The History of Indian Literature c8.87

c8.87

∗ The circumstance that commentaries on almost all branches of the Vedas, and on various other important and extensive works as well, are ascribed to Sáyaṇa and his brother Mádhava, is to be explained by the practice prevailing in India by which works composed by order of some distinguished person bear his name as the author. So in the present day the Paṇḍits work for the person who pays them, and leave the fruit of their labour to him as his property. Mádhava, and probably also Sáyaṇa, were ministers at the court of King Bukka at Vijayanagara, and took advantage of their position to give a fresh impulse to the study of the Veda. The writings attributed to them point, by the very difference of their contents and style, to a variety of authorship. [According to A. C. Burnell, in the preface to his edition of the Vaṅśa-Bráhmaṇa, p. viii., ff. (1873), the two names denote one person only. Sáyaṇa, he says, is “the Bhoganátha, or mortal body, of Mádhava, the soul identified with Vishṇu.” Burnell is further of opinion that the twenty-nine writings current under the name of Mádhava all proceed from Mádhava himself, unassisted to any large extent by others, and that they were composed by him during a period of about thirty of the fifty-five years between 1331–1386 a.d., which he spent as abbot of the monastery at Śṛiṅgeri, under the name Vidyáraṇyasvámin. See my remarks to the contrary in *Literarisches Centralblatt* (1873), p. 1421. Burnell prefers the form Vidyánagara to Vijayanagara. Cowell, in his note on Colebr., *Misc. Ess.*, i. 235, has Vidyá° and Vijaya° side by side.]