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EDITOR'S PREFACH
11
would have exceeded my own resources by far, had they not been met for the
greater part by a generous subvention made by Mr. J. R. D. Tata and the
other directors of his Trust. Finally, the management and workmen of
the Nirnay Sagar Press did their very best to give excellent printing at
a time of growing inflation, acute shortages, through days when transport.
strikes and riots in the streets made it difficult or hazardous even to reach
the press. There must be many who could have prepared a satisfactory edition
of Bhartrhari, while the text itself is very simple when compared, for example,
with the rare and difficult works discovered by Muni Jinavijayaji; but without
the co-operation of the press workers, nothing could have reached the general
public.
To the reputation enjoyed among orientalists by my father, the late
Prof. Dharmanand Kosambi, I owe the cheerful cooperation received. It
is a matter for sorrow that he did not choose to live till this work appeared,
to judge with what success and results the critical methods which he himself
taught me in my hoyhood had hoon applied hero. It seems to me that
no major social problem of our times is solved by fasting to death, or by
the parallel though more effective philosophy of the Mahatma. The dedication,
therefore, is to the men from whose writings I first loarned that society
can and must be changed before we attain the stage at which human history
will begin. The senseless bloodshed and increasing distress of our times are
inevitable only because of the present class-structure of society; Bhartrhari's
poetry of frustration provides at most an oscape, but no solution.
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,
Bombay 26; June 4, 1948
D. D. KOSAMBI
11
would have exceeded my own resources by far, had they not been met for the
greater part by a generous subvention made by Mr. J. R. D. Tata and the
other directors of his Trust. Finally, the management and workmen of
the Nirnay Sagar Press did their very best to give excellent printing at
a time of growing inflation, acute shortages, through days when transport.
strikes and riots in the streets made it difficult or hazardous even to reach
the press. There must be many who could have prepared a satisfactory edition
of Bhartrhari, while the text itself is very simple when compared, for example,
with the rare and difficult works discovered by Muni Jinavijayaji; but without
the co-operation of the press workers, nothing could have reached the general
public.
To the reputation enjoyed among orientalists by my father, the late
Prof. Dharmanand Kosambi, I owe the cheerful cooperation received. It
is a matter for sorrow that he did not choose to live till this work appeared,
to judge with what success and results the critical methods which he himself
taught me in my hoyhood had hoon applied hero. It seems to me that
no major social problem of our times is solved by fasting to death, or by
the parallel though more effective philosophy of the Mahatma. The dedication,
therefore, is to the men from whose writings I first loarned that society
can and must be changed before we attain the stage at which human history
will begin. The senseless bloodshed and increasing distress of our times are
inevitable only because of the present class-structure of society; Bhartrhari's
poetry of frustration provides at most an oscape, but no solution.
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,
Bombay 26; June 4, 1948
D. D. KOSAMBI