Scribes and their prayers
WHEN one copied some text or words exactly — I remember from my childhood days — especially with little understanding of its contents, one was reminded sharply by the teacher that doing this amounted to makkhi pe makkhi maarna [squashing one fly upon another]." There was no doubt in our minds about the import of these dreaded words, but what the reference to flies was became clear to me only years later. This, when I chanced upon the Mughal chronicler, Badauni’s caustic comments upon some of the Sanskrit texts that he — much against his orthodox Islamic bent of mind — had to turn to under Imperial orders. These “wretched texts,” he wrote with some bigotry, were replete with errors, having been copied from generation to generation: if there was fly-excrement on a folio of the original, the scribes could be trusted to copy it exactly on to their own page.
Despite all these broadsides from the likes of Badauni, all the calumny heaped upon them, however, scribes and copyists have always interested me. For here were these countless men, unnamed for the most part and almost always unsung, who carried on with their work in those laborious days of writing everything with hand, poring over texts night after night, copying works that they often understood very little of, all for a mere pittance. Unlike calligraphers who were often made much of, especially in the Islamic world, they were treated as mere hired hands — whether katibs or kayasths — held in poor esteem, taken for granted, alike by princes and prelates. All errors in texts were routinely attributed to them: their brush with literature was considered an accident, very little if any of the prestige, or sacredness, of the texts they copied from, rubbed off upon them. They were the whipping boys of the world of learning.
Factually, one knows very little about the scribes themselves. There are colourful oral accounts of Kashmiri scribes going around the countryside in groups, hawking their skills about of copying from old manuscripts, in scripts ranging from Sharada and Devanagari to Persian and Gurmukhi. There are also references to tightly organised Kayastha families of scribes who remained active for centuries, from Bengal to Gujarat. But all this does not really amount to much. And whatever one gets is tucked away in brief colophons. These being short passages brought in at the end of manuscripts in which facts relevant to production are given, one can glean much from them: thus, the name of the patron for whom the text was written down or copied, sometimes its date with the exact day and time of its completion. But only on occasions does one get the name of the scribe or the copyist. The information thus remains truly sketchy.
What the scribes often say, in such colophons as have survived, is however always of interest. There is an awareness in these passages of the significance of the task just finished, for the task was often part of a sacred, dedicatory act that earned the patron merit in the ‘two worlds’: that of getting a scripture copied for presentation to the guru or to the faith’s repository of sacred texts. As in the case of Jaina or Buddhist texts. Consider this colophon from an 11th century palm-leaf manuscript copy of a celebrated Buddhist text from Bihar:
“This is the pious gift of Ramajiva, who is from Nepal and who is a devout follower of the excellent Mahayana. Whatever merit there is in this gift, let it accrue to his teacher, to his parents, to all his ancestors, as well as all sentient beings. Completed on the 13th day of Phalguna, of the year 14 of the victorious reign of Sri Nayapaladeva, ... the great king of kings.” And then follows the cryptic information: “The scribe Svameswara of Nalanda copied it.”
There is always some blessing, some auspiciousness, invoked upon the head of the reader of the present and the future by the scribe. The future always interested the scribes, aware and hopeful of the fact as they were that the work would long outlast them on this earth. “May peace come to all”; “May welfare be the reader’s and the writer’s” are the commonest of such invocations. But other formulas were worked out and there are some that one comes upon again and again. An especially delightful one is a prayer that is placed in the mouth of the book itself, the manuscript just finished. “Jalat rakshe, tailat rakshe...,” and so on, it runs in indifferent Sanskrit. “May I be protected, so speaks this book, from water; may I be protected from oil; may I be protected from defective tying; may I always be protected from falling into the wrong hands.”
Aware also of the fact of how much blame is placed upon them, the scribes would often add a disclaimer, again in barely literate Sanskrit: “Yadrisham pustakam drishta ...”,meaning: “I have copied this book exactly as I found it; errors or not, please (dear reader) blame me not!” The concern was shared by Persian scribes equally, for often one would find in the colophons verses such as “Qariya bar makun chandin ‘atab ... (Do not, O reader, be angry with me for any errors that you come upon. Blame me not for them. And correct them yourself, thus earning merit.).”
But this was all in the days gone by when auspiciousness was associated with the written word, and errors were still things that one had to feel contrite about.
Modern prayers
All the time that I was working on the above piece, I was wondering what kind of a prayer would be suitable for the scribes of today to send up. There aren’t many left in this day of printing and proof-reading, but one can think of those who still write with their lotus-hands on files, sitting in sarkari offices. Others may have their own ideas, but I think it may not be inappropriate for our babus, high or low, to add: “May this file remain buried forever; may these words reach no one; may no one be able to decipher the intent with which I write them; may all the harm that accrues from them be noiselessly passed on to others, past and future!”
This article was published on November 6, 1998
