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

INTRODUCTION 15 absence of the copyist's name perhaps indicates that the ms was copied by the owner himself, who, both from the style of writing and textual emendations, appears to be a scholar of Gujarātī, Rājasthānī and Sanskrit. He is likely to have been a Jaina. The traditional svastika or ornamental blank space is found in the centre in all the pages. It is a survival of the style of writing on palm-leaf, where space had to be kept blank in the middle of the page for a hole through which the string was passed. The only other mss used in this edition which have a svastika are E and K.¹ Ms D, No. 239 of 1873–74, in the manuscript-collection of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, comes from a Jaina Bhaṇḍāra in Tharad.² This is the ms that Dr. BUHLER got copied out and sent to Navalrām PANDYA for publication in the Śālāpatra. It has 29 folios, each measuring 11.2″ by 5.1″. It has margins .9″ wide on both sides, marked off by a thick double-line in red and a small margin of .45″ above and below. The right and left extremities of the folio are also marked with a broad red line. The ms starts on folio 1 recto—the maṅgalācaraṇa or praśasti being ॥ एदं० ॥ श्री गणेशाय नमः । and ends on folio 29 verso. There is a big lacuna on f. 25 verso, where the copyist has left the last six lines blank and made a remark in the bottom of the left-hand margin that “as f. 27 of the original is missing, it could not be copied”.³ On the verso sides, the folio-number is written both in the left-hand margins at the top and in the right-hand margins at the bottom. The title of the poem is not written anywhere Folio 1 has 16 lines per page; folios 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 have 18 lines per page. All the other folios have 17 lines per page, except folio 25 verso which has only 11, and folio 29 (last folio) which has 19 lines on the recto side, and 16 lines on the verso side. There are usually 38 to 49 letters per line, or 43 letters per line on an average. If a letter is inadvertently omitted it is added just above its appropriate place in small hands. If ि (sign for short i) is left out, two curved strokes, one on the upper side and the other on the lower side of the consonant are marked to indicate it.⁴ ¹ Only folios 2-7 in E have a svastika, the remaining folios are without it. ² There is a note to this effect on the label pasted on the cloth-wrapper of the ms. ³ Thus vss IV 176–IV 206 are lost in the D ms ⁴ Cf. f. 12 verso l. 13, f. 13 verso l. 8.