A Critical Edition of the Mankhakosha with its Commentary

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For a long period in history Sanskrit has been the cultured language of poetry, politics, religion and culture in most South Asian regions, extending at times to parts of Central as well as South East Asia. The language was kept highly regulated by the proliferating grammatical traditions of the subcontinent, but also through a corpus of monolingual lexica (kosha) that aided the learner and served as reference to readers and commentators. These ancient and medieval dictionaries had normative power, but some also tried to record the usage of words in actual literature and thereby to update the recognised vocabulary of the language.Among this corpus the lexicon composed by the poet Mankha, who lived in Kashmir during the twelfth century, is in many respectsunique. The author tries to capture new senses of words previously unrecorded, and he provides in his autocommentary quotations from actual literature for the senses given. The text has been edited only once in 1897 and thus came too late to be included in the still current academic Sanskrit lexica. The value of its quotations lies not only in the fact that it provides early testimonia for words and senses, they also enable us to date authors and texts quoted with more precision. All this can, however, not be achieved by the edition of 1897, in which the text of the commentary appears only in the form of small and fragmented extracts.The present project will produce a critical edition of the text and commentary and thereby make the vocabulary of the Mankhakosha and the testimonia in the commentary accessible to Sanskrit lexicography as well as to the many other branches of pre-modern Indian studies that depend on Sanskrit sources.