Everyone quotes the book that isn't there

Claim (verbatim)

The Nāṭyaśāstra closes by naming its own successor: the remainder of the science of performance, Bharata says, Kohala will treat in a sequel — Kohala being already listed among Bharata's sons in the treatise's opening frame. For the next thousand years Kohala is everywhere in Sanskrit performance theory: Abhinavagupta's Nāṭyaśāstra commentary cites him repeatedly, Mataṅga's Bṛhaddeśī leans on him for the deśī music the founding text never covered, and Śārṅgadeva's thirteenth-century Saṅgītaratnākara lists him among the discipline's ancestral authorities. No work of Kohala survives. The delegation created a slot, and the slot outlived any text: an authority whose function was to say what the canon had left unsaid, invoked wherever a theorist needed a licence the Nāṭyaśāstra could not give. That structure has a signature distinguishable from an ordinary lost book: a real single treatise quoted across five centuries leaves convergent fragments, while a licensing slot fills with divergent material — citers attribute incompatible doctrine, late compilations take the name, and the fragments refuse to assemble into one work. Prediction: assembling every Kohala-attributed quotation and doctrine from the Abhinavabhāratī, the Bṛhaddeśī, and the Saṅgītaratnākara with Kallinātha's commentary, the pairwise overlap between the three citation-stocks will stay under 20% — near-disjoint Kohalas — and the Kohala-titled items in the manuscript record will prove to be late compilations without substantial match to the medieval citations (primary clause: the under-20% pairwise overlap; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a Kohala fragment census assembled from the Nāṭyaśāstra with the Abhinavabhāratī (Gaekwad's Oriental Series edition), the Bṛhaddeśī (Trivandrum Sanskrit Series 94, 1928; IGNCA edition, 1992), the Saṅgītaratnākara with commentaries (Adyar Library edition), and the New Catalogus Catalogorum entries under Kohala.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: assembling every Kohala-attributed quotation and doctrine from the Abhinavabhāratī, the Bṛhaddeśī, and the Saṅgītaratnākara with Kallinātha's commentary, the pairwise overlap between the three citation-stocks will stay under 20% — near-disjoint Kohalas — and the Kohala-titled items in the manuscript record will prove to be late compilations without substantial match to the medieval citations (primary clause: the under-20% pairwise overlap; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a Kohala fragment census assembled from the Nāṭyaśāstra with the Abhinavabhāratī (Gaekwad's Oriental Series edition), the Bṛhaddeśī (Trivandrum Sanskrit Series 94, 1928; IGNCA edition, 1992), the Saṅgītaratnākara with commentaries (Adyar Library edition), and the New Catalogus Catalogorum entries under Kohala.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Kohala as a lost authority known only from citations in the Abhinavabharati, Brhaddesi and Sangitaratnakara is standard in the musicological literature, and the lateness of the Kohala-titled manuscript items is recognized; but no one has quantified the pairwise overlap of the three citation-stocks or tested the licensing-slot signature against the ordinary-lost-book alternative.

• E. te Nijenhuis, Indian Music: History and Structure (Leiden, 1974), on the lost early authorities
• Brhaddesi of Sri Matanga Muni, ed. P.L. Sharma (Kalamulasastra Series, IGNCA, New Delhi, 1992)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.