xxii PROLOGUE saṃ gacchadhvaṃ saṃ vadadhvaṃ saṃ vo manāṃsi jānatām | devā bhāgaṃ yathā pūr ve saṃjānānā upāsate || — Ṛg Veda 1.191.2 Czech artist František Kupka (1871–1957)1 painted Le Premier Pas or The First Step, reproduced on the cover of this book.2 The painting on the cover and this essay accompanying it provide a useful avenue for understanding certain concepts: origins and archetypes, singularity and plurality, emanation and transmission and the parallelism of cosmology and art. These themes are essential to understanding the conceptually difficult task V. S. Sukthankar set for himself when he created the design for the critical edition of the Mahā bhā rata. Therefore, before we look at the technicalities of a critical edition, we wish to first explore the logic and artistry of creating stemmata through a related medium: abstract art.3 The choice of abstract art to illustrate the concept of a critical edition may seem strange at first, yet it is also obvious when one considers that, like abstract art, stemmata are idealized representations of relationships that have no basis in matter.4 Hence, when we approach stemmatics from the perspective of abstract art, we gain a new perspective on textual criticism—one that goes beyond the standard presentations of this field.5 The movement known as “abstractionism” itself originated in the early part of the twentieth century in response to a specific concern: artists wished to free themselves from the constraints of having to represent something.6 Abstract art and stemmatics thus both respond to a similar problem: the figurative representation of abstract relations that nonetheless permit us to intuit certain features of reality––features that possibly go beyond what we can intuit with our senses.7 By collating various manuscripts, identifying the textual coherences and harmonies, arranging them according to the logic of emanation and carefully distinguishing the original from the archetype, Sukthankar created an intellectual organization that does justice to the complicated architecture and reception of the Sanskrit epic. His work fittingly transcends the crude mechanical models created by the Indologists whose work we analyze in this book.8 Trained as a mathematician, with a keen appreciation for the subtle nuances of ideas contained in the text, Sukthankar culled the many extant manuscripts into a single pyramidal architecture.9 Scientists who appreciate genetic relationships, as well as artists who understand how plural elements can be meaningfully organized, will no doubt appreciate his creation.10 Both Sukthankar and Kupka wanted to move beyond the fetishism of facts to an engagement with truth. If Sukthankar mathematically, philosophically and aesthetically xvi xxiv PHILOLOGY AND CRITICISM transcended philology while doing it full justice, Kupka did something similar with art. He wished to transcend the formal and material dimensions of painting by making it self-consciously intellectual, mathematical and spiritual.11 In 1892, Kupka moved from Prague to the Vienna Academy, where he “rea[d] avidly: particularly Greek and German philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Paracelsus, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and German romantics. Also he rea[d] extensively on astronomy, astrology, Theosophy.”12 Whatever the contemporary evaluation of theosophy as a discipline, it was an early protestation against the gross materialism and hemorrhage of meaning inaugurated by modernity.13 Artists rather than philosophers and social scientists reacted immediately to these trends— Kupka foremost among them.14 As with Sukthankar, no opposition appears between the spiritual and the scientific in Kupka—a distinction that itself has its root in the obsessive dichotomy between faith and reason endemic to Christianity.15 Margit Rowell notes: Kupka’s most fundamental premises—that nature had a spiritual reality determined by final causes, that the hidden laws of this reality are present in all of nature’s manifestations including man and the artist’s function is to make visible these laws, not by copying nature but by creating a parallel order—spring from Goethe’s aesthetic. […] Through a better understanding of natural causes, rhythms, structures and progressions, he hoped to develop a parallel vision, order and language. His interest in physiology, biology and astronomy therefore had its roots in mystical thought. By extension, he paid acute attention to his own sense impressions and evoked coenesthesis as a form of access to higher knowledge. Through a close observation of his own body’s rhythms, reactions to stimuli, sense perceptions, emotional responses, he attempted to develop a sixth sense, an extrasensory receptivity which he believed led to a state of superconsciousness.16 These methods and intellectual efforts led Kupka to describe the artist’s relationship to inner visions as follows—a description that provides a model for visualizing not only the intra-textual setup of the Sanskrit epic as containing additional temporal dimensions clarified by avataraṇa or descent but also the pan-Indic relationships that Sukthankar explored in the manuscript tradition: In our inner visions, the different fragments which float in our heads are incoherently situated in space. Even in remembered so-called representative images of organic complexes, they are so strangely situated that the painter […] who would wish to project them would have to go even beyond the fourth dimension. Some parts penetrate each other; others seem completely detached, disconnected from the organism to which they are supposed to belong. The same is true of purely subjective visions where often only fragments, plexuses of forms, or colors are given. Before we can seize them and set them down, we must draw lines between them and establish a structural coherence.17 Kupka thus saw in the cosmic rhythms and repetitions a truth that the artist experienced in his visions, and it was the artist’s task to go beyond representing the objects given to the senses and rather depict the intellectual perception of the connections between the fragmentarily given sense data. Concomitant with this purely intellectual approach was a spiritual orientation, which included self-cultivation and a refusal to accept the crude empiricism of modernity. xv PROLOGUE xxv The creative solution Kupka adopted is not too different from the poetic solutions found in the epic. The frame narratives and the descent of the characters in the Mahā bhā rata represent a self-conscious repetition that organizes itself by organizing space: descent of gods and titans, or repetition in vertical space, which in turn organizes the field of action (the battlefield), the field of transmutation (sacrifice) and the field of recognition (the forest). By extension, it is these repetitions and rhythms that guide the expansion and proliferation of the manuscripts, not mechanical and extrinsic “contamination.” Every interpolation thus clarifies the text by providing a new chromatic variation, and Sukthankar’s task can be seen as one of cataloguing and arranging the cosmos of manuscripts in the overall intellectual composition of his enterprise. Kupka, on his part, was aware of this intellectual-spiritual-artistic conceptual constellation. It was the spiritual worldview of many artists of his day. Maurice Tuchman summarizes this worldview as follows: The universe is a single, living substance; mind and matter also are one; all things evolve in dialectical opposition, thus the universe comprises paired opposites (male–female, light–dark, vertical–horizontal, positive–negative); everything corresponds in a universal analogy, with things above as they are below; imagination is real; and self-realization can come by illumination, accident, or an induced state; the epiphany is suggested by heat, fire or light.18 It is hard to remember that Tuchman is speaking of the early abstraction movement in art, not about the Mahā bhā rata. It is even harder to believe that in the annals of Mahā bhā rata scholarship, not one scholar understands its creative elements so succinctly.19 The artist, it seems, is the very teacher of the epic. These insights find their finest expression in The First Step, a painting Kupka executed during 1909–13.20 The painting contains a luminous black background, which evokes a pregnant darkness full of potential, and not merely a blackness of absence. The organization of the various circles creates a map of space and dimensionality within the background, and thus demonstrates that the background is not non-being. The painting itself is a harmonious variation of a single form—the circle—echoed in its appearance or disappearance (in red), its concrete manifestation and endurance (blue and white) and finally its repetition and multiplication (a circumference composed of blue and red circles). The three processes of evocation, manifestation and multiplication create a complex sense of movement. Kupka was experimenting with motion at the time he painted The First Step, as were the Futurists. But the movement Kupka depicts is not mere physical movement, but a complex one of pulsations in existence. Its cosmological meaning was not lost on later commentators. Roger Lipsey comments on his Disks of Newton, a series of works to which The First Step was a prelude: Kupka’s transformation of color theory diagrams into a rotating, complex, genuinely spirited evocation of cosmos and light represents the high point of what might be called the naïve phase of his work, a phase of mobile search without the hardening that often occurs when answers are attained or, on the contrary, doubt gains the upper hand. The image moves freely and glows, conveying sensations of ease and pleasure. It is, as much as any painting, an Orphic work of strong poetic appeal; sunny and confident, pitched to the scale of the cosmos xvi xxvi PHILOLOGY AND CRITICISM and approachable. Kupka intersects here and is generally thought to precede Delaunay. Their paintings projecting the humble color wheel out into the cosmos constitute, to my mind, an undeniable manifestation of the spiritual in art. Perhaps neither closely reasoned nor metaphysically elaborate, they are nonetheless a celebration of cosmos that can leave few untouched.21 Besides the cosmological and spiritual meanings of the painting, Kupka endowed it with a critical evaluation of art. Kupka himself spoke of “a realm of rhythms and signs” to shed light on his art: We have to try […] to separate two incompatible elements, that is to say, the imitative work which today is superfluous, from art itself. This is a realm of rhythms and signs too abstract to be captured easily and which form the leitmotif of all compositions, the basic arabesque, a kind of framework which the painters […] as of old fill with a vocabulary of forms taken from nature. If we sacrificed the intruding element we would of course have to face the danger of talking in an unusual language. Yet there is a kind of pictorial geometry of thought, the only possible one, which forces the painter to lie less. And that is what I am trying to achieve.22 Kupka’s painting thus illustrates not only a skill, or allegiance to a movement, or incremental innovation (invenzione) or design (disegno). Art can embody thinking, and precisely the kind of thinking that—while reflected in a historical object—transcends history. In Kupka’s painting, art likewise transcends the universe and its cominginto-being and passing away. It does not abolish, but preserves the manifestation and repetitions of the universe. Each of the blue and red “instantiations” of the one concept, the circle, is different. These differences are preserved, and yet their perfect procession and repetition and also their interaction (see the green ghostly circles) add to an overall sense of continuity in the cosmic order of the circle. The clarification of these existential movements, and the constant presence of a singular reality (here the circle) in the manifold “lies less” than the representation of a single concrete object. The painting discloses a profound truth: the truth of mimesis, the “lesser lie” that the truer existence is never what something is historically, but always a play of paradigms that transcend it.23 The reason for using this image by Kupka as the cover of a book on the study of Mahā bhā rata manuscripts is simple: the Mahā bhā rata is a literary creation; it is art. In its materiality, it is of course created within history, but in its intellectual effort it transcends it. Both the painting and epic exploit the contextualization of the macrocosm with the microcosm to break free from the “literalism” of both. The First Step and the Mahā bhā rata are essentially “cosmological” works. Tuchman notes that The First Step is “a painting whose imagery is rooted in astrology and pure abstraction. The painting may be interpreted as a diagram of the heavens and as a nonrepresentational, antidirectional image referring to infinity and evoking a belief that one’s inner world is truly linked to the cosmos.”24 Like Kupka’s work, the epic is a cosmological work executed as a series of echoes: the intra-textual author Vyā sa’s conceptualization of the epic on the slopes of the axis mundi, Mount Meru; his teaching it to his students in an academic setting; one student’s (Vaiśaṃpā yana’s) repetition at the horrific scene of the sacrificial immolation of snakes; and the bard Ugraśravas’s (literally, the “he of the awesome voice”) recounting of the narrative xxivi PROLOGUE xxvii in the sylvan and peaceful assemblage of sages in the Naimiṣa Forest. The text itself presents these repetitions. Of another order are the repetitions of vignettes and motifs and messages in the various sectarian bibles: the Purā ṇas. A. K. Ramanujan offers the best statement of the mimetic self-consciousness and the inbuilt mechanisms for transmission of the epic.25 Kupka helps us visualize Ramanujan’s insight, one that states that repetition and modulation of repeating elements is itself the structure of the epic: I’d suggest that the central structuring principle of the epic is a certain kind of repetition. One might say that repetition or replication is the central principle of any structuring. What occurs only once does not allow us to talk of structure. Einmal ist keinmal—it’s as if what happens once does not happen at all. Students of narrative like Propp, Levi-Strauss, Dumezil, and J. Hillis Miller have made this idea a commonplace. Indian artworks, like the Hindu temple, or the decads (pattu) of Tamil classical or bhakti poetry, of the rā gas of Karnatak music, are built on the principle of interacting structures of repetition and elaboration and variation. Not only are there repetitive phrases, similes, and formulaic descriptions that the students of oral poetics (Parry, Lord, et al.) have taught us to recognize, but incidents, scenes, settings, and especially relationships are repeated.26 Kupka’s art self-consciously creates by using repeating patterns. For instance, in 1921 he painted the Hindu Motif, consisting of repetitions and modulations, abstractly recreating the architectural logic of the Hindu temple.27 This work paradigmatically illustrates his interest in Indian thought as well as his ability to recognize the repeating, abstract and symbolic qualities of Indian art. So much for the “external,” that is, formal aspects of mimesis as concerns the text. “Internally,” that is, with regard to the narrative and content, the mimetic nature assumes cosmological attributes. The text is presented as if it is a “history” but the universe presented in this “history” is itself a mimetic object. The author enters the text and procreates the characters. Besides this literary duplication, there is a cosmological one: all the characters in the world described in the epic are “descended” from certain prototypes: gods and titans. The idea of mimesis plays a crucial and enduring role in the Mahā bhā rata and in the Indian textual tradition. Brahmā , the creator god, always creates the universe according to a paradigm, symbolically “given” to him by the One Being, called Nā rā yaṇa in the epic. The universe is always an artefact, created and recreated, endlessly in cycles. Coming-to-be and passing away is the ultimate indicator of the mimetic nature of our perceived and lived reality. And the epic is careful to present this repetitive cycle, rather than a naïve linear history: one that takes fluxing time as a permanent framework. It is precisely by overcoming history that the epic “lies less.” Likewise, ideas of rebirth, lack of ultimacy of phenomenal reality and the soteriological presence of Being are ubiquitous elements with which all Indian philosophical systems grapple. Lurking behind the issue of any witness text of the epic are the usual problems germane to all ancient texts, for example the Nibelungenlied from the German tradition or Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis in the Greek. These include textual variations and insertions and emendations, bequeathing to philology the task of coping with multiplicity in the textual tradition. But the Mahā bhā rata seems to anticipate and absorb these issues into its very composition. The question of a “lost” original is trumped not only by the various xxivi xxviii PHILOLOGY AND CRITICISM “versions” narrated within the text, but more seriously, any historical event is also divested of originality (the characters of gods and titans are merely enacting roles). In fact, the universe itself is a mimetic process, hardly a static object. Originality does not belong in the universe; it remains a feature of “unfallen” Being (Brahman). To seek either an original event (history) or an original narrative (text) violates the epic’s understanding of itself. Those who seek an “original” Mahā bhā rata (as opposed to the original of any other text) are not like the blind men who variously represent the elephant as a snake or a pillar or a wall with respect to its various parts. They are the fools searching for a barren woman’s son. Sukthankar therefore carefully distinguished “older” from more developed forms of the texts, and discovered not an “original” but an archetype. The “archetype” in Kupka’s painting is not any particular circle but the concept circle, which is essentially abstract, and which “lies less.” The plural depictions of circles and their variations are essential to the recognition of the concept. Similarly, the plural witness texts are “recognizably” the Mahā bhā rata with respect to the archetype recovered in its critical edition. Sukthankar’s “critical” project negotiates between a method that prefers a fetish original to an actual text and the text’s obsessive disavowal of the category “original” in its literary and its philosophical vision. Any great philologist can recover a most “ancient” text, but Sukthankar’s stemmatic arrangement of a plurality of texts as an astrolabe is the work of a philosophical and artistic genius.28 The critical edition does not replace the witness texts; it makes us more confident in appreciating them, and seeing them as singular/plural.29 Unfortunately, few have seen these abstract yet “less untrue” dimensions of the Mahā bhā rata critical edition project. This is not surprising. Mahā bhā rata scholarship has been ravaged by the crudest sort of butchers, untrained in philosophy and aesthetics and lacking the minimal sentience required to distinguish history from fiction. Therefore the need for this book, which serves to remind scholars of the brilliance and rigor of the critical edition scholars’ work, and which hopes to teach the scholars of the future to appreciate the critical edition as a creative project of great subtlety, abstraction and truth that guides the thinker in the textual universe of the itihāsa purāṇa. Notes 1 Kupka, a pioneer of abstraction in art along with Piet Mondrian, Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, is less well known today than his peers. Yet he was one of the most important figures for the development of the movement known as “abstractionism.” See Ludmila Vachtová, Frank Kupka, Pioneer of Abstract Art, trans. Zdeněk Lederer, with an introduction by J. P. Hodin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968) and William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Kupka was also an influential theoretician of twentieth-century art, expressing his views widely in articles and magazine interviews. Leighten considers his main work, La Création dans les arts plastiques (1912), “the central text of anarchist aesthetics in the modernist period.” Patricia Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2013), 15. Many of Kupka’s other writings can be found in the one-volume complete edition of untitled articles written between 1932 and 1936 for the journal Abstraction, création, art non-figuratif (Paris): František Kupka, Abstraction, création, art nonfiguratif, 1932–36 (New York: Arno Press, 1968). See also Pierre Brullé and Marketa Theinhardt, xi PROLOGUE 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 xxix “Painting Despite Everything: František Kupka on Creation in the Plastic Arts,” in Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction, ed. Dorothy Kosinski and Jaroslav Anděl (OstfildernRuit, Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997), 151–77 for a discussion. Margit Rowell, ed., František Kupka 1871–1957: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975). This is the catalog for the exhibition Margit Rowell curated, for which Meda Mládek served as the consultant. Containing articles on the painter, his context and his contribution and a discussion of the formal and metaphysical aspects of his work, this volume remains the best resource on Kupka available in English. A stemma (plural: stemmata) is a visual representation of genealogical relationships that takes the form of lines drawn between manuscripts and subfamilies of a work. It is also known as a textual tree or a genealogical tree and usually represents the descent of manuscript copies or apographs from their sources though it may also be used to diagram other sorts of relationships (for example, contamination between two manuscripts). That is to say, the relationships themselves (for example, that a scribe A copied a manuscript a from source b) do not have any basis in matter; not that the relationships do not exist or that there is no material basis (manuscripts, etc.) for positing these relationships. See, for instance, Otto Stählin, Editionstechnik, Completely Revised Second Edition (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1914); Louis Havet, Manuel de critique verbale appliquée aux textes Latins (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1911); and Paul Maas, Textkritik (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927), with successive editions. (All references in this work are to the 4th edition of 1960.) See Leah Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013). Meecham and Sheldon note that “years before the first photographs of the earth from space, Kupka was painting what he believed to be ‘visions’ of the cosmos. Although Kupka never claimed that his ‘inner visions’ were any more than fragments which ‘float in our heads,’ he believed that his clairvoyant vision lent him a transcendence which enabled him to survey the cosmos.” Pam Meecham and Julie Sheldon, Modern Art: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), 56–57. It is as such a visionary, who had a total, synoptic vision of the Mahā bhā rata tradition in his head, that we shall try to present Sukthankar here—and defend him against his critics. Of course, we might have studied other Indologists. Extending our analysis back in time, we might have looked at the work of critics Edward W. Hopkins and Adolf Holtzmann Jr. or at Hermann Oldenberg. Likewise, we might have extended our analysis forward in time to study the work of James L. Fitzgerald or Georg von Simson or any other member of the so-called analytic school. The reason we did not do so is that their work has already been subject to a critique in our earlier book The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Sukthankar received a BA degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1906; we do not know why in 1911 he went to Berlin to study philology, but he must also have continued the association with Cambridge, for he received an MA from that university the following year. See S. M. Katre, “Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar and His Contribution to Indology,” in V. S. Sukthankar Memorial Edition, vol. 2: Analecta, ed. P. K. Gode (Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House, 1945), 464. Incidentally, Katre also arrives at substantially the same assessment: “The scientific training which Sukthankar received at Cambridge while preparing himself for the Mathematical Tripos, stood him in good stead during his Berlin days. Although he took up Indian Philology and Philosophy as his main branch of study, this Mathematical training prepared him for a scientific outlook on matters literary or historical, and there was no study or investigation which he considered was low enough for a scholar if it led to proper utilisation of the material available.” Ibid., 465–66. For an articulation of this insight within philology, see Sean Alexander Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 188. Gurd’s “goal is to assess the realities involved in the multiple productions of a classical text x xxx 11 12 13 14 15 PHILOLOGY AND CRITICISM so as to facilitate a literary philology alive to the fact of plurality. I call this a radical philology.” Ibid., 72. Gurd succinctly lays out various theoretical perspectives (Augustine, Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Goldhill, Finley, Page, Diggle, etc.) to show how the valorization of a singular original is a misguided fetishism. He recommends a more complex approach. “My central proposition is that critical texts are singular plural—that every single edition models and reflects a plurality of other versions and variants—and that this singular plurality of the critical edition constitutes its sense.” Ibid., x. Gurd distinguishes the “core of textual criticism” from “the fetishism of the critical text” by analysis that “must oppose variability to stability, plurality to unity, and a concrete to a nostalgic idealism.” Ibid., 35. Theosophy provided artists of his generation an avenue whereby they could challenge the narrow definitions of rationality and the dehumanizing materialism that were part of the Enlightenment’s legacy. For example, all four pioneers of modern abstract painting were influenced by theosophy, but the list is quite extensive. Through the channels of philosophy opened up by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and through channels of art opened up by theosophy, a living dialogue of ideas progressed, in contrast to the obsession with historical facts and the pseudoscience of Indologie being forged in Germany. Their forensic science (who, why or what killed the Kṣatriya Urepos) remains one of the most spectacular blemishes on the human sciences to date. Meda Mládek and Margit Rowell, “Chronology,” in František Kupka 1871–1957: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975), 306. Increasingly in the 1930s and into the 1940s, mystical and occult beliefs came under suspicion because of their political associations, which were clear and well known. The Nazi theory of Aryan supremacy, for example, was indebted to various versions of theosophy, such as theozoology, which pertains to birth by electric shock into the astral ether, and ariosophy, which fuses ideas of karma, the ether and sun worship with idolatry of Aryan ancestry. “Adolf Hitler’s confidant Otto Wagener explained to Hitler the nineteenth-century occult writer Karl von Reichenbach’s theory of Odic force, according to which ‘every human being has an unknown source of power that produces rays. These not only inhabit the body but also radiate from it, so that a person is surrounded by something like a field laden with this Odic force.’ Hitler immediately applied these ideas to the potential revivification of society by ‘the invisible strength which is transferred from them [storm-trooper divisions] to us like an aura.’ No doubt the perception of a link between alternate belief systems and fascism made critics and historians in these decades reluctant to confront the spiritual associations of abstract art. To use the word spiritual in the late 1930s and 1940s, as Richard Pousette-Dart recently acknowledged, was near-heresy and dangerous to an artist’s career.” Maurice Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (New York: Aberville Publishers, 1986), 18. Albeit for different reasons, even today, Indology remains in the grip of political paranoia whenever spiritual aspects of Hinduism are presented. It is virtually taboo for scholars of Hinduism to engage in its theology, ontology or ethics except with great affectations of “critical” distance. This was true not only in Europe but also in America. “The historian T. J. Jackson Lears has recently argued that anti-modernism is the central notion unifying the leading American thinkers from the transcendentalists through Walt Whitman and William James. Modernism was regarded as something to be fought because it was synonymous with the loss of inner spiritual values. [William] James emphasized that the only way to attain true supremacy and higher consciousness was by losing oneself, by breaking down the confines of personality, and he pointed to the ‘immense elation and freedom as the outlines of confining selfhood melt down.’ In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) James stated, ‘Our normal waking consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.’ He acknowledged that sensory, symbolic elements could ‘play an enormous part in mysticism.’ ” Ibid., 34. While the Indological philologist earned his bread and butter by laboriously deconstructing texts to separate material “fact” from spiritual insight, the artist had already moved beyond this xxi PROLOGUE 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 xxxi distinction, sensing that it was problematic and ultimately untenable. These echoes were felt as deeply as in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, which declared the death of God (section 108) and as far away as Tahiti, where the French-born Paul Gauguin wrote: “The Word remains. Nothing of this Word is dead. The Vedas, Brahma, Buddha, Moses, Israel, Greek philosophy, Confucius, the Gospel, all exist. […] From a religious point of view, the Catholic Church no longer exists. It is now too late to save it.” Paul Gaugin, Gaugin’s Intimate Journals, trans. Van Wyck Brooks (Mineola, NY: Dover Publishing Company, 1997), 79. Margit Rowell, “František Kupka: A Metaphysics of Abstraction,” in František Kupka 1871– 1957: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975), 76. Kupka, Manuscript II, 28, cited in Rowell, ed., František Kupka 1871–1957: A Retrospective, 77. Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art, 19. The banal, self-serving, self-congratulatory and unscientific theories of the Indologists regarding the Mahā bhā rata have been sufficiently discussed in our earlier book The Nay Science. Against the contributions of a genius such as Kupka these tired ruminations appear even more facile and pointless. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired this painting in 1956 and it remains there to this day: The First Step, MoMA no. 562, 1956; 83.2 x 129.6 cm. Roger Lipsey, The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 101, 103. Kupka, cited in ibid., 103. Here also, referring to Gurd is useful. In his book, he makes “an attempt to characterize textual criticism as a field defined by multiplicity and variation. It also contains a series of attempts to attend carefully and heedfully to each of its objects. Thus it shares its ambition with every other philological project. But if philology consists for some in training the vision ‘to see a whole landscape in a bean,’ I have tried to see each critical version pulsing with the rich plurality of many others: ‘the universe in a grain of sand.’ ” Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis, ix. See Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art, 36. Tuchman continues: “Years earlier Kupka had written of a mystical experience in which ‘it seemed I was observing the earth from the outside. I was in great empty space and saw the planets rolling quietly.’ ” A. K. Ramanujan, “Repetition in the Mahā bhā rata,” in Essays on the Mahābhārata, ed. Arvind Sharma (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007), 419–43. Ibid., 421–22. This painting, also known as Graduated Red, was completed between 1919 and 1923. It is currently in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. It features on the cover of our edited volume Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, eds., Argument and Design: The Unity of the Mahābhārata (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016). Sukthankar was aware of these aspects of his project. He explicitly notes that “the Mahā bhā rata is the whole of the epic tradition: the entire Critical Apparatus. Its separation into the constituted text and the critical notes is only a static representation of a constantly changing epic text—a representation made for the purpose of visualizing, studying and analyzing the panorama of the more grand and less grand thought movements that have crystallized in the shape of the texts handed down to us in our Mahā bhā rata manuscripts.” V. S. Sukthankar, “Prolegomena,” in The Ad̄ iparvan for the First Time Critically Edited, vol. 1 (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933), cii (Sukthankar’s italics). German Indologists, no less than Sukthankar’s Indian detractors, have therefore misunderstood him when they suggest that Sukthankar reduced the Mahā bhā rata to and/or extracted a core text. Actually, he preserved all its available versions, creating the superset of Mahā bhā ratas and thus a text embodying, more than ever, its claim: yadihāsti tadanyatra yannehāsti na tatkvacit (“whatever is here […] that is found elsewhere. But what is not here is nowhere else”; Mahā bhā rata 1.56.33cd and 18.50.38cd). The critical edition does not eliminate the need to look carefully at witness texts. These serve again and again to refine and gloss over the more “archaic” material recovered by archetype. newgenprepdf xxxii xxxii PHILOLOGY AND CRITICISM To give one example, Hudson’s spectacularly erroneous reading of the Mahā bhā rata (see Emily T. Hudson, Disorienting Dharma: The Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahā bhā rata [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013]) could easily have been prevented had she looked at the vulgate, which contains the Kaṇikanīti, an insertion of 230 lines in the vulgate that is moved to the appendices (App. 1, no. 81) in the critical edition. See Vishwa Adluri, “Ethics and Hermeneutics in the Mahā bhā rata,” review of Disorienting Dharma: The Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahā bhā rata, by Emily Hudson, International Journal of Hindu Studies 20, no. 3 (2016): 385–92 and, in still greater detail, Vishwa Adluri, “Hindu Studies in a Christian, Secular Academy,” International Journal of Dharma Studies 5, no. 1 (2017), doi:10.1186/s40613-016-0037-5.