[4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST one verse are grouped together in the first book (the ekanipata) and so on till book fourteen, after which there is a shift to Jatakas with twenty, thirty or more verses, till the last section, number twenty two, called the mahanipata, containing stories which run into hundreds of verses. These are very different in texture, although there are certain structural and thematic similarities between the longest and the shortest texts. While the printed page can at best provide an extremely rough estimate of the length of texts which were meant to be narrated rather than read, or, even if read, were meant to be read in order to be narrated, the differences are sharp. On the one hand we have books one to three, comprising about three hundred Jatakas, with only eleven stories ranging between 6 to 10 pages, and about 260 ranging between 1 to 3 pages. At the other end, in the Mahanipata, the shortest Jataka runs to eleven pages, and the longest to 90. Obviously, remembering and narrating such a text would require a certain degrree of skill and expertise, as well as an audience tuned to the performance. It is also likely that the longer narrations were subject to greater variation and may have been less standardized than the shorter ones. In effect then, the selection and dissemination of a particular story would have been subject to specific contexts which are extremely difficult to reconstruct. Given the canonical centrality of the gathas, it is important to bear in mind that, except in the longest Jatakas, the gathas are by no means always self-explanatory, and, in fact, require a prose commentary to contextualize them, which is provided, more often than not, by the story of the past. In the shortest Jatakas, where the story is built around a single gatha the verse underscores the turning point or the moral of the narrative, and is usually attributed to the Bodhisatta (the Buddha in his previous birth). Such verses frequently have a proverbial ring. Where two or more verses are employed, these are often used to mark out the speech of the protagonists, to comment on the action, and in the process stagger its pace, so that its implications are made explicit. The gathas are repetivive at a number of levels. Many have been traced to other Buddhist works such as the Dhammapada, some have similarities of form and content with epic verse, or with those found in the Pancatantra, many gathas are repeated in different Jatakas in more or less identical contexts.5 While one can talk in terms of borrowing and lending in such a situation, it is perhaps more fruitful to bear in mind that the recitation of a verse in the context of a specific Jataka could evoke a variety of associations which were not necessarily confined within the immediate narrative framework. At the same time, the interpretation of the gatha implicit in the narrative, would add yet another layer to the meanings clustered around the verse.