A Note on the Analysis of Two Early Rajasthani Dadupanthi Manuscripts
Abstract The study of literary traditions of medieval India is, to a large extent, dependent on the analysis of extant manuscripts as primary sources of information. Knowledge of their absolute and relative chronology, together with the development of their internal structure and format, can throw more light on their uses and roles in the process of the formation of the communities that produced them. Possible methodological approaches and tools for acquiring and evaluating the desired sets of data are here demonstrated on a small sample of text, a collection of sakhis or couplets attributed to the sant Kabir (ca. 1440 1518) and included in manuscript textual corpora compiled by members of the communtity of Dadupanth in seventeenth century Rajasthan. A comparison of the internal structure of two kindred sakhi collections, namely a so far unedited Dadupanthi manuscript and the existing edition of the Kabir granthavali of Syamasundaradasa A note on the transliteration of Devanagari: the IAST system of transliteration has been used throughout, with two exceptions: vocalic r is transliterated (in the absence of the letter r with subscript ring in the Unicode) with cedilla, to distinguish it from the retroflex r, where the subscript dot properly belongs. Superscript dot used indiscriminately in the old Hindi manuscripts for both vowel nasalizations and homorganic nasals has been transliterated in all its occurrences by m with superscript dot. (1928) combined with data in the colophons of the former, and along with other circumstantial information, allows us to postulate their relationship to other preexisting models that bring us to the very beginnings of the scriptural traditions of Dadupanth. The gradual accumulation and internal rearrangement of the material that is evident in the manuscript copy under study reveals the emergence of the idea of a panc vani, or a compendium of texts by the five most revered sants, in the later history of Dadupanth considered to be canonical.