A History of Indian Literature v3.c33.1

v3.c33.1

When 23 years ago I undertook to write a "history of the Indian literature" and had begun to work on its preliminaries, I hoped to be able to complete the work in one volume in about three to four years. But the more I dived deep into the subject, the mass of available materials heaped up the more and this increased the difficulties of shifting them. And thus the work, that was planned to cover a single volume, has now become one of three volumes, and parts of this book appeared at considerable intervals : 1904, 1908, 1913, 1920 and here is the last volume at the end. Now after the work is concluded, nobody can be aware of its shortcomings and imperfections more than its author himself. But in case I had wished to let it go into the world, these faults were mended, I would have to wait still for not less than 20 years. In particular I feel and have always felt the obvious deficiency that I have prepared a history of the Indian literature in a very limited measure. But the hard fact remains that we do not possess any trustworthy information about the oldest and most important works of Indian literature, and whatever we can say with regard to the antiquity and origin of the earliest religious and secular poetry as well as about the beginning of the scientific literature is nothing but hypothetical, and naturally many readers will be disappointed to find in *my history of literature* so few definite statements on chronological topics. In fact, I have been accused by a critic of having used expressions like "probably", "perhaps", "apparently", etc. at too many places. In case everything in the history of Indian literature had been fully clear it would have been easy to create an impression with discussions supported by more or less definite figures with regard to dates. But I believe that even a layman derives more benefit when he comes to know about the meagreness of chronological data in Indian literature than when one leads him into the hamlet of Potemkin. And for the beginners, who may choose to undertake research in Indology—they will need consulting this book the most, since it is of great importance [at this stage of study] to be able to distinguish accurately between definite and indefinite statements in order to arrive at the points at which further researches have to be carried. For this very reason, I have stated in the footnotes the views that I do not participate in.