Sketches of Ancient Indian Literature (An Old and Rare Book)

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The publication of my Ocherki drevneindliskoi literatury [Sketches of Ancient Indian Literature), in English, in the Soviet Indology series, is a matter of great honour for me and I wou'd like to express my deep, sincere gratitude to the series editor, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, and the translator, Harish Chandra Gupta, who have also laboured hard in seeing the work through the press.

One thing I would like to mention here is that the very character of the present work is determined by the fact that it was meant to give the Soviet reader an over-all-panorama of the historical development of the literature of the peoples of India in ancient and early medieval period and to familiarize him with some pearls gifted to mankind by the endless ocean of the creative genius of the peoples of India.

The subject of this work being what it is, any one venturing to take it up inevitably involves himself in a serious scientific discussion not only with the eminent scholars of today but also with the great classics of world Indology. As such, the author has only to take recourse to the example of that creative modesty which the immortal Kalidasa set forth in his oft-quoted introductory verses of the Raghuvamsa.

The present work was conceived by the author almost over thirty- five years back while he was still at the University. But the decisive impetus came only when he had the good luck of staying and working in India, thus making his modest contribution to the great work of friendship between the peoples of the Soviet Union and the Republic of India. Years which he spent in India were especially important in that these gave him the opportunity to grace the very land which had given the world marvellous geniuses of the art of word and thought and, thus, to have a first-hand acquaintance of the life of the peoples, -for whom even today the works of these remarkable toilers are not just a great heritage of the past but a precious integral part of their modern culture, an unending source of inspiration to live and to struggle for a glorious future.

To conclude, the author also likes to say how beholden he is to all the colleagues whose works and advice he has drawn upon. Many such works would be found mentioned in the bibliographical references, but the author cannot but specially name here the National Professor, Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Professors V. Raghavan, H. P. Dvivedi, Bhagawat Sharan Upadhyaya, Baldev Upadhyaya, Romilla Thapar, and M. S. Randhava.

The culture, literature and art of the peoples of India occupy one of the honoured places in world civilization. In this country, where, from times immemorial, there lived in constant inter-action and close contact indigenous peoples as well as peoples immigrating to settle down-nationalities and tribes of various origins-there occurred, as a synthesis of creative cultural process, a unique phenomenon which bears the name of Indian culture.

An integral part of this is the literary creation of the peoples of India, i.e. the literary-historical process covering a period of over four thousand years. In the course of this period there emerged, succeeding one another, various literary communities. Some of these emerged as literatures of ethnic groups, others as literatures of religious communities; still others found their support in the official language. Then, there were others, remaining in a state of subjugation, which were absorbed by communities having state or religious sanction, etc. In the latter half of the first millenium A.D., there appeared literary communities which in the modern time and especially in the conditions of independent India have become national literatures.

During the last two decades, the study by Soviet Indologists of the literature of the peoples of India has made a consider- able advance. The friendly relations of the Soviet Union with the Republic of India and good neighbourly collaboration with the Republic of Pakistan have led to a serious, all-round development of Indological studies in our country and to an unusual popularity of the multilingual and multinational literature of the peoples of India and Pakistan.