कान्हड़दे प्रबन्ध (कवि पद्मनाभ - जालोर चौहान वीरगाथा, अलाउद्दीन खिलजी से युद्ध व जौहर इतिहास)

INTRODUCTION 7 III The Kānhaḍade Prabandha had attracted my attention ever since I read it for my M. A. in 1931-1933. While teaching the poem to the B. A. students from 1937 to 1940 I found that a critical edition of the text of this work was absolutely necessary. From 1940 I started acquiring the manuscripts. I got the two ᴍss from the manuscript-collection of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona¹, which were used by DᴇʀĀSAʀĪ and designated by him as ᴍss ग and घ respectively. After a prolonged search it was also possible to hunt out the old numbers of the Śāḷāpatra, in which Navalrām had published serially the text of the ᴍs sent to him by Dr. Bᴜʜʟᴇʀ (the text designated as क by DᴇʀĀSAʀĪ). The effort, however, was wasted as the text printed by Navalrām turned out to be a verbatim and rather faulty transcription of Bᴜʜʟᴇʀ's ᴍs (ᴍs ष in DᴇʀĀSAʀĪ). The agreement between the two texts and the identical colophon in both leaves no doubt whatsoever regarding this identity. It was then brought to my notice that there was a ᴍs of the Kānhaḍade Prabandha in the collection of the Jaina Jñāna Bhaṇḍāra of the Anantanāthjī's temple, Bombay. I approached the trustees of the temple through the late Ambālāl B. JĀNĪ, himself a veteran scholar of mediaeval Gujarati literature. With the trustees' permission I visited the Bhaṇḍāra and found to my great surprise that along with the ᴍs mentioned in the catalogue of the Bhaṇḍāra (the c ᴍs in the present edition) there was also another ᴍs of the same work lying unnoticed there, because its first folio was lost so that the cataloguer was left without any clue regarding the name of the manuscript. This ᴍs (ᴍs A in the present edition) turned out to be a rare find, an invaluable treasure, for it happened to be the oldest dated ᴍs, copied in v. s. 1598 in Jhalor, the poet's own place, where it may have had for its basis the poet's autograph or a direct copy of it. Both the ᴍss were made available to me by the trustees (1940). I then learnt from the late Mohanlāl Dalichand DᴇsĀI that a fragmentary ᴍs of the work existed in the Kesarbāī Jñāna Bhaṇḍāra at Pātan. I went to Pātan in October, 1941, in search of the ᴍs. The ᴍs, however, could not be traced there. I met there Muni Śrī PᴜṆʏᴀᴠɪᴊᴀʏᴀᴊĪ who was then engaged in preparing a catalogue of the manuscripts lying in the various Jñāna Bhaṇḍāras of Pātan. He had two fragmentary ᴍss of the work in his private ¹ No. 1541 of 1891-95; and No. 239 of 1873-74.