________________
-18
1924, the information contained (or which was to be contained in 1925?) in Kavi's
letter was confirmed by the pandits of that Library (De does not specify the
extent of confirmation). The additional detail he learned was that Ml was
discovered somewhere on the Malabar coast (De 1961:vi-vii). This makes it very
probable that the ms. was in some old Malayalam or Granthe script and consisted
of palm-leaves. K (p. IX) is, however, convinced that this is the case: "the original Malayalam palm-leaf Manuscript had been irrecoverably lost."
K (pp. X-XI) further observes that S. Kuppuswami Sastri in his review of
De's 1928 edition (review published in the Journal of Oriental Research, Madras, 1929, pp. 102-105) wrote about how it was he (Kuppuswami Sastri) who discovered
the VJ text "through a peripatetic party and announced its discovery in 1920 in
his Report of the Working of the Peripatetic Party ...."
As some of the phrases in the above collection of information indicate,
much has been written about this ms, with a tone of uncertainty. I have also
heard scholars speak about it as if the exact location of its discovery was not
recorded - as if it was a mysterious find somewhere in the wilderness of Malabar
and is unlikely to be recovered unless the area is combed again for mss. Few,
if any, seem to have noticed or noted that in Volume IV - Part I, Sanskrit B,
.
p. 4964, of A Triennial Catalogue of Manuscripts Collected during the Triennium
1919-20 to 1921-22 for the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras, edited
by S. Kuppuswami Sastri (Madras : Superintendent, Government Press, 1927), location
of the discovery is given with the phrase "M.R. Ry. Kunjukrsna Variyar, Sanskrit
Pandit, Zamorin College, Calicut."
It is true that the present whereabouts of
the manuscript are not known and there is uncertainty about its very survival.
However, it does not seem justified to proceed (or rest) on the assumption that
nothing short of an ambitious manuscript hunt in the Malabar area will bring the
manuscript to light again. An attempt should initially be made to locate the
