Shilpa Sumant received her PhD from the Tilak Maharashtra University in Pune. Her academic career includes position as an assistant in various research projects, teaching activities in Sanskrit, Marathi and Hindi as well as visiting faculty for courses at the University of Pune.
Since 2009 Prof. Sumant has been involved in the editorial work on the Encyclopeadic Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles. Her central research area is the Atharvavedic ritualistic literataure. She is currently holding the position as Gonda Fellow at the IIAS, Leiden.

In this talk, I wish to concentrate on the Karmapañjikā (KP) as an example of a text written in priestly Sanskrit. This type of priestly Sanskrit may be regarded as a sub-standard variety of the more ‘perfect’, copious and refined Sanskrit language.
The KP is a manual for Atharvaveda Paippalādin priests to carry out the domestic rituals according to that school. It was composed by an otherwise unknown Śrīdhara around the 16th century of the common era. A critical edition of this text in three volumes is under preparation in collaboration with Prof. Arlo Griffiths (EFEO, Lyon). The edition is based on six palm-leaf manuscripts written in Oriya script, each containing approximately 175 folios.
The necessity of composition of paddhatis (guide-books) and prayogas (practical courses of the procedures) arose from the early mediaeval period. This genre of treatises has rarely caught the attention of scholars and hence most of them are still lying in the manuscript form.
It will be interesting to see the features of written priestly Sanskrit by picking examples from the KP. I would like to discuss the non-standard morphology, non-standard vocabulary, unusual sentence constructions and deviations from metrical norms in Śrīdhara’s low register Sanskrit and the consequent difficulties in editing such texts.