50 
THE MODERN LITERARY HISTORY OF HINDUSTAN. 
[§ 128 . 
available are very deficient. The best of them is that by Pandit 
Ram Jasan ; but he, like all the other editors, has printed only a 
modernised copy of the textas receptus. I have carefully compared the 
latter with the original text, and am in a position to state that 
anything more misleading can hardly be imagined. Tul’si Das wrote 
phonetically the words as they were pronounced at his time, and 
in an archaic dialect. In the printed books the dialect is altered to the 
standard of the modern Hindi, and the spelling improved (?) according 
to the rules of Panini. Examples of the modernisation of the dialect 
are the following :—Tubs! Das uses the short u as the termination of 
the nominative singular, leaving the crude base in a for its legitimate 
purposes in composition, thus following the rules of the Apabhramca 
Prakrit. Thus he wrote kapi-kataku , an army of monkeys; prabala - 
moha-dalu , a powerful band of delusions ; and so on: but all the 
modern editions give -kataka and -dala, according to the modern 
pronunciation. So also modern editors write prasada , ‘favour/ for 
the original pasau ; bliujaygim , ‘snake/ for original bhuaygini; 
yajnavalkya for jagabaliku; banda/ii, ‘I revere/ for bandau; bhakti, 
‘faith/ for bliagati , and so on. Examples can be gathered in 
almost every line. Instances of alteration of spelling are equally 
numerous. One example must suffice. Tubs! Das evidently pro¬ 
nounced the name of Ram’s father as Dasarathu, for that is the 
way he wrote it; but modern editors write the Sanskrit Dagaratlia, 
which is not even the way it is pronounced nowadays. But there 
are other and greater errors than these in the textus receptus. 
It abounds in lacunas. Whole pages are sometimes omitted, and 
minor changes occur in every page. In short, opening the printed 
edition at random, I count no fewer than thirty-five variations 
from tne original, some most important ones, in one page of twenty- 
three lines. I am glad, therefore, to be able to record that an 
enterprising publisher of Patna (Babu Ram Din Sirjqh , of the 
Khadg Bilas Press, Ba^kipur) is now engaged in publishing a text 
of the P.am-Charit-Manas founded on the old manuscripts I have 
already mentioned. 
In the Addendum to this chapter I give samples of the true text 
of the Ram-Charit-Manas, founded on the Banaras and Raj’pur 
manuscripts, already alluded to, together with photographs of the 
originals. The footnotes show the readings of the textus receptus , 
-lam indebted to the kindness of Raja Siva Prasad, C.S.I., for 
these photographs. 
