HINDU LITERATURE

1. The Book of Good Counsels 2. Nala and Damayanti 3 Selections From the Rámáyana 4. Śakoontalá 5. Poems by Toru Dutt. PREFACE: The “Hitopadeśa” is a work of high antiquity and extended popularity. The prose is doubtless as old as our own era; but the intercalated verses and proverbs compose a selection from writings of an age extremely remote. The “Mahabharata” and the textual Veds are of those quoted; to the first of which Professor M. Williams (in his admirable edition of the “Nala” 1860) assigns a date of 350 B.C. while he claims for the “Rig-Veda” an antiquity as high as B.C. 1300. The “Hitopadeśa” may thus be fairly styled “The Father of all Fables”; for from its numerous translations have come Æsop and Pilpay and in later days Reineke Fuchs. Originally compiled in Sanscrit it was rendered by order of Nushiraván in the sixth century A.D. into Persic. From the Persic it passed A.D. 850 into the Arabic and thence into Hebrew and Greek. In its own land it obtained as wide a circulation. The Emperor Acbar impressed with the wisdom of its maxims and the ingenuity of its apologues commended the work of translating it to his own Vizir Abdul Fazel. That minister accordingly put the book into a familiar style and published it with explanations under the title of the “Criterion of Wisdom.” The Emperor had also suggested the abridgment of the long series of shlokes which here and there interrupt the narrative and the Vizir found this advice sound and followed it like the present Translator. To this day in India the “Hitopadeśa” under other names (as the “Anvári Suhaili”1) retains the delighted attention of young and old and has some representative in all the Indian vernaculars. A work so well esteemed in the East cannot be unwelcome to Western readers who receive it here a condensed but faithful transcript of sense and manner.As often as an Oriental allusion or a name in Hindoo mythology seemed to ask some explanation for the English reader notes have been appended bearing reference to the page. In their compilation and generally acknowledgment is due to Professor Johnson’s excellent version and edition of the “Hitopadeśa” and to Mr. Muir’s “Sanscrit Texts.”