Encyclopaedia on wheels

By Our Staff Reporter

TIRUPATI, NOV. 27. He is a man of wit, adept in five languages, authority in Srimad Bhagavatham, expert in analysis, a tenacious writer and finally patience personified. To conclude, he is a mobile library.

Meet Nallan Chakravarthy Venkata Narasimhacharya, or `NCV' as he is reverentially called, the 79-year-old representative of Bhagavatham and an authority on various other scriptures being unearthed and redone by the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams.

NCV is currently working as the Special Officer/Chief Editor for the Sri Bhagavatam Critical Edition Project, a prestigious mission taken up on a massive scale by the TTD to produce an encyclopaedia on the mega epic Bhagavatham, which is all- encompassing and the representative of the views of all schools of thought.

The project has been running for the past 18 years and it is only now that three of the 14 volumes have seen light. Leave the printing aspect aside (as it is up to the TTD) and think of the brain behind this project. Want to know how many pages NCV has written while preparing the manuscript? It is 30,000, that too in his own handwriting! All in a span of 18 years. That means, he has spent that part of his life entirely for the project. He himself says it was a `Rakshasa Kruthyam' (devil's work) that he had penned so many number of pages.

The project is a `critical edition' and not just a reprint of any other version. Only one such edition has seen light, that too somewhere in North India (NCV could not recollect more than that). All the available versions of the Bhagavatha were gathered from various parts of the country and pooled up. They included even palm-leaf scriptures.

Then, the analysis part started. The staff of the project spent many a sleepless night in unearthing the perceptions and interpretations from the various versions and also referred to commentaries on the Bhagavatha, written by saints and experts in many languages. In this connection, he searched for citations even in the Sanskrit library in the Bhandarkar Institute, Pune, said to be the largest of its kind in the world. NCV says that in all, he had referred to some 600-700 books to prepare the ground.

The toughest part was identifying the verses as to whether they were quoted from the Vedas, Upanishads, Itihasas, Puranas, Smritis, Yoga or Ayurveda, etc.

NCV did them with ease and found out the origin of all the 18,000 verses (slokas) in the Bhagavatham. Then, he chose the best available version and put it in the main slot and all the other editions in the footnotes.

This is to make available all the material on the subject to the readers and give them the choice of believing or following. Enough care was also taken to see that all the versions of the Dvaita, Advaita and Visishtadwaita schools of thought of Hindu philosophy were considered.

NCV is fluent in English, Hindi, Sanskrit, Telugu and Tamil literature. He also speaks Prakrutham, a tributary of Sanskrit that is known to only half a dozen persons in the world now. He had also learnt Urdu sometime back. The surprise is that he did not have a formal school education at all.

He has to his credit some 70 books written in three languages. But still worried, he is, that the TTD, though being the custodian of a Vaishnavite shrine, is not eager to publish more literature on the subject and that many such rare works are gathering dust.

NCV received the Certificate of Honour from the former President of India, Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma, for his achievement in Sanskrit literature. This apart, a honorary title `Panditaraja' was conferred on him by Saraswati Vihar, Vachaspati (D. Litt) by the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, a deemed university at Tirupati and `Sahityavisarada' by the Sanskrit Parishad, Tiruchirapalli.

The three volumes of the Bhagavatham so far published bear testimony to the effort that went into their making and the set of 14 volumes is a `must-be-owned' possession for scholars and the common public alike. It is for the TTD to get the 18-year-old dream of the doyen realised.

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