A Middle Indo-Aryan Reader- Set of Two Volumes (An Old and Rare Book)

Preface In the year 1953 the University of Calcutta published through our joint editorship (associated with Sri Gokul Chandra De) a Middle Indo-Aryan Reader which gave some representative selections of different types of Middle Indo-Aryan or Prakrit as available from the third century B.C. to the fifteenth century A.C. Only the Text volume was published, and the Notes which were promised could not be brought out. The first edition has been exhausted, and at the request of the University, with our joint authorship, a fully revised and enlarged edition of our Middle Indo-Aryan Reader is now offered to the students and general public.

The present work is entirely revised and brought up to date. The selections have been made primarily from the linguistic standpoint, and all phases of Middle Indo-Aryan along its nearly two thousand years of development right down to the initial period of New Indo-Aryan have been sought to be represented. Although the approach has been strictly linguistic, the chronological arrangement which has been followed provides a certain amount of historical background for the development of Middle Indo-Aryan. We have not neglected the special development in Middle Indo-Aryan in the Khotan Dhammapada and the Niya Documents. We trust the present corpus of selections will give a fairly representative and significant body of texts for the students of Indo-Aryan linguistics.

We would like also to state that the literary aspect has not been ignored. Some typical texts and passages with an aesthetic appeal have also been included.

In the Notes, which for the convenience of the students is published in a separate volume, we have tried to be brief, and we have sought to bring out the linguistic aspect of the matter in its proper historical development to make the understanding of the latter easy. In these notes the Sanskrit equivalents are printed in italics. Anyone who has anything to do with the study of Indian Linguistics, both of Aryan and Dravidian (particularly in the case of the cultured Dravidian languages, including Old Tamil) will have to admit that a knowledge of the Sanskrit language and of the Sanskritic background is indispensable for a proper and correct understanding of the linguistic and literary development of all these speeches of the Aryan as well as of the Dravidian family of languages. For Middle Indo-Aryan, consequently, Sanskrit is a sine qua non, and even in the case of a language like Pali which by virtue of its extensive literature has obtained an independent position as a classical language, the Sanskrit background is still more necessary. As a knowledge of Sanskrit makes the understanding of Middle Indo-Aryan and also of New Indo-Aryan much easier, in both descriptive and historical linguistics of these two phases of the Aryan speech in India, the Sanskrit basis or background has always to be kept in mind.

We trust that this book will be helpful to those for whom it is intended, and we shall welcome any criticism and suggestion for making it more useful.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages