Eight times in the Mahābhārata Footnote ¹ reference is made to people going to, attaining, or bestowing on others the suk tā l lokān, apparently “well-made worlds”. The context leaves no doubt that what is meant is heaven, but the phrase seems oddly chosen. Investigation suggests that it is actually a cuckoo in the nest, and that the poets originally wrote something slightly different.

As well as these occurrences of suk tā l lokān, the epic refers five timesFootnote ² to puṇyak tā l lokān, “the meritoriously-made worlds”. The word puṇyak ta- is not common in the text: it occurs elsewhere only once, at 13.62.2 – śaṃsa me tan mahābāho phalaṃ puṇyak taṃ mahat. There are thirty-two other occurrences of words beginning puṇyak t…, but they are all unmistakably forms of the agent noun puṇyak t-, not the past participle puṇyak ta-. What is more, five of these occurrencesFootnote ³ form part of the phrase puṇyak tāṃ lokān, “the worlds of the meritorious”, which differs from puṇyak tā l lokān only in the sandhi of the two words, and which makes rather easier sense. It looks as if a single phrase has come to be spelt in two slightly different ways, causing it to have two different meanings. If this is indeed the case, which of the two was intended by the poets? It is surely very suggestive that, of the remaining occurrences of the word puṇyak t-, five are genitive plural forms governing, but not immediately preceding, forms of loka-:

3.247.5

lokān puṇyaktāṃ brahman sadbhir āsevitān nbhiḥ

5.42.17

yān imān āhuḥ svasya dharmasya lokān/dvijātīnāṃ puṇyaktāṃ sanātanān

13.62.51

ete lokāḥ puṇyaktām annadānāṃ mahātmanām

13.70.19

icchāmy ahaṃ puṇyaktāṃ samddhāl/lokān draṣṭuṃ yadi te ‘haṃ varārhaḥ

13.70.20

saṃdarśayām āsa tadā sma lokān/sarvāṃs tadā puṇyaktāṃ dvijendra

The antonym of puṇyak t-, pāpak t-, occurs only once in the genitive plural preceding loka-:

12.255.14

sa sma pāpaktāṃ lokān gacched aśubhakarmaṇā

But again, there is another occurrence of it governing but not preceding the word (I cite the entire śloka because the syntax is not clear from the one line):

7.16.34

nāstikānāṃ ca ye lokā ye ‘gnihorāpittyajām tān āpnuyāmahe lokān ye ca pāpaktām api

The Mahābhārata contains forty-five further occurrences of words beginning pāpak t… (discounting forms of pāpak tya-/pāpak tyā-); all of them are forms of pāpak t-, none forms of pāpak ta-.

The evidence thus strongly suggests that the sequences appearing as puṇyak tā l lokān would be written more normally as puṇyak tāṃ lokān. The substitution of one sandhi for the other is not very surprising, given that in manuscript usage it is common for n to be replaced by anusvāra before l, as m is before any consonant; indeed, Whitney (§213) comments that “according to the Hindu grammarians”, m before l may be replaced by nasalized l, in the same way as happens to n. Of the ten occurrences of our phrase, half are spelt by the editors with anusvāra, half with nasalized l. This may partly reflect differing editorial policies, since there is only one overlap (book 7 has four anusvāras and one nasalized l). But if that phrase is “misspelt” on five occasions, it is at least plausible that the phrase suk tā l lokān could be a parallel case.

Unlike puṇyak ta- and pāpak ta-, the participial form suk ta- does of course occur commonly in the Mahābhārata: we see it functioning both as an adjective meaning “well-made” (e.g. 1.1.89) and as a noun meaning “good deed” (e.g. 1.33.27); and the phrase suk tā l lokān is uniformly spelt with nasalized l, indicating an accusative plural suk tān. It is worth pointing out, however, that the unambiguous phrase suk tināṃ lokān (“worlds of the doers-of-good”) occurs at 6.79.10, and there are further cases where suk tinām governs forms of loka- without immediately preceding them at 12.309.27 and 13.105.1, so the “given essential idea” does exist within the epic.

It is also striking that all cases of the problem phrase are in the accusative plural; we have no forms such as *suk tā lokāḥ. The accusative plural is the only form permitting the ambiguous sandhi to produce two grammatically acceptable readings. Given this, and the parallelism with puṇyak tāṃ lokān, where there can be no serious doubt that the intended meaning was “worlds of the meritorious”, the likelihood seems very strong that there has been a shift from suk tāṃ lokān to suk tā l lokān, from “worlds of the doers-of-good” to “well-made worlds”. Possibly the beguilingly simple grammar of the second phrase helped to compensate for the fact that it actually makes less sense than the first one; scribes and/or editors may also perhaps have been unconsciously influenced by the fairly common occurrence of forms of the past participle of ji- qualifying a following loka- Footnote ⁴ in lines such as dhruvaṃ śastrajitā l lokān prāptāsy amaravad vibho (11.17.7).