The Asiatic Society, the Bibliotheca Indica and Devanāgarī Printing in Bengal: The Historical Context of the Editio Princeps of the Nyāyabhāṣya

The editio princeps of the Nyāyabhāsya of Vātsyāyana Pākṣilasvāmin (ca. fifth century CE) was published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1864–1865 and edited by the Nyāya scholar Jayanarayana Tarkapanchanana. The influential Nyāyabhāṣya is the textual root of the prominent Nyāya tradition of epistemology and logic, yet in the nineteenth century it was largely unknown and understudied even by Indian scholars. In his foreword, Jayanarayana predicted the possibility of saving the Nyāyabhāṣya from oblivion and reviving it by means of the pioneering movable type technology in Devanāgarī characters. His endeavor was certainly fulfilled, since his seminal edition has inspired several improved editions, translations and studies. This contribution contains a thorough description of Jayanarayana’s edition, analyzed in the broader context of the history of the Asiatic Society, of the Bibliotheca Indica Series, and of the early Devanāgarī press in British India. Particularly, Jayanarayana’s foreword in Sanskrit verses and some key variant readings in his edited text of the Nyāyabhāṣya are here discussed in their historical context and matched with the information derived from the manuscript tradition. Although Jayanarayana’s manuscript sources are barely mentioned in his edition, it is now possible to identify at least two of the three manuscripts used by him with a fair degree of certainty, after the thorough investigation on the textual transmission of the Nyāyabhāṣya done in Vienna in the course of several research projects. We now know how his three manuscripts represent the latest stage of the much richer transmission of the Nyāyabhāṣya. The present study also shows how a late manuscript from Kashmir in Śāradā script likely descended from this editio princeps, an hypothesis that opens a new scenario of horizontal transmission of readings. More in general, the purpose of this paper is to provide the context for a better understanding of the editorial strategies of the Bibliotheca Indica, of its editors’ motives, and of the impact of the early press on Sanskrit on Sanskrit scholarship.