कान्हड़दे प्रबन्ध (कवि पद्मनाभ - जालोर चौहान वीरगाथा, अलाउद्दीन खिलजी से युद्ध व जौहर इतिहास)

INTRODUCTION 15
absence of the copyist's name perhaps indicates that the ms was copied
by the owner himself, who, both from the style of writing and textual
emendations, appears to be a scholar of Gujarātī, Rājasthānī and
Sanskrit. He is likely to have been a Jaina.
The traditional svastika or ornamental blank space is found in
the centre in all the pages. It is a survival of the style of writing on
palm-leaf, where space had to be kept blank in the middle of the page
for a hole through which the string was passed.
The only other mss used in this edition which have a svastika are
E and K.¹
Ms D, No. 239 of 1873-74, in the manuscript-collection of the
Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, comes from a Jaina
Bhaṇḍāra in Tharad.² This is the ms that Dr. BÜHLER got copied
out and sent to Navalrām PANDYĀ for publication in the Śālāpatra.
It has 29 folios, each measuring 11.2" by 5.1". It has margins
.9" wide on both sides, marked off by a thick double-line in red and a
small margin of .45" above and below. The right and left extremities
of the folio are also marked with a broad red line.
The ms starts on folio 1 recto—the maṅgalācaraṇa or praśasti
being ॥ एं० ॥ श्री गणेशाय नमः । and ends on folio 29 verso. There is a big
lacuna on f. 25 verso, where the copyist has left the last six lines blank
and made a remark in the bottom of the left-hand margin that "as f. 27
of the original is missing, it could not be copied".³ On the verso sides,
the folio-number is written both in the left-hand margins at the top
and in the right-hand margins at the bottom. The title of the poem
is not written anywhere
Folio 1 has 16 lines per page, folios 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 have 18 lines
per page. All the other folios have 17 lines per page, except folio 25
verso which has only 11, and folio 29 (last folio) which has 19 lines on
the recto side, and 16 lines on the verso side.
There are usually 38 to 49 letters per line, or 43 letters per line
on an average.
If a letter is inadvertently omitted it is added just above its
appropriate place in small hands. If ि (sign for short i) is left out, two
curved strokes, one on the upper side and the other on the lower side
of the consonant are marked to indicate it.⁴
¹ Only folios 2-7 in K have a svastika, the remaining folios are without it.
² There is a note to this effect on the label pasted on the cloth-wrapper of the ms.
³ Thus vss IV 176.-IV 206 are lost in the D ms.
⁴ Cf. f 12 verso l. 13, f. 13 verso l. 8.