The present paper attempts to give an academic response to Roque Mesquita's study, Madhva's Unknown Literary Sources: Some Observations.3
Reviews of the original German version of the above-mentioned text have appeared in various academic journals (some are briefly cited on the book jacket itself). Although well-intentioned in their assessments, they miss serious problems in the text reviewed, which we would like to point out here.
Upon an investigation of Madhva's unknown sources, Mesquita concludes that Madhva himself is the author of them, and that ``we should assume that all the unknown sources of Madhva are not `finished products', but merely `work-titles', which Madhva employs as a loop (sic) to hang up his literary compositions'' (p. 175). Madhva commits the fraud in honesty, for he ``is sincerely and firmly convinced that he was acting on the command of Visnu'' (p. 176). Mesquita has a detailed discussion (pp. 35-62) of the avatara doctrine of Madhva, and indicates how Madhva's claim of being the third incarnation of Vayu, a god he describes as close to Visnu, is pertinent in this regard (pp. 63-87).
Mesquita's monograph upon the subject of Madhva's unknown sources is a welcome foray into the subject, just touched upon by previous authors like Suzanne Siauve (Doctrine de Madhva, Pondicherry, 1968), and B.N.K. Sharma (History of the Dvaita School of Vedanta, 3d. ed., Motilal Banarsidass, 2000). It however makes factual errors of a type not generally expected in mature scholarship, and is thus suspect in its core assessments.
The chief difficulty with Mesquita's work is that his research is monumentally incomplete, so he presents a distorted picture that does little to cause faith in his conclusions. Mesquita is genuinely unfamiliar with the spread of the Vedic corpora, and in a rush to judgement labels Madhva the author of rare Vedic (and some post-Vedic) sources for which we have collateral evidence other than Madhva's own word; in fact, in a few cases, we even have evidence of their present-day or recent availability. This evidence for the existence of many of Madhva's sources that Mesquita carelessly labels ``fictitious'' is damaging to his credibility, to say the least, since it is always a given that a conclusion is no more sound than the facts upon which it rests.
It is well beyond the scope of the present paper to discuss the question of the unknown sources in full detail, but here we simply highlight evidences for a few of the ``fictitious'' sources (with an emphasis on the Sruti sources, which are thoroughly researched), and also point out other errors in the claims Mesquita presents as facts. We intend the following solely as a template for further thorough research, rather than as an exhaustive resource in itself.4
One improvement in the English version over the original German text is the availability of indices, so that names, ``fictitious'' titles, etc., may be readily cross-referenced with the pertinent pages in the book. Taking this into account, we do not necessarily cite every instance where an unknown source is discussed by Mesquita.