah ayam apapāthah,' etc. The works of Kālidāsa have also been commented upon by many beyond Mallinātha. We have in our mss. library at the L. D. Institute of Indology, quite a number of interesting commentaries on Raghuvamsa, Meghadūta, and Kumāra. sambhava', by Jaina and non-Jaina writers of high calibre. All these are worked out only with any number of variants, but even the numbering of verses, their sequence and total, also vary. And all these evidences cannot be dismissed lightly. They have to be taken note of and weighed properly, no matter what date they belong to, for surely each one represents a tradition much older, of its own. These traditions were preserved probably in very old mss. that are lost to us now. And works on alamkāra proper, dating back from 8th cen. A. D.,
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