Mahāsubhāṣitasaṃgraha, Vol. VI by Ludwik Sternbach; S. Bhaskaran NairReview by: Ludo RocherJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 110, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1990), pp. 539-540Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/603208 .

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Reviews of Books 539

nized by the tradition, as Sanatani, a pre-Udayana Naiydyika from Gauda (Bengal), noted that there were two types of vitandd, the good and the bad (see my Nydya- Vai.sesika, Wiesbaden, 1977). I believe this type of good vitanda, which follows the rules of vdda or good debate (Udayana refers to Sanatani in his PariSuddhi), paved the way for the genuine sceptics to enter into philosophical discussion with others. Scepticism thus became a recognized tradition. Jayarasi was a champion of their cause.

BIMAL K. MATILAL

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Herrschaft und Verwaltung im 6stlichen Indien unter den spaten Gangas, ca. 1038-1434. By SHISHIR KUMAR PANDA.

Beitrage zur Sudasienforschung, Sudasien Institut, Uni- versitat Heidelberg, Bd. 110. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER

VERLAG, 1986. Pp. 184 + map.

What follows is more a critical brief notice than a review because it is based principally on a twelve-page English summary, with conclusions, of a German text; however, Dr. Panda's numerous English publications, including his M. Phil. dissertation, are well known, and admired, by many who work on medieval India, and these form the basis of the present volume. Nevertheless, there are two new elements in this work that deserve notice. The first is the methodology of computer analysis of inscriptional sources to establish periodization and certain features of the polity being examined; the second is Panda's effort to place his analysis within a broader theoretical framework relating to state formation.

The application of computer statistics to Indian inscrip- tions was pioneered by Noburu Karashima, using records of the Tamil Chola kingdom, and while the method has been appreciated by scholars as an additional ordering method for the thousands of inscriptional records that have been copied over the past century, few scholars have seen fit to alter their conventional historical understandings as a result of changes in the incidence of certain terms such as political titles or types of revenue that form the core of that sort of analysis. The reason for this hesitation is that Chola inscriptions, like the thousand Ganga inscriptions used by Panda, are not clear about the function of 'officials' designated by various titles nor about the resources or classes of people being taxed. This difficulty is admitted by Karashima as well as by Panda. As a result, meanings are attributed-as they always have been-according to the usually implicit political theoriz-

ing of different authors, and the resulting distribution of titled 'officials' or taxes is deemed to confirm one or another notion of the character of the polity under examination.

Panda is partly aware of this difficulty, and he devotes twelve pages of his German text and six of his English summary to a discussion of the various theories of Indian monarchies of the medieval age. He asks whether the Ganga state of medieval Orissa was a "centralized state," as formu- lated by K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, a "feudal state," as implied in the work of R. S. Sharma, a "segmentary state," or a "state of 'concentric integration'," after the work of B. Stein and H. Kulke, respectively. The last two formulations are considered to offer some useful theoretical guidance, but neither is found fully satisfactory. Panda's solution to this unsatisfactory state of theorizing about the medieval states of India is the dubious one of adopting the presumed universal formulation of H. J. M. Claessen and P. Skalnik of "the early state." This "alternative model" is specified at such a level of generality as to accommodate all four of the formulations which Panda considered and rejected! Hence, at the end of the study rich in heretofore unknown evidence from Orissa and using state-of-the-art computer technology, we are left disappointed. For all of its rich, original docu- mentation, this monograph fails to provide that sort of critical examination of existing political theories, such that one theory, at an appropriate level of Indian specificity, is found superior and others rejected as the outcome of critical historical reasoning.

BURTON STEIN SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES, LONDON

MahasubhdsitasaMgraha, vol. VI. By LUDWIK STERNBACH.

Edited by S. BHASKARAN NAIR. Hoshiarpur: VISHVESH-

VARANAND VEDIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE, 1987. Pp. xiv +

2663-3238. Rs 400.

It is about a decade since the latest review-of volume III-of Sternbach's Mahdsubhdsitasamgraha appeared in the Journal. Reviews of the first three volumes, all by Professor Pratap Bandyopadhyay of the University of Burdwan, suc- ceeded each other in rapid succession. The review of volume I appeared in JAOS 96 (1976): 314-16, immediately following B. A. van Nooten's review of Sternbach's Subhdsita, Gnomic and Didactic Literature (vol. IV.2. 1 of Jan Gonda's A History of Indian Literature). Volume II was reviewed in JAOS 98 (1978): 546-48, and volume III in JAOS 100 (1980): 42-43. Since volumes IV and V were not reviewed, I will use the

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540 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.3 (1990)

review of volume VI as an opportunity to make a brief status

questionis of the Mahasubhdsitasamgraha generally. Those who participated in the 29th International Congress

of Orientalists-the last to be held under that name-will remember the following resolution: "The XXIXth Inter- national Congress of Orientalists, held in Paris on the 21st

July, 1973, considers the Mahdsubhasitasamgraha as an important publication and requests that this publication be

speedily brought to an end and be published by the Vish-

veshvaranand Vedic Research Institute as quickly as possible." The purpose of the Mahasubhdsitasamgraha is to bring

together, in a single alphabetical sequence, all the verses

quoted in the existing subhdsitasamgrahas as well as other

wise sayings throughout Sanskrit literature, both in India itself and in sources from Greater India. It was planned that

the entire collection would be published in about twenty

volumes, with additional volumes for verses that might come to the compiler's attention after the printing had started. All in all, up to and including volume VI, more than eleven

thousand subhdsitas-occasionally there is more than one

entry to a single number-have been published, as follows:

vol. I (1974) nos. 1-1873 a - anve vol. II (1976) nos. 1874-4208 apah - ahni vol. III (1977) nos. 4209-6285 am jiinamn - Thd

dhanasya vol. IV (1980) nos. 6286-8264 u - au vol. V (1981) nos. 8265-9979 ka - kd vol. VI (1987) nos. 9980-11491 kim - kai

Each entry includes, in addition to the text of the su-

bhdsita, a list of the sources in which it appears, together with the variant readings which these sources exhibit, and an

English translation. The translations are by different hands.

Whenever a good translation was available, it was reprinted, with the name of the translator in brackets. Some of the

verses Sternbach translated himself. The remaining ones are

the work of-now, the late-A. A. Ramanathan of Madras.

Each volume also contains at least three appendices, of

authors and sources, of Sanskrit meters, and a subject index.

Ludwik Sternbach (born in Krakow, December 12, 1909) died in Paris on March 25, 1981. Volume V contains a brief In Memoriam, by K. V. Sarma. Before his death Sternbach

set up the "Dr. Ludwik Sternbach Foundation," to be

administered by the Vishveshvaranand Vedic Research Insti-

tute at Hoshiarpur for the continuation of the Mahdsu-

bhdsitasamgraha. We may, therefore, expect that the staff of

the VVRI will continue to be involved in the enterprise, as

they have been right from the beginning. Although Sternbach

himself was the indefatigable collector of the subhdsitas, as

early as 1966 he conceived the idea of involving S. Bhaskaran

Nair in the editorial work. From volume II onward the name

of Bhaskaran Nair, at present the Honorary Director of the Institute, indeed appears on the title page as the editor. The same remained true for volumes III and IV. Bhaskaran Nair in turn acknowledged the advice he received from his predecessor, Professor K. V. Sarma, throughout the work on the first four volumes. Although Sarma retired from the Directorship of the Institute at the beginning of 1980, he returned to Hoshiarpur to edit volume V. Volume VI is again edited by Bhaskaran Nair.

A feature of volume VI that will be much appreciated by the users of the first six volumes is an appendix titled "Abbreviations-cum-Bibliography," which consolidates the several lists of abbreviations spread over the earlier volumes.

Sternbach's own compilation and numbering of subhdsitas halted with number 10597, which appears in volume VI and was also the highest number referred to in his A Descriptive Catalogue of Poets Quoted in Sanskrit Anthologies and Inscriptions (2 vols., Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1978-80). The editor informs us that materials for another three or four volumes have been partly collected; he does not tell us whether an effort will be made to expand the existing materials up to the projected number of twenty volumes. Whatever the decision may be, we are once again grateful to the VVR Institute in general and Professor Bhaskaran Nair in particular for providing us with another beautifully edited and produced volume.

LUDO ROCHER

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Nepalese Manuscripts, part 1: NevdrT and Sanskrit. By

S. LIENHARD. Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschrif- ten in Deutschland, Band XXXIII. I. Stuttgart: FRANZ

STEINER VERLAG, 1988. Pp. xxxiii + 222, 16 plates.

This volume forms part of the prestigious and ever-growing

series devoted to cataloguing the considerable holdings of

oriental manuscripts in Germany and of the Staatsbibliothek Preussicher Kulturbesitz in West Berlin, and, as one has

come to expect from earlier volumes, it is exquisitely printed

and produced. S. Lienhard, in collaboration with Thakur

Lal Manandhar, the well-known NevarT scholar, and biblio-

phile in his own right, provide in their introduction (pp. ix-

xxxiii) a brief but informative survey of the Nevars of the

Kathmandu valley, the NevarT language, and the rich NevarT

literature about which so little is still known; the best

overview in English is K. P. Malla's pioneering Classical

Newari Literature: A Sketch (Kathmandu, 1982). Written

NevdrT is first attested in a bilingual Sanskrit-NevarT legal

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