DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

5.2] NEED FOR CRITICAL EDITIONS 117
and the quite historical Mauryans. With the Mbh. goes the whole
complex of the puranas, which contain king-lists in the shape of
prophecies, rewritten again and again almost to the present day. Could
these puranas be critically edited, which means editing about a dozen of
them simultaneously with a synoptic critical apparatus, it would be
possible to BEGIN the work of winnowing the minute historical grains
from a vast amount of mythical chaff. The Mbh. was similarly inflated,
but a critical edition now helps restore a good approximation to a nucleus,
which dates to between the 2nd century B. C. and the 2nd century A.
D. This archetype, however, rests upon a completely lost older Bharata
of 24,000 stanzas or less which in turn goes back to freely improvised
bardic lays. The Ramayana (only now being critically edited) narrates
of the abduction and recovery of Sita, wife of an exiled king of
Ayodhya (Fyzabad). The villain is (a ten-headed demon) Havana, king of
Lanka (equated to Ceylon) certainly unknown to the Aryans of our period.
Finally, we have a great deal of Buddhist canonical literature in the
simpler Pali language, which was first written down in Bihar about the
time of Asoka, say two and a half centuries after the events narrated,
and about which grew up a whole series of tales in the nature of
commentaries, the Jatakas being the most informative. Pali literature brings
us into verifiable history, for archaeology supports the record. The Jain
sutras must be included therewith though in their present state they are
later as well as less important.
Even the negative study of such material is useful, first to remove
any doubts of possible historicity, and secondly to make available the
patches which may be clarified by archaeological work in future. The
Yajurvedic ritual has such support (IAR. 1954. pp. 10-11, and earlier reports).
Ornaments described or mentioned in the Mbh. can be equated to
some of those sculptured in monuments of the Gupta period. The
process of collation lies in the future and will be analogous to the
recovery of information from Homer and from the Bible by excavations.
The purely literary-critical study reveals one extraordinary feature, namely
that even the latest of the works may be the first to contain a very