Throughout the 20th century, the editing and translation of Indian texts into European languages was accompanied by a debate on the various ways of approaching the texts and their philological implications - a debate that continues today, but not without the creation of new concepts.
The publishing of Greek and Latin classics has long offered a model for the analysis and treatment of texts, which has structured the very conception of philological science implemented, from the end of the 19th century, in the great wave of editions of Indian philosophical and literary corpora. The creation of major scholarly collections of Indian classics, in India as well as in Europe and the United States (such as the Sacred Books of the East, the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies, or the Harvard Oriental Series), and the uninterrupted production of critical editions and annotated translations of Sanskrit texts, have demonstrated both the almost unanimous adherence to this method and the fragility of an ecdotic model that sometimes struggles to be applied outside the corpora for which it was conceived.
How, then, to account for the singular characteristics of Indian textual traditions and the particularities of their history over the centuries? How, for example, can we address the question of the author and his role in essentially oral traditions, at least in their early stages? In this respect, we might refer to the contemporary notions of "orature"(vs. writing) and "oraliture"(vs. literature), coined to designate texts whose medium is, synchronically, the very moment of enunciation, or, diachronically, the chain of enunciation. What, then, is the status of the variant, and what meaning can be given to the quest for the original in a culture where the spheres of the oral and the written never cease to overlap, and where the transmission of texts traditionally includes passage through the oral?