الإنجليزية 1438

Language: EnglishPages: 272Preface A satisfactory history of the ancient literature of India has not yet been published. The chief difficulty has been the chronology. Despite a certain amount of progress in dating the great kavis, our would-be historians have so far preferred the classificatory method of proceeding by types of literature to grappling with the problems of a strictly chronological presentation. It is useful to have essays on the various types, but a collection of such essays is no substitute for a general history of literature. Just as the types of literary composition, such as lyric poetry, epic, drama, the novel, have been segregated, so to an even greater degree literature in different languages or dialects, Sanskrit, " Epic " Sanskrit, Pali, Ardhamagadhi, Maharastri, Apabhramsa and the like, has been rigidly compartmentalized into so many isolated literatures chronologically unrelated. This compartmentalization has resulted first in the illusion of there being several separate literatures, leading to their being studied in a strange and barren insulation from one another, particularly by more recent writers trained in this artificial tradition. A further and subtler distortion of outlook resulting from the segregated study by dialects and types has been the impression of static literatures, without development, without significant history, seeming to confirm the original bias against historical investigations. The text books of the artificially constituted literatures and types harmonize complacently with the easy and servile (for India) illusion of a static or degenerate society. The non-chronological study of literature is reflected also in the non-chronological " histories " of Indian philosophy, religion, and other subjects for which the main sources are l