The History of Indian Literature c9.37

c9.37

these, moreover, appear as taking an actual part in the conflict—a circumstance which necessarily presupposes that at the time when these passages were written, collisions with the Greeks, &c., had already happened.²⁰² But as to the period when the final redaction of the entire work in its present shape took place, no approach even to a direct conjecture is in the meantime possible;²⁰³ but at any rate, it must have been some centuries after the commencement of our era.* An interesting discovery has recently been made in the island of Bali, near Java, of the Kavi translation of several *parvans* of the Mahá-Bhárata, which in extent appear to vary considerably from their Indian form.²⁰⁴ A special comparison of the two would not be without importance for the criticism of the Mahá-Bhárata. For the rest, in consequence of the utter medley it presents of passages of widely different dates, the work, in general, is only to be used with extreme caution. It has been published at Calcutta,²⁰⁵ together with the *Hari-vaṅśa*, a poem which passes as a supplement to it.*—Respecting the *Jaimini-Bhárata*, which is ascribed, not to Vyása and Vaiśampáyana, but to Jaimini, we have as yet no very precise information: the one book of it with which I am acquainted is wholly different from the corresponding book of the ordinary Mahá-Bhárata.†