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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[NOVEMBER, 1914.
There have been several attempts at the construction of a scientifically accurate history of the life of Madhvacharya in the past three or four years. Mr. C. N. Krishnasami Ayyar, M.A., of the Coimbatore College was the first, as far as we know, to attempt the solution of the question of the age of Madhvacharya in his dissertation for the Master of Arts Degree examination. The same gentleman brought out quite recently a revised edition of his booklet, in which a certain amount of anxiety to deal with the subject in a most scientific manner is exhibited by him. However, we are sorry to remark he has not made use of all the available sources of information for the elucidation of the period under consideration, and it is no wonder that he has arrived at conclusions which, we fear, are not reconcilable with unshakably sure facts; we mean those that are given in inscriptions, both on stone and on copper. If he had only taken the trouble first to have gathered all available facts for the construction of the history of the period chosen by him for study, we have no doubt, he would have arrived at true results. His summary way of disposing of the conclusions arrived at by Mr. H. Krishna Sastri is, we consider, rather hasty. In fact there are several points in his essay which we feel are not acceptable to us.
The next serious attempt at fixing the age of the greai Dvaita Acharya was made by Mr. H. Krishna Sastri, B.A., of the Archaeological Department. His paper was based upon an inscription discovered in the Srikûrmam temple, belonging to the time of Narahari Tirtha, one of the direct disciples of Madhvacharya, and dated in the Saka year 1203 One thing came out of this paper. The Mâdhva community was bestirred to reconsider the date of their Acharya, as also the chronology of their heirarchy in general, and to adjust the dates to suit irrefutable facts of Epigraphy. At the Madhva-Siddhanta-Unnâhini Sabha, which is annually held at Tiruchchânûr, near Tirupati, during the Christmas holidays, the question of the exact date of the birth of Madhvacharya was taken up for discussion and, as might be expected from such an orthodox body as the Sabha, a condemnation of the methods and results of Mr. Sastri was expres ed.
The orthodox denunciation started at the meeting of the Sabha reached its climax in the writings of Mr. Subba Rao, M.A., of the Salem College. This gentleman in the introduction to his translation of the Gita-Bhashya of Madhvacharya,8 empties the vial of his wrath first on the epigraphical information gathered by the archæologist, which he brands as “of impossible and inadmissible character "9 and later on by saying "supposing the above information is obtained on correct interpretation of the inscriptions "10 he insinuates that the people in the Archaeological Department cannot interpret inscriptions properly, Then again he inweighs against the impudence of the very inscriptions themselves in recording dates and facts which are contradictory to the lists maintained in the mathas. Truly, the piety of this Madhva in believing that the matha lists are infallible surpasses that of the orthodox Roman Catholic who holds firmly in the infallibility of the Pope. Regarding the inscriptions he writes: "It is not our business at present to investigate still further the erroneousness or correctness of the inscriptions themselves "11 as though he could prove that a public stone record is likely to be more erroneous than a private list recorded on a palm-leaf or paper and preserved in the matha. In making statements such
6. Madhudcharya'- A Short Historical Sketch. * Epigraphis Indioa, Vol. VI, pp. 260.68 8 The Bhagavad-Gud, printed at the Minerva Press, Madras • Ibid. p.xi of the introduction. 10 Ibid. p. xii of the introduction 11 Ibid. p. xvii of the introduction,
