Dear friends,

Let me share this work you: Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism. 

https://www.academia.edu/36999444/Philology_and_Criticism_Open_Access

There are a lot of nineteenth-century and erroneous views floating around in Indology and epic studies such as Sukthankar’s edition reconstructs a “normative redaction,” Sukthankar classified the mss. by script (Schriftartprämisse), Sukthankar did not create a stemma but a “pedigree of versions,” the “Venn diagram” is an improvement on the stemma, an earlier oral epic was “redacted” by Brahmans, bhakti is a later “interpolation,” the Mahābhārata is a “sectarian” text following the logic of “inclusivism,” we can identify “Kṣatriya” passages based on style, we can apply “layers analysis” (Schichtanalyse), we can still recover an earlier oral epic or a heroic epic by applying “higher criticism,” etc.

These views are NOT defensible either through manuscript evidence or through logic. In our previous book, The Nay Science, we had demonstrated how these views arose from the German Indologists’ racial and nationalist prejudices and the problems with their so-called higher criticism. This new book provides support from lower criticism for that and shows that no Indologist has made a meaningful contribution to Mahābhārata criticism after Sukthankar and his team. 

It also addresses the view that a critical edition does not require a stemma or a rigorous procedure for sifting variants and establishes some criteria for any future critical editions of Sanskrit texts. 

Vishwa and I look forward to new ways of reading texts meaningfully!

Joydeep Bagchee