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2
EDITOR'S PREEACF
the detachment of Anatole France's Johannes Talpa (Ile des Pingouins III-iv), a new distraction presented itself in the sudden eruption of India's long-repressed struggle for the transfer of power from the British to "he Indian bourgeoisie.. Months passed in unorthodox activities such as aid to the wounded; helping an occasional "underground" worker no matter how silly his plans and how meagre my dwindling resources; trying to persuade some groups of students that wrecking the college, where I then lectured on sufferance while they were supposed to be receiving an education, would be ineffcetive as a method of forcing the British to quit India. Sukthankar's unexpected death on January 21, 1943 destroyed one of the major premises upon which my work was to be based, namely the availability of his profound experience and brilliant guidance. In the event, the other two assumptions which he had made also turned out to be unjustified. Instead of being a good way of learning classical Sanskrit, it is actually necessary to forget Paninian rules in order to edit Bhartṛhari properly. Finally, the chronic ill health and financial ruin which I had to face for three long years force the rueful admission that a critical edition of this particular text cannot be recommended as a pastime for the indigent amateur, especially in a period of war shortages and inflation. The editorial work was not actually taken in hand till July 1943.
Sukthankar often called his Mahabharata text "fluid" without defining the adjective more closely; if that be admitted, then mine can only be qualified as nebulous, so great is the difficulty of pinning down the Bhartṛhari tradition from the enormously variable MS evidence. After being trained to the rigid logical discipline of a science that specializes in exactitude of statement and numerical accuracy, I find it peculiarly vexing that a precise answer cannot be given even to the simplest of questions about our present text. For example, how many MSS have I studied? My count is 377, whether in original, photostat, microfilm, direct copy, or in some cases a pratika index. But some were mere fragments, down to a single folio- nevertheless of great importance as for example ISM Gore 144. Some, like BU 41/4 and Mysore 223, contain many Bhartṛhari stanzas, but are certainly not Bhartṛhari MSS, being mislabelled collections. Occasionally, as in my We or VSP, three separately tied and numbered pieces are clearly by the same hand and portions of one MS, whereas BORI 331 shows two entirely different MSS belonging to different versions and scribes catalogued as one. Thus, my total of 377 gives an exaggerated notion of precision. Similarly for the total number of stanzas, where we have all possible degrees of variation from the trifling scribe's error to a complete paraphrase, so that stanzas like bhoge rogabhayam rob an exact count of meaning.
Apart from this lack of a sharp focus, there are other' difficulties peculiar to Bhartṛhari. There is no guiding thread of a narrative as in the Mahabharata, or the frame story of the Pañcatantra. Though the southern recension does make a feeble attempt at logical grouping of verses
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