Promotion of Learning in India during Muhammadan Rule (by Muhammadans) c3.1

c3.1

My friend, Mr. Narendra Nath Law, the grandson of a famous citizen of Calcutta, has asked me to write an introduction to his book on the *Promotion of Learning in India*, and I willingly comply with his request, as it is always a great pleasure to see Indian gentlemen taking an interest in the history of their country. But some practice during a long life has never made composition an easy matter, and the subject which Mr. Law has chosen is only partially familiar to me. My studies in Indian history began late, and were mainly concerned with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whereas Mr. Law’s work covers, like Livy’s *History of Rome*, a period of over seven centuries. He begins with Sulṭān Maḥmūd of Ghaznī, whose date is some forty years earlier than the Norman Conquest, and ends, for the present, with the close of the eighteenth century. This volume, which is in two books, the first dealing with the Pre-Mughal Period, and the second with the Mughal Dynasty, is now before me. It breaks new ground, for though there have been several literary histories