Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c2.4

c2.4

As for the epigraphic materials to be treated in this book, it should be emphasized that the limits are linguistic rather than geographical or chronological. Any and all inscriptions in Indo-Aryan languages, whether ancient or recent, from India² or from other lands, are treated as relevant to this study. Indian inscriptions in languages of other families—mainly Dravidian languages—are not treated in detail, although I have not felt constrained to apply this exclusion too rigidly since the fields of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian epigraphy are closely related and even overlap to a considerable extent (for example, in the many bilingual Indo-Aryan/Dravidian inscriptions). This limitation is admittedly primarily one of convenience; although a complete study of Indian inscriptions ideally would cover material in Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and other language groups, from a practical standpoint the material involved is so vast that it would hardly be possible to do it justice in one volume. In any case, I am not qualified to treat Dravidian inscriptions adequately. In point of fact, most previous studies of Indian epigraphy have similarly concentrated on one or the other of the two major bodies of material, namely, Indo-Aryan or Dravidian, presumably for similar reasons, though they have usually not explicitly admitted that they are doing so.