Nagesa and The Mahabhasya

Nagesabhatta is a prolofic writer and genius in grammar who flourished towards the end of the seventeenth cen-tury A.D. and the first half of the eighteenth century A.D. The Mall& bhasyapradipoddyota is a supercom-mentary written by him on Kaiyata's gloss on the Mahabhasya of 'Patafijali. The present book dealing with the Mahabhasyapradipoddyota of Nagesa is divided into three parts. Part I 'General' aims at introducing the author as well as his work and points out the characteristics of the work. Part II 'Analytical examination' examines the Uddyota from four points of view, namely elucidation of Mahabhasya, elucidation of Pradipa, citations of the views of others and criticism of Kaiyata by Nagesa. Part III 'Observations' is devoted to the exposition of the view's of Nage4abhatta on certain important topics referred to in the course of the work. It sums up in a critical back-ground the assertions of Nagesabhatta in Uddyota and concludes with an evaluation of the work. The book is published under Sri Garib Dass Oriental Series.

Dr. (Mrs.) MEENAMBAL NARA-YAN is the daughter of a great Sanskrit Scholar, the late Pandit Sri. K.N. Sub-rahmanya Sastry of Kollengode, Pal-ghat, Kerala. She has a highly distin-guished accademic carreer and has won a number of Gold Medels for her graduate as well as post graduate studies. She is presently the Head of the Dept. of Vyakarna, Government Sanskrit College, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. She has composed a Sanskrit poem, 'Galitakusumam' which is the Sanskrit versification of the Malayalam lyric 'Vinaptivu' of Kumaran Asan, one of the three great poets of Kerala.