The Kāśikā is the oldest available complete commentary on Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, the oldest available
Sanskrit grammar. Besides being a valuable aid to understand and interpret Pāṇini, the commentary forms
an important historical document of the social and cultural life of India in the first half of the first
millennium. A critical edition of this massive text was a long-felt desideratum. A project with that aim
was launched as part of a collaborative agreement between the University of Lausanne and the University of Pune in 1991. However, it could not continue beyond the collection of ms. material from India and elsewhere due to lack of funds.

As a happy coincidence, the text of the Kāśikāvrtti was chosen as the testing ground for a new software for preparing critical editions of Asian texts as part of another project in 2005, and a team of Sanskrit
scholars is, again, busy preparing a new critical edition of the Kāśikā with the help of this software. The
project is an extension of a French project already being conducted at EFFEO, Paris, and involves the
collaboration among two Asian countries, India and Nepal, and two European countries, France and Italy.
A team of researchers working at the Bhandarkar Research Institute, Pune, is engaged in the work of
collating about 60 mss. on the initial section of the Kāśikā. Editorial and other problems arising out of this work will be discussed in the lecture.