SRI VISHNU SITARAM SUKHTANKAR, the prodigious editor and compiler of the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata was another lodestar of Indian history, broadly speaking.
This extraordinary scholar travelled twice from Poona to a remote village named Porumamilla in Kadapa district to decipher just one inscription related to the Vijayanagara Empire.
The inscription is technically named as the Porumamilla Tank Inscription because it was found outside the Bhairava temple overlooking the Anantaraja Sagara lake in that village.
Sri Sukhtankar stayed there for several days and spoke to the locals and the District Magistrate of Kadapa and gathered every minute detail of the region. If that was not enough, he physically entered the lake, built by Bhaskara Bhavadura, a prince of the Sangama Dynasty – in the 14th century.
Sukhtankar measured the whole lake and wrote down the precise details of its dimensions as mentioned in the inscription. The unit of measurement was Rekha-Danda, which is approximately 1.25 Yards or 1.15 Feet.
For the exact dating of the inscription, he corresponded with various scholars throughout India. Finally, the renowned Tamil historian, Swamikannu Pillai supplied the precise date of the year in which the tank was built.
Sukhtankar also studied various Dharmasastra texts to understand the other nuances of the inscription and found a reference to Hemadri’s Danakhanda in his encyclopaedic Chaturvarga-Chintamani, an authoritative work on the Dharmasastra.
The Porumamila Tank Inscription is rather unremarkable in the sense that it is a typical Daana-Sasana speaking about a dam constructed across a river named Maldevi. However, V.S. Sukhthankar’s omniscient eye and his encyclopaedic scholarship caught every line, word and syllable in the inscription. The result is a short but brilliant treatise.
Thanks to Sukhtankar’s decipherment, the Porumamilla Tank Inscription has become one of the primary sources for reconstructing the history of the irrigation system of the Vijayanagara Empire.
AFTER SUKHTANKAR, we can consider his junior contemporary and colleague at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Sri Parashuram Krishna Gode. We’ve already published a series celebrating the life and legacy of Sri Gode on The Dharma Dispatch.
P.K. Gode is unique in the sense that in a scholarly career spanning more than three decades, he never once travelled out of his Karma Bhoomi, Pune. He is also unique in another sense: perhaps no other historical scholar of India selected offbeat topics for deep, exhaustive and sustained research.
Here’s a sample of the sort of topics he researched on: history of soap nut powder, firearms, bullock carts in the Vedic era, hair dyes in ancient India, history of the nose ring, history of Rangavalli from 50 CE up to 1900 CE, massage techniques in ancient India, history of rope manufacture in India from 300 BCE up to 1900 CE, biographies of medieval clerks, names of obscure Yajnas…
Fortunately, Sri Gode has written about his methods of work and research. Here is an excerpt.
To me all old manuscripts, documents, printed books, not to say other sources of history, are worthy of reverence and careful preservation. The wider and deeper the acquaintance of an investigator with the known sources, the larger is the number of problems that crop up… He alone is a “Complete Angler” in historical research who sits patiently on the shores of antiquity by casting a close and comprehensive net of knotty problems and catches daily some new facts bearing on the solution… I have practiced such angling on the shores of Indian antiquity commensurate with the scanty leisure at my disposal. I have under investigation innumerable problems and have maintained separate “Problem Files” for them. Facts bearing on these problems, as soon as they are discovered, are noted on separate sheets with indication of their chronology and inserted in these files. When a sufficient number of analogous facts clarifying a problem is gathered in due course…these facts are released in the form of an article. Sometimes it takes years before a problem is…completely solved; but if an investigator toils diligently year after year he is sure to be rewarded…by a decent number of original research papers…
In the same essay, he mentions how he always kept in mind, an eternal warning from the Yoga-Vasistha:
yenā'bhyāsaḥ parityaktaḥ iṣṭe vastuni saha adhamaḥ ||
He is the meanest wretch who abandons constant practice in the pursuit of his ideal.
As always, I have the same question: why are we unable to produce scholars of even ten percent of this calibre?
To be continued
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