Prof. Upendra Sharan Shastri from Govt. Sanskrit College, Mahakal Mandir, Ujjain (any info?)

[Deepro Chakraborty]

I am looking for some information about this Sanskrit professor from Ujjain. 

He was a professor at the Government Sanskrit College, Mahakal Mandir, Ujjain (Government Manmal Mimraj Ruyia Sanskrit College?). Yudhishthir Mimamsak met him on July 10, 1976, in Ujjain. See the details here. According to Mimamsak, he was doing research on Jagaddhara Bhaṭṭa, a fourteenth-century Kashmiri grammarian. I am also interested in Jagaddhara. He wrote a couple of texts on grammar and a Śaiva devotional text called Stutikusumāñjali.

I was wondering if anyone is aware of the works of Prof. Upendra Sharan Shastri (if any) or at least can tell me the way to find more about him. 

Deepro

[Mrinal Kaul]

Dear Deepro,

No grammatical work of Jagaddhara Bhaṭṭa (c. 1350 CE) has so far been published. I have at least referred to all his available grammatical works in my Introduction to the book "Linguistic Traditions of Kashmir" that I had the privilege of editing with Aklujkar Sir. I have also given the details of availability of the Mss of these texts wherever possible in the appendices of the book. Jagaddhara's commentary titled Bālabodhinī on the Kātantra-vyākaraṇa/sūtra is quite colossal. I can only recall Dr Ratna Basu from Calcutta University was interested in working on Jagaddhara's Bālabodhinī and she had also promised me a paper for the volume that never arrived to me. I recall she and Prof Karunasindu Das saying (if I can trust my memory) that there are a few Mss of the Bālabodhinī in the Asiatic Society. I never checked, but this does sound interesting to me in the sense that there was some transmission of Jagaddhara's Bālabodhinī in Bengal after 14th CE. But one can only confirm this if the Bālabodhinī really travelled to Bengal. 

Best wishes.

Mrinal Kaul

[Deepro Chakraborty]

Dear Mrinal,

Thanks for your informative response. I did check your book which is very useful for my work, especially the introduction and the details of manuscripts. I wouldn't have known that there are some copies of Bālabodhinī in the National Museum, Delhi unless you mentioned that. 

It is great to know that people are interested to work on the Kātantra texts which is quite a neglected area in Sanskritic researches in recent years. We had a very active and productive community of Kalāpa scholars in East Bengal. But the tradition seems to be entirely lost now. On the other hand, many Indologists are working on various genres of texts from Kashmir. But I barely see anyone working on the Kashmiri Kātantra texts. There is merely an incomplete edition of Ugrabhūti's Śiṣyahitā by Ramsagar Mishra in the 90s from Delhi. But this edition doesn't answer many questions. Yiming Shen, a student at University of Oxford transcribed a section of Chucchuka Bhaṭṭa's Laghuvṛtti that was in the Bodleian Library. If you know any recent work of Kashmiri Kātantra texts please let me know. 

The older descriptive catalogues of the Asiatic Society Bengal do not include an entry of the Bālabodhinī. But there are some new descriptive catalogues of the Indian Museum Collection manuscripts which I haven't checked yet. 

Also, I would like to ask you about the process of requesting copies of Sanskrit manuscripts from Kashmir University. Any idea?

Warm regards,

Deepro