("collection”) In medieval northern India, a kind of themed commentarial writing developed popular.
The nibandhas were Hindu lore compendia in which the
compilers gathered samples from the Vedas, dharma literature, puranas, and
other authorized religious works on a certain issue and then assembled them
into a single organized volume.
Excerpts from these same authoritative books would be
gathered into a separate volume on a different subject, and so on.
Compilers would often have to reconcile contradictory
passages or decide which paragraph was more important than another.
The Purva Mimamsa philosophical school, one of the six
schools of ancient Hindu philosophy, devised criteria for textual
interpretation.
These guidelines were initially devised for understanding
the Vedas, the oldest and most authoritative Hindu religious writings, by the
Purva Mimamsa school.
In many instances, the nibandhas were fifteen to twenty
volumes long, seeking to cover every aspect of Hindu religious life.
The Kalpataru, compiled by Lakshmidhara in the twelfth
century, and the Viramitrodaya, produced by Mitra Mishra early in the
seventeenth century, are two of the most significant nibandhas.
