importance for any systematic study of the development of the melodic structures. The Brhaddesi is an important text also because it anticipates the Sangita Ratnākara by many centuries through relating the understanding of body system, especially, physiology and articulation of sound. In this respect, Brhaddesi makes explicit mention of the principles of the Nātyasāstra which were only implicit. Also, stylistically, it moves away from the prescriptive nature of the Natyaśāstra, even the Dattilam and adopts instead a Bhāsya or a dialogue form. The erudite editor will throw light on all these aspects in her critique. I would like to thank her for having devoted her valuable time for editing such a complex and incomplete text so as to enrich the Kalāmūlaśāstra Series Programme. New Delhi 12.1.92 Kapila Vatsyayan • • -

INTRODUCTION Bṛhaddeśi and more so its Puranic author Matanga Muni have been well known in Sangītasāstra for more than one millenium. The text has been profusely quoted in texts of Sangītaśāstra upto the 17th century. But for two or three centuries it had gone into oblivion. There was no access to it in the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the present century, until Pt. K. Sāmbaśiva Śāstrī edited and published it in the Anantaśayana Granthāvalī No. 94 (Trivandrum Sanskrit Series) in 1928.⁴ The following excerpts from his introduction would throw light on the MSS retrieved by him. "I would add, before concluding, that the present work though incomplete has been published on account of its rare merit and that the manuscript of this work was Travancore's contribution to the exhibition held at the All India Conference of Scholars and Artists at Indore in 1921. "The edition of the work is based on two palm-leaf manuscripts in Malayalam characters obtained from the poonjar Raja, North Travancore. One of these manuscripts marked as ka is exceedingly worn out; it is about four centuries old and wanting in the first leaf as well as four leaves from the 41st. The other manuscript marked as kha is fragmentary, ending with a portion of the Jātiprakaraņa*.¹⁰ "The work ends abruptly saying इदानीं कथियध्यामि बाह्यस्य निर्णयो यथा (p. 154) and so we conclude that there are subsequent parts of the text yet to be discovered." The text, available to Pt. K. Sāmbaśiva Śāstrī, is incomplete and it has not been possible to discover another manuscript in the last seventy years, that could accord access to the complete text. In 1980 I suggested to my student Sri Anil Bihari Beohar to take up a critical study of Brhaddesi including reconstruction of the text on the basis of citations or references available in various texts from Abhinava-Bhāratī of Abhinavagupta to Rāga-Vibodha of Somanātha.⁵³² He took up this subject for his doctoral research and started collecting and collating citations and references. As his supervisor, I continued to struggle and grapple with the problems of reconstruction of the text on the basis of the material collected by him, in collation with the Trivandrum edition. Sri Beohar was awarded the Ph.D. degree in 1986. Almost immediately after this Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, Member Secretary of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, conceived the publication of a series of Kalāmūlaśāstra (Fundamental Texts on the Arts).⁷ It was decided that so far as Sangītasāstra was concerned, Dattilam and Brhaddesī should be in the first priority.⁹