ABSTRACT
About 20 years ago, the existence of a bundle of palm-leaf manuscripts of Odisha in Japan was brought to light. It is assumed that this palm-leaf manuscript might have transmitted to Tsushima-Cho village of the Ehime Prefecture in Shikoku island in the middle of the Edo period. The Tsushima Baiyo originally belonged to Manganji Temple, located in Tsushima-Cho village of Ehime Prefecture in Shikoku island. According to the opinions of the experts in the field, it is assumed that the Tsushima Baiyo might have been transcribed around the early seventeenth century. In Odia poetry, particularly of the pre-modern time, the reciter, known as ‘bhanita’, is mentioned generally at the end of a chapter or sub-chapter of the complete work. Ten manuscripts of the first part of Banaparba of the Saralaa Mahabharata were collected from different sources for the critical apparatus of the Tsushima Baiyo. They were collected from different places to get rich variants for the suddhapatha.
