Reading a pada without losing the music The bhakti lyric was written to be sung. What survives on the page is a score, not a poem — and it… The women the anthologies kept losing Meerabai survived. Akka Mahadevi survived. A great many did not, and the reasons are more institutional than literary. Translating Vidyapati into a language that has no Maithili Three translators take the same eight lines in different directions, and explain what each of them decided to give up. What we mean when we call a text “reliable” Manuscripts disagree. A note on how the archive chooses a reading, records the variants, and tells you which is which. Why the recitations matter more than the transliterations On metre, breath, and the things a Roman-script line can never tell you about a Sanskrit one.