NILAKANTHA IN HIS HISTORICAL CONTEXT1 INTRODUCTION Readers of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, who attempt to study the vast work in its original language share something in common: reliance on a Sanskrit commentary called the Bharatabhavadipa, "Light on the Deep Meaning of the [Maha]bharata". This commentary was written by an author whose name was Nilakantha. Nilakantha's "Light" has been included in editions of the Mahabharata since the middle of the nineteenth century, when the epic first began to be published2. The commentary was known to the earliest European scholars of the epic. Franz Bopp, for example, who is best known to posterity as a comparative historical linguist, but who also published some of the earliest studies of the Mahabharata, made use of manuscripts of Nilakantha's commentary (for example, in Bopp, 1829). To this day, Nilakantha commentary is the only Sanskrit commentary on the whole epic that is available in print. The work thus occupies a prominent position in the literature of epic studies. Does it deserve this position of prominence? Some have not thought so. Readers often express frustrations with Nilakantha's method and style: he remains silent on difficult passages, so the complaints go, and yet sometimes speaks in learned detail about obvious matters - about words that have no special contextual meaning, for example, but that can easily be understood by referring to a dictionary. When he comes to the "battle books", the epic's lengthy description of the great war that lies at the heart of the story, and to which the entire narrative builds, Nilakantha falls almost entirely silent, leaving the melée to go on nearly without him. In this he is rather like the epic character Balarama, who refused to participate in the war, and who went off on a tour of sacred pilgrimage places instead. What is worse, Nilakantha subjects some of the most memorable episodes of the epic to an allegorizing interpretation, or else to a reading oriented ... Read more