[INDOLOGY] Thakkana again

[Roland Steiner]

    Walter Slaje has asked me to forward a further message to the list.

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Having been disconnected from the list for a while, it may have  
escaped my notice if the reading -chakuna- has been adopted  
text-critically from among other variants, or if it is an only reading  
from a unique manuscript. That would certainly change the starting  
point of this discussion.

     

    We can of course never exclude the possibility that the syllables  
under consideration were physically damaged in the exemplar a scribe  
had had in front of him and which he supplied in his own copy with a  
wording (“śakuna”) that seemed reasonable to him. Then however, and  
without further evidence, anything could be explained by wild guesses  
of that sort. Moreover, an unsubstantiated assumption that CCHa-KU-na  
was mistaken for TTHa-KKA-na is, as I should like to repeat, baseless  
in the Śāradā script. I am not prone to consider such an argument as  
valid until its likelihood has been more convincingly demonstrated.  
For, what other script should we suppose in use in the Greater Kashmir  
region in the tenth century, if not Śāradā?

     

    The Śāhi ruler Thakkana “may have been some small chief in a  
neighbouring hill region“, to quote Stein on RT 6.230. Thakkana was  
conquered and captured after an invasion of Kashmiri forces in his  
“country, which is difficult of access on account of its streams and  
mountains“ (Stein). The difficulty of access mentioned here points to  
the Dardic territories north of the Kashmir valley proper, where Hindu  
Śāhis had been ruling, too. There were indeed no safe and easy passes  
to cross the mountain range to the north. Hence, the Greater Kashmir  
region is our most likely candidate, which is the homeland of the  
Śāradā script.

     

    As to my hypothesis that /śakuna/ may have deliberately been used  
instead of /thakkana/ by the author himself with a view to avoiding an  
inauspicious name in the beginning, a beginning which is by all means  
supposed to be auspicious, let me add that he was writing at the court  
in the company of contemporaries who certainly knew him as a dependant  
of his patron quite well. Sure, at their time, the audience could  
immediately savour the applaudable elegance with which he had turned  
the unhappily named Thakkana into, and immortalized him as, a Śakuna  
king (by which he won his favour).

     

    If otherwise, could anyone supply evidence for a maṅgala or a  
dedicatory verse containing unfavourable words or ominous names?

     

    Until counterevidence, would someone on this list earnestly  
believe that a medieval Indian author might have addressed his patron  
as “illustrious liar king”?

     

    Thank you again for your attention,

    WS

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