∵ What is Ailing Purāṇic Studies?

Commencing from a critical reading of two recent publications on the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa and the Devīmāhātmya , this article argues that, contrary to what is maintained by theauthorof thetwobooksunderreview,whatisailingPurāṇicstudiesisnotareliance on traditional modes of textual criticism, but a misunderstanding about its utility for accessing the dynamic history of Purāṇic text corpora.

In their announcement 'Towards a Critial Edition of the Skandapurāṇa' , published in this journal in 1994, the authors wrote that "what eventually made its way into generally acclaimed Purāṇic compositions, was a redactor's choice out of textual materials locally produced. It is through philological research based on manuscripts that this selection and the criteria by which it operated-i.e. the genetic principles of Purāṇa literature as a whole-can be brought alight. No structuralist analysis, taking printed texts for granted, will ever delve so deep."1 Since then, five volumes of the critical edition of the early Skandapurāṇa have appeared, along with a range of related studies, which have significantly deepened our understanding of the principles of composition, redaction and transmission of the Skandapurāṇa, and, by extension, of Purāṇic literature in general.2 Constituting the backbone of Brahmanical Hinduism through the ages, many Purāṇas-and the Skandapurāṇa is no exception-have been subject to a long and dynamic process of "composition-in-transmission", attesting to their intensive use by various religious communities.
I start with this quotation because the methodology expressed there is diametrically opposed to that advanced by Raj Balkaran in the two books under review. He writes, programmatically, about "transcending the pitfalls of our predecessors in encountering Indian myth. I take the Sanskrit texts I study herein at face value, attentive to the presence of highly conscious compositional strategies at play by the time of their final redaction.
[…] I privilege the thematic trends one discerns in viewing the MkP [Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa] as a whole over the temporal trends one discerns while slicing and dicing it for historicist or philological aims." (The Goddess and the Sun, pp. 2-3). The difference does not so much lie in the nature of understanding-that Purāṇas were composed and redacted with conscious efforts, and not just randomly, is something that lies at the heart of the research of the Skandapurāṇa project and is expressed in the above quotation as well-but in the methodology. In the critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa, the rich transmission of the text in its various recensions is presented to the reader in the form of a layered apparatus that allows for a study of the changes of the Purāṇa over time.3 The aim is not 1 R. Adriaensen, H.T. Bakker, H. Isaacson, 'Towards a Critical Edition of the Skandapurāṇa.' Indo-Iranian Journal 37 (1994): 325-331 (327). 2 For an overview of publications, see the website of the Skandapurāṇa project: https://www .universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-projects/humanities/the-skandapurāṇa-project #tab-1. 3 In the words of the editors of the first volume: "Indeed, the manuscript situation allows a unique opportunity to study the process of transmission, involving on the one hand simple scribal corruptions, and on the other hand major additions and 'recomposition' or 'composition-in-transmission . The criticism of Wilson has some justificationalthough he is an easy 19th-century strawman-but if Pargiter was so much under the sway of the archvillain Wilson and this kind of scholarship is to be "transcended", as vehemently argued by Balkaran,7 it would be advisable not to take the translation of such a scholar as the basis of one's research, but to go back to "the Sanskrit texts" themselves. The analysis of the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa and the Devīmāhātmya offered here in the end is not an interpretation of "the Sanskrit texts", but of Pargiter's and Coburn's English translations of the texts. These then are to be taken as the "final redactions", which obviously they are not, being rather 20th-century scholarly translations, dissociated from the Purāṇic tradition itself and produced for a different purpose and audience.
Moving to the Sanskrit texts underlying these translations, there is serious confusion in The Goddess and the Sun, which comes with an appendix containing the Sanskrit text of "The Sun myths of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa" (pp. 143-167) that is beset with a host of problems. For a start, no information is provided about which edition has been used in preparing this appendix. I suspect that it has been lifted directly out of the e-text repository of gretil (Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages) or Sansknet8-again with no acknowledgement-for it contains the very same mistakes as the e-text and, inconveniently, like the e-text does not include word separation. For two telling examples of shared misprints, from the first page alone, compare saroṣor'kaḥ (for saroṣo 'rkaḥ, 77.3c) and duḥ khena (for duḥkhena, 77.8b). The text is furthermore plagued by typesetting problems causing all the palatal ś-s to appear as ú-s, so that the reader has to work their way through gibberish like viúvakarmmaṇah (77.1b), prakhyātayaúas (77.2a), etc. The problem with the palatal ś-s magically disappears in the second part of the appendix (MkP 101-110: "the Sūrya Māhātmya"), which I speculate may be because it is based on a different source, for the gretil e-text only goes up to chapter 93. At the same time, the number of typos in this part outnumbers even those of the previous part of the appendix: on p. 148 alone, e.g., asṛjadvijasattama for asṛjad dvijasattama The problem gets worse, however, for the edition cited turns out not to be the one that served as the basis for the translations offered in the volume, that is, Pargiter's translation. The reader, that is, is confronted with a mismatch between the cited translations and the actual Sanskrit text provided in the appendix. The issue is rather fundamental, since the e-text is based on an edition whose text and chapter numbering is different from the Bibliotheca Indica edition of K.M. Banerjea on which Pargiter based his translation.9 As a consequence, none of the verse references of the citations from the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa in the main body of the book match with the verse numbering adopted in the appendix to the very same book, which thus becomes impossible to use (even leaving aside the many typesetting errors). The titles in the appendix already indicate that something is not quite right, for the first part labeled 'MkP 78-79: Sūrya-Saṃjñā-Chāyā episode' in fact quotes chapters 77-78, while the second part labeled 'MkP 101-110: "the Sūrya Māhātmya"' quotes chapters 98-107. These inconsistencies make the appendix functionally useless for reference or further research.
All of this takes me to the heart of the matter. In my review of dicsep Proceedings 5, while commenting upon the neglect of the critical editions of the Viṣṇupurāṇa and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa in two articles in that volume, I wrote: "In purāṇic studies it sometimes seems everything goes. It is one thing to disagree with the methodology or approach of a critical edition, or be dissatisfied with its results, but quite another to neglect it."10 The present two books, significantly preceded by lauditory forewords from two established scholars in the field (Greg Bailey and Hillary Rodrigues), go one step further. They make no mention of the existence of different editions, let alone critical editions, and fail to provide the reader with accurate information about the textual basis of their study. If this really is the way forward in Purāṇic scholarship-Bailey boldly states that Balkaran has established himself as "one of the foremost scholars of the Purāṇas with his work on the Devīmāhātmya" (The Goddess and the Sun, p. iv)-we face a serious problem. There is apparently no longer , then what we fundamentally need are more, rather than less critical editions of Purāṇas. We should not limit ourselves to the "final redactions", whatever these may be. Only a critical edition, which, crucially, reports the readings found in the different manuscript traditions, gives the reader access to the Purāṇas' layered history, and allows for the study of their profound changes and transformations over time. Furthermore, such critical editions should precisely be studied and prepared in conjunction with all other sources (both material and textual) at our disposal.12 Only such an integrative approach founded on a text-critical basis means taking the Purāṇas as a "living tradition" seriously, not the faithful acceptance of some random form of a text for which we lack any text-critical basis.
In this regard, it is also worth noting that there is not a single mention, let alone use, of the two volumes of the critical edition of the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa-including significantly, for the subject of the two books under review, the Devīmāhātmya-that were published in 2011 by the Oriental Institute in Baroda.13 While in the case of the Rāmāyaṇa the Baroda edition of that text has provided the basis for almost all subsequent scholarship, including the recently completed Princeton translation,14 the Baroda critical editions of the Purāṇas have not had a comparable impact on Purāṇic scholarship. I am not aware of even a single review of them. It is true that these editions leave much to be desired,15 but to entirely neglect them appears to be the other end of the extreme.

The Goddess and the King in Indian Myth
After this lengthy introduction to the problematic nature of the source material, let us turn to the subject matter of the two books under review. For example, the Baroda editions of the Viṣṇupurāṇa and the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa uncritically follow the neat divide of a Northern recension and a Southern recension of the text on the basis of script, which is a model that has come under criticism in Epic scholarship. More important, the introduction to the two volumes of the critical edition of the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa that have appeared so far give very little insight into the editor's understanding of the nature of the text and its transmission and do not engage with any recent scholarship. Furthermore, the edition of the Devīmāhātmya, while incorporating the readings from some of the manuscripts from Nepal, neglects the evidence from some of the oldest Devīmāhātmya manuscripts from the region: e.g. ngmpp A 1157/11 (dated Nepal Saṃvat 229 = ad 1109) and ngmpp A 1157/12 (dated Nepal Saṃvat 518 = 1398 ad). I thank Yuko Yokochi (Kyoto University) for providing me with information of these manuscripts. Nonetheless, an impressive number of 50 manuscripts have been used in the preparation of the Baroda edition of the Devīmāhātmya, which goes far beyond any edition before it and its achievements cannot therefore be put aside. "model reader" developed by Umberto Eco: "It anticipates a reader intimately familiar with the interplay of two divergent religious ideologies: one fundamentally world-embracing, the other fundamentally world-denying." (p. 27). These two religious ideologies are subsumed under the concept of "the dharmic double helix", which essentially concerns the irresolvable conundrum of the wellknown pair of pravṛtti and nivṛtti. The introductory narrative of the Devīmāhātmya commences with king Suratha who has lost his kingdom and encounters the merchant Samādhi who has lost his family, in the hermitage of the forestdwelling ascetic Medhas: "The king, longing to govern and protect the social sphere, is the paragon of world-affirmation, while his merchant counterpart, who requests release from worldly existence, personifies world-abnegation.
The brāhmaṇa who instructs them both must remain ambivalent in order to ambiguously encapsulate the ideologically double helix." (p. 27). The Devīmāhātmya's "chiastic structure", which shows parallels to that of the Bhagavadgītā (represented in Tables 4.2 and 4.3), was set up to negotiate this "double helix" and to ultimately promote the value of pravṛtti over nivṛtti in relation to the king's duty: "The central exposition of the dm, like that of the BhG, concerns the restoration of kingship." (p. 114). As Balkaran explains at some length in the conclusion, his own book has been composed in the form of a ring composition as well: "this work has chosen to follow suit, organizing its conclusion through a centrifugal motion inversely addressing the frames centripetally established at its outset." (p. 147). I am sympathetic to a narrativist approach that pays attention to the structural composition of a Purāṇa as a whole, but such research should go hand in hand with a philological and historical study, in order to be able to address and contextualize the strategies of the anonymous composers and tradents involved. The aim of such a study is not, as Balkaran would have it, to dissect the text and qualify the insertion of the Devīmāhātmya as "spurious", but instead to draw attention to the Purāṇas as living texts, which were subject to a process of "composition-in-transmission" by actual people in real time and place. It gives the lie to the old Orientalist myth of a civilization with no history.17 By studying the Devīmāhātmya with such a perspective in mind, we may gain a better understanding of how and why the Devīmāhātmya was inserted into the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa in its current position and acquired its canonical status. After all, we can only speculate about possible motifs of the author(s) if we also have an understanding of what came before and how the redaction created a new balanced whole, in the present case how the Devīmāhātmya was incorporated into the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa according to the principles of ring composition argued for by Balkaran. In studying Purāṇas, context is everything.

The Goddess and the Sun in Indian Myth
The The identification of MkP 101-110 as a "Sūryamāhātmya" that mirrors the Devīmāhātmya, is presented as the book's major discovery. The study of the interrelations between these two Māhātmyas is a significant contribution, but it deserves mentioning that Pargiter had already identified these chapters as constituting "The Majesty of the Sun" (Pargiter 1904: xxx). The Goddess and the Sun repeats at times verbatim extensive parts from The Goddess and the King, showing little care in editing, and both books are in fact so closely related in subject matter, methodology and style that one wonders why two slim books with so much overlap needed to be produced, rather than a single comprehensive one.18 Not only is there considerable overlap between the two books, but The Goddess and the Sun is also plagued by an uneven presentation, giving the appearance I raise this issue here also because both books come at the regular Routledge price of £120.00 each. For two slim books that have received no serious copy editing and are printed in a cheap format, charging such a price seems outrageous. of having been assembled from different studies that do not fit together. A particularly telling case occurs on p. 29: "Prior to commencing our methodological demonstration through analysis of the Gītā proper, I must first remark on what I call "guiding principles"." This remark suggests that an analysis of the Bhagavadgītā, whatever its relevance for the Sūryamāhātmya under study, will follow, but no such analysis is in fact given here. It looks like the section has simply been lifted out of a separate study on the Bhagavadgītā, without having been properly edited to make it fit the present publication.
Returning to the Sūryamāhātmya, the Saura portions of the Purāṇas are definitely a valuable object of study that have not received the attention they deserve. The first chapter includes an overview of solar sources (Vedic, Epic, and Purāṇic), largely building on secondary literature. Again Balkaran goes astray in referencing the texts involved, however, because he has not consulted the sources cited from the secondary literature. For example, on p. 14 he cites MBh 7.82.14-16, apparently following Farquhar's An Outline of Religious of India (1920: 151-152), but without saying so explicitly. Farquhar of course refers to an older edition of the Mahābhārata, so that the verse numbering does not correspond to the critical edition which Balkaran later on refers to, relying on van Buitenen's translation (p. 18). Readers wishing to check these references for themselves are thus led astray.19 For the Ṛgveda Balkaran notably cites the 1896 translation of Ralph Griffith instead of the recent (2014) translation by Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton, while for the Chāndogya and Kauśītaki Upaniṣad he cites an even older and equally outdated translation of Max Müller (printed Muller).20 Some of the claims in this part of the book are really quite baffling, e.g. "It [the Saura sect] is in fact one of the five most prominent sects within India's great epic, including which are Gaṇeśas, Śāktas, Śaivas, Vaiṣṇavas and Sauras." (p. 17). Passages like this suggest that the Routledge Hindu Studies Series, in which both books have been published, does not involve proper peer review and editing: it is hard to understand how a statement like this-and there are many others that could have been cited as well21-could have been published otherwise.
An intertextual study of the Saura portions of the Purāṇas would be a rewarding enterprise. Although Balkaran refers to the important Sāmbapurāṇa in this connection (pp. 22-25), he fails to mention the work by Heinrich von  The passage in question corresponds to MBh 7.58.14-16 in the critical edition. 20 Both quotations are cited from "sacred-texts.com". 21 E.g. the identification of Varāhamihira as working at the court of Candragupta ii in the sixth century(!): "Varāhamihira (who was at the court of Chandragupta ii) in the sixth century" (p. 89). etencron on this Purāṇa22 and inaccurately claims that "all of the Saura material we see in the Bhaviṣya Purāṇa" is "borrowed from the Sāmba Purāṇa" (p. 23). The Bhaviṣyapurāṇa's Saura material in fact goes far beyond the mere parallels with the Sāmbapurāṇa23 and requires more detailed research than has yet been done. I also found that several parts of the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa's Sūryamāhātmya have extensive parallels in the Brahmapurāṇa and the Sāmbapurāṇa.24 Uncovering such parallels can help in gaining a more detailed understanding of Purāṇic intertextuality, as well as retrieving some of the extensive Saura material scattered through the Purāṇa corpus. It may also help answer the question to what extent the Sūryamāhātmya of the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa, which includes a remarkable repetition of the Saṃjñā myth, may have been added under the influence of the preceding Devīmāhātmya. To mention one piece of evidence perhaps pointing in this direction, the Sūryamāhātmya includes an episode describing the creation of the weapons of the gods from Sūrya's tejas, which is an inversion of the Devīmāhātmya's episode of the creation of Durgā's weapons from the gods' tejas (p. 62). This episode from the Sūryamāhātmya is precisely missing in the parallels with the Brahmapurāṇa and the Sāmbapurāṇa, which may suggest that it was added to the preexisting material by the compiler of the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa's Sūryamāhātmya. Such questions are, however, not taken up in The Goddess and the Sun.

22
Von Stietencron's Indische Sonnenpriester: Sāmba und die Śākadvīpīya-Brāhmaṇa (1966) does appear in the bibliography, however, which lists numerous publications on Saura matters not referred to in the book itself (e.g. six art-historical articles by Gerd Mevisssen that find no mention anywhere and that are hardly relevant to the book's subject matter). 23 The hyperbole is repeated (and extended) on p. The parallel between the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa and the Brahmapurāṇa starts at MkP 104 (referring to the numbering in the appendix of Balkaran) and BrP 32, covering several chapters. A partial parallel between BrP 32.49-79 and Sāmbapurāṇa 11 has been identified in the concordance (appendix 4) in Peter Schreiner and Renate Söhnen (eds.), Sanskrit Indices and Text of the Brahmapurāṇa (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987), but the more extensive parallel with the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa has been missed in that publication.