Text, Translation, and Interpretation of the Early Krishna Story: The Cardiff Harivamsha Project

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This project will fill a serious lacuna in scholarship by producing a reliable modern English prose translation of the Harivamsha. An English translation of the Harivamsha has been a desideratum for decades, and will be of great value in many fields of Indology.The Harivamsha is a text in Sanskrit from the early centuries CE, closely linked to the Mahabharata. It has 118 chapters in three sections: the Harivamshaparvan (about the line of Hari, i.e. Krishna), the Vishnuparvan (about Vishnu, i.e. Krishna), and the Bhavishyatparvan (about the future). The Vishnuparvan tells of Krishna in his own family context -- his home affairs; his foreign affairs being treated in the Mahabharata, most famously in the Bhagavadgita. As Krishna is one of the most celebrated figures in all of human culture, an English-language paperback Harivamsha will have appreciable effects in many dimensions of UK culture.This project will translate, from Sanskrit into English, the Harivamsha as reconstituted in 6073 verses by P.L. Vaidya after he undertook a detailed survey of 37 selected manuscripts ('The Harivamsha, being the khila or supplement to the Mahabharata, for the first time critically edited', vol. 1, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969). The method that Vaidya used to reconstitute the text is used in Sanskrit studies and more widely in textual studies with considerable success; it yields a reconstituted text that is often seen as the ancestor of all manuscript versions. The reconstituted Harivamsha is very different from the manuscript versions, but since it remains untranslated, the benefits of Vaidya's work have yet to penetrate fully into teaching and research. Some scholars have doubted the applicability of the text-critical method to certain old Sanskrit texts. This project will thus probe the suitability of applying that method to the Harivamsha, and clarify the status of the resulting text. The project will also re-evaluate the relationship between the Harivamsha and certain other old Indian texts, especially the Mahabharata. If the reconstituted Harivamsha is viewed as an ancient text, its production in the early centuries CE has implications for our understanding of its original context and purpose. The reconstituted Mahabharata claims the Harivamsha as a part; but was it always an integral part, or was it incorporated only latterly, and if so, why? Study of the reconstituted Harivamsha will have important effects within Mahabharata studies -- which up to now have often overlooked it -- and more widely in Indology.The project will result in a compact paperback English translation of the Harivamsha in the 'Oxford World's Classics' series, with a short introduction contextualising the text and encouraging the reader to approach it as a story of universal human interest. The project team will use the book launch for this publication as a knowledge transfer event promoting wider interest in Sanskrit narrative literature; the launch will feature four short talks by leading figures -- academics and non-academics -- on aspects of the Krishna tradition. Readings from the new translation will also be featured at an international storytelling festival in 2014.The research team's wider findings will be explored in a series of five seminars held in Cardiff during the three-year project, discussed in two UK and one international conference papers, and published in two refereed articles -- one aimed at scholars of many languages other than Sanskrit, and one written for a specialised Indological audience. Thus although focusing primarily upon a single text, the project will utilise several different research methods and its outputs will serve several different audiences, some within academia, some without. It represents a fruitful, innovative, and timely combination of philological scholarship on textual and translation issues, and more searching literary and contextual interpretation.