Bankim Chandra Chatterji

Publisher's Note

These essays were first published serially in the Indu Prakash, a newspaper of Bombay, between 16 July and 27 August 1894. they were not signed, each instalment had "by a Bengali" printed above the text and "Zero" in place of the signature. In 1950, when the series was rediscovered and shown to Sri Aurobindo, he wrote:

I have not intended to republish these articles as they were written when I had just recently come from England and they contain some very raw matter such as the remarks about Indian art which I no longer hold.

He added that it might be necessary for him "to revise and possibly to omit or alter some passages" before publication. Unfortunately he did not find the time to do this work, and when the essays were published in 1954, the unrevised Indu Prakash text was used. This way reprinted in 1965 and included in the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 1972. The present text has been checked against the Indu Prakash. A few typographical and editorial errors have been corrected