SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The thesis is an edition of selections from Sadavasyaka vriti of Tarunaprabha. Tarunaprabha composed this Gujrati commentary in 1411 V.S. (1355 A.D.) at Patan. The earliest available ms. is written in 1412 V.S. and comes from Bikaner. In addition to this, I have used three other mss. from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (Bh, not dated), the Limbdi (L. 1419 V.S.),and the Patan (P. 1508 V.S.) collection; The earliest specimens of the Gujrati language date from 1330 V.S. There are four fragmentary prose pieces (in all, less than 200 lines) from 1330 to 1369 V.S.,while this work is a detailed document containing popular narratives, written in 1411 V.S. This work is, not only the earliest detailed document of Gujrati, but one of the earliest in the New Indo-Aryan languages. The whole commentary is a large work of 308 folios, so I have edited narratives from it, omitting the Old Gujrati translation of the original Prakrit sadavasyaka and discussions about the ritual. These thirty popular stories are the nearest approximation to the then spoken Gujrati of the common man. The selections form more than one-third of the whole work. It is an important phenomenon that our best ms. is written just one year after the composition of the text. At the same time, the other two, the BORI and the Limbdi mss. are written between 1411-1419 V.S.; thus, of the four mss. available three are written during the first ten years succeeding the composition of the text, evidence which cannot be disregarded. in the restoration of the text. So I have edited the text eclectically. By presenting the internal evidence I have been able to show the probable course of text-transmission,which has helped me to judge the authenticity of various readings, and to fix the date of the BORI ms. The difficulties of editing a 'bhasa' text where the scribes do not trouble much about minor alterations are well known; but at the same time, these scribal variations in different mss. present material through which we get glimpses of the dialectal tendencies of Early Gujrati. In the treatment of the orthography I have analysed these scribal variations which have enabled me to present the text in a method hitherto unknown in Gujrati text-editing. The work is divided into three main parts: 1. Introduction; deals with the orthography and contains a grammatical analysis of the language of the text. 2. Text: contains thirty narratives from the mss. with complete collations of B, Bh, and P and partial collations of L. 3. Index ; contains a vocabulary of Gujrati words, omitting the Sk. and the Pk. loanwords,found in the text together with the Sk. equivalents explaining their etymology. The appendix contains the colophons, which give the date of the composition and the writing of the text, and the genealogical of the author and the patron of the scribe of the B.