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12
KUVALVYAMĀLĀ
romantic situation very well depicted, but somehow it is absent in P. Further the author's prasasti (8 430) stands differently in J and P; as far as I understand it, there is no contradiction in the two drafts, but what J gives is more than what is found in P. As already noted above, the concluding mangala (8431) is as good as different in the two Mss., though some contents are common. Paragraph 432 is special to P only.
Even this sample study of the variations in the text of the Kuvalayamālā, as found in the only two available Mss., raises a number of questions: Why are there so many variations? Who is responsible for them? Which Ms. is more authentic or earlier, P or J? And what is the relation between them? etc.
Our answers to the above questions can be only tentative, because we have only two Mss. at our disposal. If and when a third independent Ms. is dis covered, the above questions can be answered more satisfactorily. Uddyotanasūri, as he himself tells us, went on composing about one hundred granthas, say roughly eighty gāthās, in a prahara or a period of three hours (281.27.) He hints that he went on writing. To me, however, it appears highly probable that, to begin with, some two copyists might have taken down the dictation and thus prepared two drafts; and these must have been subjected to revision by the author himself in due course. Presuming, in the light of the available evidence, that two copies were prepared in this manner, and revised independently, J represents a successor of one draft and P the successor, a bit more remote, of another. As noted above, there are such differences in syllables, words, lines and paragraphs that one cannot be a copy of the other: such variations cannot emerge from a common focus. Some of the various readings might be called scribal lapses due to various reasons, usual in the transmission of texts through copying or dictation, such as, confusion of syllables due to similar sound or shape (in writing); omission or transposition of syllables and words; substitution of familiar words for the unfamiliar ones; improving on the spelling or orthography; trying to mould a prose line into metrical form or vice versa; slips and haplographic omissions; repetitions and conflated readings; additions from marginal glosses; etc.
The Prākrit dialects were not fully standardised in the sense in which we understand them to-day); and copyists' imperfect knowledge of them might have added certain irregularities in the Mss. Hemacandra's Prākrit grammar supplied a standard as it were for the regularisation of dialectal features of Prākrit texts composed or copied after him in Gujarat and the roundabout area. Though the Ms. P is based on some old palm-leaf Ms., its version of the text of Kuvalayamālā has, no doubt, come under the influence of Hemacandra's grammar. This explains the scarce use of inorganic t, more regular elision or softening of intervocalic consonants, abundant use of n initially or as a double consonant and more regularised use of ya-sruti. The Ms. J (1083 A.D.), however, is older than the Prākrit grammar of Hemacandra (1088-1172 A.D.) and is not consequently subjected, like P, to its influence. The copyists have not always been successful in detecting metrical lines in the body of prose; and as they were conversant more with words only, it did not make material difference for them whether they wrote navara or navari, jaha or jahā, and so on. In the Paiśācī and Apabhraíša passages and in colloquial conversations, the syllabic variations are too many,
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