Haribhaktivilāsa of Sanātana Gosvāmin

Haribhaktivilāsa of Sanātana Gosvāmin: Critical Edition and Annotated Translation, Volume I by Måns Broo. Brill, 2023.

How were long and complex texts written in concrete terms in a pre-modern era? This is one of the issues that I address in the first part of my edition of a medieval Hindu ritual text. Sanātana Gosvāmin wrote his Haribhaktivilāsa ca. 1540 in Vrindavan, a small North Indian village, where he is said to have slept under different trees every night. Nevertheless, in the book he quotes more than two hundred older texts. Where did he find all these sources in an era long before the art of printing came to India? Previous scholars have thought that he quoted from his vast memory, or that the book as we know it today has grown over generations since his time. By carefully studying the history of the manuscript and its use of quotations, I have nevertheless been able to show that, with minor exceptions, the book has been preserved in its original form and that the author used about twenty earlier, similar texts, from which he borrows most of his quotations. Already twenty texts is quite a lot, which shows that Vrindavan during Sanātana Gosvāmin’s time was more developed than previously thought and that his life was probably not quite so ascetic; It also shows that he probably had help from co-workers who looked up quotes for him. Sanātana Gosvāmin’s selective use of earlier texts shows in an exciting way which texts he read, what he could agree with, what he quietly left out, and what he felt compelled to change. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Tell me what you share on social media, and I will tell you who you are”. Sometimes quotes can say as much about the writer as their own words.

Måns Broo