Center for Baltic and East European Studies

The Kauśikasūtra (KauśS) represents a complex work of the Śaunaka school, collected from various sources of Atharvavedic ritual literature. Bloomfield considered that the KauśS was compiled at a certain time from different materials with clearly individual characters and that the redactor(s) did not try or did not succeed in harmonizing and unifying the text by removing the discrepancies. One of the effects which would follow from these inconsistent revisions would be that the general rules would be applied strictly to some passages and loosely or not at all to others. A systematic study regarding a methodology for applying metarules to the KauśS is wanting. The present work represents such an attempt, restricted to the elucidation of the paribhāṣā 7.1. Following an exhaustive analysis of all its potential uses, underlined by a new translation of the respective passages, it is noted that the metarule is quite consequently applied. One of the questions arising from this is whether Kauśika had in mind some of these metarules at the time of his composition and the later redactor(s) attempted to maintain a high degree of consistency in applying them to the newly introduced fragments. Secondarily, the paper addresses another issue, the use of the preverb pra in prāśnāti and prāśayati allegedly as a tool for disambiguation in the KauśS.

The KauśikaSūtra (KauśS) opens with a set of general rules giving indications about the sources of the text (1.1-8). Then another set of paribhāṣās with a special character follows, applicable only in the rituals of the full moon and new moon that are prescribed subsequently (1.14-6.37). After the description of these rituals, three chapters consisting of rules with a more general character (7.1-9.7) follow.

In one of my connected studies I have raised the questions whether Kauśika had in mind some of the metarules at the time of his composition and if the later redactor(s) attempted to maintain a high degree of consistency in applying them to the newly introduced fragments.

The present work evaluates the paribhāṣā 8.10, apparently added by a second redaction and maladroitly applied by the two medieval commentators.

The existing edition of the KauśS reads: viśaye yathāntaram |. Bloomfield emends the sūtra as viśaye, against the unanimous reading of the eight MSS. of the KauśS, viṣaye. The emendation is retained by Bahulkar in his edition of the first ādhyāya of the KauśS on the basis of new MSS., all having the same reading as viṣaye. In addition, I have consulted four new manuscripts4 which unanimously have the lectio viṣaye. Two of them read viṣaye yatthotaram, variant present also in two manuscripts5 used by Bahulkar, who does not report the same.

There are two hymns in the AtharvaVeda, 4.1 and 5.6, having the same first verse, beginning with the words brahma jajñānam. "the brahman that was born". The hymn thus designated  is employed profusely by all the ritual texts of the AtharvaVeda. It is not clear which of the two hymns is meant by this pratīka because apparently, the texts do not have a methodology of quoting the mantras.

Generally in the KauśikaSūtra by pratīka the whole respective hymn is employed and not a verse, although there is no paribhāṣā to that effect, unlike those in other sūtras .  Whenever one verse is to be employed it is thus specified by adding iti ekā [ṛc], in some instances (KausSu 9.1,
35.12, 40.16, 139, 11). Apparently there is no methodology of quoting distinctly the two hymns under discussion, having the same beginning, yet there is a paribhāṣā referring to the mantra viniyoga which might help ascertaining the identity of the intended hymn:

(8.21) grahaṇam ā grahaṇāt --  [the pratīka] denotes the employment of the hymn [in the rite prescribed by the subsequent sūtras] upto the next pratīka [quoted in that section of the sūtra] (Bahulkar, 1977: 38, n.133).

There are nine occurrences of this pratīka, but the verse/hymn in question should be inferred in twelve other instances wherein is not explicitly mentioned, on the basis of the rule 8.21. The commentators Dārila and Keśava quote the beginning of the second or even of the third verse of the hymn 5.6 for pointing out the intended hymn. Sāyaṇa identifies
the hymns exactly as Keśava does. He fails to notice one occurrence (KausSu 51.7) and all the others where the pratīka is not explicitly mentioned, but wherein it should be inferred.

In comparison with the construction rite construed around worshiping the Lord of the House, Vāstoṣpati, found in the ritualism of the other Vedic schools, the Atharvavedins had a complex ceremony completed by the worshiping of Vāstoṣpati. It is commonly considered that the Kauśika Sūtra prescribes two ceremonies accompanying the building of a dwelling, in two far-reached kaṇḍikā-s. The two rites are reconstructed with the help of the two medieval commentaries, those of Dārila and Keśava, and the unedited late paddhati, Atharvaṇīya Paddhati. Besides the elucidation of the idiosyncratic ritual, the paper deals with the textual intricacies of the Kauśika Sūtra: textual divisions of the surrounding context, the mantrādhikāra and phalādhikāra methods used by Kauśika/s in arranging the subjects of the sūtra text, etc.

The ritual book of the Atharvavedins, the Kauśika Sūtra (KauśS), knows very well the portent of the hymns of the Śaunakīyasaṃhitā (ŚS) and prescribes them for employment in proper rites. Yet, in the following instances, KauśS employs two hymns in a rather surprising way. Thus the two consecutive hymns, 1.12 and 1.13, are rubricated by the index Anukramaṇī as yakṣmanāśanaṃ sūktam, “a hymn for curing yakṣma (consumption)”, and vaidyutam “addressing the thunderbolt”, respectively. They are prescribed by the KauśS in a sequence of rites connected with bad weather in general (38.1-6), rain flood (38.7), and precisely hailstorm (38.8-9). The modern exegesis considers the two hymns as addressing the lightning, although only the second has explicit reference to this atmospheric phenomenon, which is but recited in a rite for averting the hailstorm. A hymn addressing the hail is not available in the Śaunaka recension, but it occurs in the Paippalādasaṃhitā of the Atharvaveda, 15.22-231. What is the reason for this qui pro quo, we shall try to analyze through the translation of the respective passage in the KauśS and its two medieval commentaries, the Dārilabhāṣya and the Keśavapaddhati.

The Dārilabhāṣhya (DB) is the most important commentary on the Kauśikasūtra (KauśS) which made it to us, besides the Keśavapaddhati (KP) and other works which were lost (the works of Paiṭhīnasi, Rudra, and Bhadra). Dārila’s authority is quite acknowledged, as he is quoted by the later Atharvavedic exegetical literature all through the ages. Yet, Dārila’s technical and difficult text was actually no longer known by first hand after Keśava or probably Sāyaṇa.

His technical and erudite work was, if not hermetical, at least not read any longer by later exegetes, who were paying merely lip service by referring to him. By the late 18th century his commentary was no longer understood by the scribes, as we learn from Devabhadra who had an illegible manuscript of the same. Similarly, hard to decipher, are the three DB mss. written in the 19th century: one 1) dated śaka 1762 (1840 CE) obtained by Julius EGGELING and given to National Library of Berlin, and two in private collections and which are lost till date, 2) dated śaka 1752 (1830 CE) in the possession of Gore family of Māhulī, and 3) dated saṃvat 1884 (1829 CE) in the possession of Gore family of Gwalior. If we are to trust BLOOMFIELD (1889: iii) that ms. 1) and ms. 2) are “very faithful
copies of the same original”32, it may stand to reason ms. 3) as their source, which is “old”, allegedly “incomplete” as the other two, and “correct” (i.e. not having corrections on the margins?) unlike the first two which might have been corrected and added glosses in Marāṭhī under Paṇḍit Ganeśa Bhaṭṭa’s teaching.

The hymn of the Śaunaka Saṃhitā (ŚS) 2.29 appears to be consisting of some verses connected together for a specific purpose. The first unit is the group of 3 verses 1-3, that are found as Paippalāda Saṃhitā (PS) 19.17.10-12, and the second unit consists of the last four verses, that are found as PS 1.13.1-4, following the correspondent of the Śaunakin hymn 2.28, which is a prayer for long life, thus designated by AVPariś 34.4, Keśava ad KauśS 54.13 and Sāyaṇa ad ŚS 2.17.

The hymn ŚS 2.29 is employed in its entirety by the KauśS 27.9-13 in a curative rite for a patient suffering of thirst, where the suffering is transferred to a healthy person. BAHULKAR (1994: 138) rightly admits that the last four verses contain an allusion to the ritual praxis, whereas the first three “are clearly a prayer for the long life”. The third verse is a widely used Yajurvedic formula (BLOOMFIELD 1897: 309).

The sole common element of the four rites employing the verses 2.29.1-2, namely the four commendation, paridhāpana, kumārīsnāna and the thirst quenching medication is the water element. The expression in the first pāda 2.29.1 could furnish the verbal connection (bandhutā) for the ritual employment of these two mantras. WHITNEY postulated “some characteristic product of earth applied in the rite”, but nowhere in the economy of the three rites such an object is used. The poet-seer of this hymn does not clearly say what he means by the “sap of whatever earthly” and leaves ample room for our imagination. Probably in the days of the composition of the hymn, it might have been a familiar phenomenon and the substance that was meant by the expression might have been used in the said rite.

It has been shown by Michael Witzel in a fundamental study (1989) that the spelling of the long palatal affricate as –śch– is a śākhā peculiarity which the older texts (Ṛgveda, Paippalāda Saṃhitā, Maitrāyaṇī Saṃhitā, Kaṭha Saṃhitā) share as an archaic pronunciation of the cluster –cha–, which was later written, and in classical Sanskrit become standardised as –cch–. Griffiths considers that the spelling –śch– is less frequent than –ch– in the Kashmirian Paippalāda and almost absent in the Orissa tradition. On the contrary, the spelling –ts– for the long palatal affricate, is present in both the Paippalādas, and in the multi śākhā ritual text of the Atharvavedins, Kauśikasūtra. The majority of the manuscripts which reads –ts– for the long palatal affricate are hailing from Gujarat, the home place of the Paippalāda and Śaunaka, thus being closer to the archetype. In the present article new instances of the representation –ts– for –ch– have been added from a new manuscript of the Kauśikasūtra, from the Atharvaveda Pariśiṣṭa, and from the unedited prayoga SaṃskāraRatnaMālā.

The study concerns the reconstruction of Paiṭhīnasi’s work from the numerous fragments attributed to this author in the vast ritual and juridical literature. Such philological enterprises belong rather to the past decades or even to the last century, as it could be seen in a footnote of my introduction, yet, my subject is of great modernity. The question about the identity of Paiṭhīnasi and precisely, about the connection of his work with the Atharvaveda is addressed in very recent articles, presentations and forthcoming books (v. Alexis Sanderson in The Atharvaveda and its Paippalādaśākhā. Historical and Philological Papers on a Vedic Tradition, Griffiths, Arlo and Annette Schmiedchen (ed.). Indologica Halensis. Aachen: Shaker Verlag, also Arlo Griffiths and Key Kataoka in the same volume, Shilpa Sumant, presentation of her (joint work with Arlo Griffiths) forthcoming edition of the ritual Paippalādin manual Karmapa~njikā, and also Karmasamuccaya, which are professedly based on a “Paiṭhīnasisūtra”, at the 5th Vedic Workshop, Bucharest, 2011: http://simpozion2011.bibliotecametropolitana.ro/video-detail-en.aspx?cid=67&vid=524, etc). 

As it is well know, Atharvaveda tradition had only one sutra of a grhya type, Kauśikasūtra, edited by M. Bloomfield more than one century ago (a new project of edition, coordinated by Prof. S.S. Bahulkar, has been announced by Sumant and Rotaru at the 15th WSC, Delhi, January, 2012), and not entirely translated in a modern language. Besides this, the Atharvavedins had only one śrautasūtra, Vaitānasūtra, a late corpus of paralipomena called Atharvaveda Pariśiṣṭas, and a very limited number of (short) unpublished paddhatis and prayogas of the 18th-19th centuries (some of them published by myself in various articles). Only these few works give an estimation of the idiosyncratic ritual of the Atharvaveda. Or, it is recognized that this stays at the basis of later Tantric ritual, hence the subject of a Vedic ritualism, which was most of the time apart from the canonical ceremonies of the Traividya, remains in modernity. 

  It is very important to see whether the Atharvavedins had indeed a dharma sūtra authored by “Paiṭhīnasi” (name of an author and a school of thought) and, even most important, because this “Paiṭhīnasi” is highly quoted outside Atharvavedic literature, to see what the great ritual and juridical tradition has conserved from the idiosyncratic Atharvavedic ritualistic works (Kauśikasūtra and Vaitānasūtra are but seldom mentioned, and almost never quoted outside Atharvavedic literature, the Pariśiṣṭas, especially those connected with astrology and royal rites are somehow quoted there).

This is, in sum, the actual context and the state of research of the topic addressed by the present study.

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Attention has been drawn in 1885 by Bloomfield towards the existence of Paithīnasi, as the author of a composition on the ritual of the Atharvaveda (AV). It appears that this work is lost and is now traceable only through the quotations from it found in the ritualistic, juridical, and exegetical literature.

Paithīnasi is apparently an ancient author and his status as an authority
on the dharma can be judged from the considerable number of quotations attributed to him in this genre of literature. He is also mentioned in a number of ancillary Atharvavedic texts. The question whether Paithīnasi(s) of the AV is/are the same as the one(s) referred to in the medieval ritualistic and juridical treatises, yet awaits a satisfactory answer.

Paithīnasi of the AV tradition seems to be the author of a ritual sūtra-text. Because our knowledge about the ritual of the AV is restricted to a
very few texts, it seems of fundamental importance to determine whether there ever existed a ritual work by Paithīnasi.

For this reason I have decided to collect and study as many evidences
as possible about his opus. The first part of the study is an attempt to
supply some information about the nature of the work and its date from
the references to this in different sources. In the second part I have edited the passages attributed to Paithīnasi, from treatises on dharmaśāstra, from the oldest BaudhŚS to the late works of 19th century.

I have not endeavored to reconstruct the Paithīnasisūtra in its original
form, since such an enterprise is by its very nature unusual with the
task of an editor of the sūtras from quotations (v. Bhandarkar 1926;
Rocher 1954).

However, this study is indebted to the works of the scholars who devoted themselves to the study of Paithīnasi, starting with the pioneering work of M. Bloomfield and W. Caland, followed by T.R. Chintamani, P.V. Kane and D. Bhattacharyya.

I have added a number of Atharvavedic unedited sources, unavailable
with the scholars who so far discussed about Paithīnasi, Prayogabhānu
(PraBhā), a ritual text composed by a Nāgara brahmin from Gujarat
towards the end of the 18th century, and other several prayogas copied and composed in the Sānglī-Māhulī school, found in Gore collection deposited in Vaidika Saṃśodhana Maṇḍala, Pune.

The work represents a critical edition of one manuscript from a larger collection of unedited materials from the Library of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest (BAR 3924), being one of three notebooks written by the first Romanian scholar of Romani studies, Barbu Constantinescu. The third notebook contains a Romani-Romanian vocabulary with entries for 26 letters of the Romani language adapted to the Romanian alphabet, which will be edited as a separate work.

The so far published work of Barbu Constantinescu on Romani folklore is a collection of 75 songs and 15 story tales (1878) in Romani and Romanian translation, the latter being translated in English by F.H. Groome (1899).

The current volume brings to light 282 new songs, out of which only 10 are met, in a slightly worked up manner, in the published collection from 1878. The songs were collected by the scholar from all counties of what was at that time Romania, from nearly a hundred urban and/or rural localities. The name of the locality and of the respondent is mentioned, sometimes with extra referential information about the sub-ethnic group, age, profession, relevant vocabulary relating to that profession, etc. With a very few exceptions, Barbu Constantinescu has written a Romanian translation of these songs. The Romani text and the Romanian translation are critically edited at p. 3-291. For the Romani text, the orthography used by the author was maintained, which, with notable exceptions, is based on Romanian orthography.

The volume has one index of the localities from which the respondents hail, fully documented with information gathered from the documents synchronized with Barbu Constantinescu’s investigation.

This is the first volume from the project of the Museum of Romanian Literature to bring to light the opera omnia of the Barbu Constantinescu. While working on the current Preface, Viorel Cosma (https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viorel_Cosma) discovered the manuscript with musical adnotations on a folklore collection by the hand of Barbu Constantinescu, his brother, archbishop Calistrat Orleanu, and Iraclie Porumbescu (father of George Enescu, the first modern Romanian composer).

https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/rs.2018.3



Half a century after the first work on the Romanian Roma written by M. Kogălniceanu (1837) at the suggestion of the father of modern geography, Alexander von Humboldt, similarly, at the suggestion of a foreign scholar, the father of Romani dialectology, Franz Miklosich, one graduate of the Faculty of Theology, University of Leipzig, and Ph.D. of the same university, Barbu Constantinescu, started to learn Romani and became the first Romanian scholar in the emergent field. He was an acknowledged educationist, the first exponent of Herbatianism in Romania, and worked in many educational pioneering projects, such as the establishing of the first kindergarten as well as the reformation of the pedagogical and theological systems of education. In the field of Romani studies, unfortunately, he could not publish all his projected work, and posterity forgot his huge effort of traveling in all counties of Walachia and Moldavia in search for Romani settlements. He published in Bucharest, in 1877 and 1878, a dozen songs and tales in Romani of his own translation, which were dully acknowledged (e.g. by F.H. Groome in his 1899 anthology of Gypsy Folk songs). However, his work, comprising hundreds of documentation sheets, has not been included in a synthesis, yet, it is partially preserved in some unedited manuscripts at the Romanian Academy Library in Bucharest, which are described here for the first time, in sections § 2.1-6. The article displays the intellectual legacy left by Barbu Constantinescu in the field of Romani studies.

Two of the most important and inadequately addressed topics related to Romani studies in Rumania are the historical demography and an atlas of the ethnic groups.

In the second chapter, which constitutes the main purport of the article, seven case studies illustrate aspects of Romani demographics in 19th century Wallachia, based on two demographic sources unpublished and for the greatest part unknown (from 1838 and 1878, respectively), and other synchronic ethnographic works. These sources refer to the Romani people either with the collective " Gypsy " appellation, either, more often, with specific ethno-socio-professional denominations as presented in the first chapter. The few case studies display the complexity of the Romani society from 1838 to 1878, that is for a period of one generation, spanning 20 years before and 20 years after " Emancipation ". All these various sources aim to recompose the image of the Roms living in 19th century Rumania, contributing significantly to the historical demography as well as the history of the ethnic groups and sub groups.

The article draws upon a pilot study, which will be further developed in the project “Mapping the Roma communities in 19th century Wallachia”, conducted by the Centre of Baltic and Eastern European Studies, Södertörn University, and funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (2018-2021).

The Kauśikasūtra has three sets of general rules, the first two (1.1–8 cum 1.9–23) consecutively opening up the sūtra-text, having an application to the adjoining context, and the third one (7.1–9.7) being seemingly prescribed for the rest of the work. The understanding of the Kauśikasūtra draws hugely on ascertaining the right meaning of these paribhāṣās. The general rule 8.10 is an interesting example of such crux filologorum, wherein, regardless the emendation, the enouncement apparently bears little meaning and the paribhāṣā, as a whole, seems inapplicable. The paper discusses sixteen cases whereto the paribhāṣā 8.10 might be applied, starting from the instances thus indicated by the two commentators, Dārila and Keśava. In subsidiary , another subject is elucidated, the set of rites called manthāntāni karmāṇi, which, although there is no paribhāṣā regulating their function, they are prescribed by the sequence of rites 11.11–11.15, and are to be applied in the specified context. This is an example of the efforts done by the subsequent redactor(s) of the Kauśikasūtra, who have added general rules to elucidate the concise and obscure sūtra-text: an unspecified general rule (11.11ff) inserted in the adjoining context, and a specified, but redundant general rule (8.10) employed in the appropriate section, with little care for the consistency of the editorial work. Keywords: Kauśikasūtra, paribhāṣāviniyoga (application of the general rule), anuvṛtti (supplying the missing term from previous passage), emendation, text criticism

In the seminal study of Marushiakova and Popov (2013) on the “Gypsy” groups in Eastern Europe it is hinted that the issue of the ethnic groups, and precisely that of their appellations (ethnonyms and/or professionyms), their unclear, nay, hazy demarcation, are specific to a greater degree to the Southeastern Europe and adjacent areas, and less to the Romani groups in Western Europe who have, largely speaking, Romani endonyms (Manuš, Sinti, Kaale, etc), which delimitate them more accurately. In Romanian quarters, the different ethno-socio-professional Romani categories are described for the first time in the first Romanian Constitution (1832), chapter “Improvement of the status of the Gypsies”, article 94. Among the 6 categories described, mention is made of the alleged Netots ‘stupid’, who were the real nomads of that time, were not practicing any specific skill, and were held responsible for all transgressions. The current article is an historical and linguistic investigation of this alleged ethno-professional category, demonstrating that the “Netot” issue is a connivance conceived by the Russian administration and the local politicians in order to solve the “problem” of the errant groups, in the context of the plague outbreak in 1831–1832, by creating a political reason to dispatch them to the defeated Ottoman Empire. The article provides sources and open questions instead of giving answers.