Bhagwad Gita Vivechanatmak Shabdakosh

Author(s): Prahlad C Divanji
Publisher: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd

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FOREWORD
is my good fortune to-day to introduce the present Critical
IT to the Bhagavadgită world of
scholars. The author of this index needs no introduction to scholars in India or outside: for during a very busy official life connected with the judicial department of the Government of Bombay, Rao Bahadur P. C. Divanji has maintained his scholarly contacts and personally contributed valuable research papers to several oriental journals of repute. He belongs to a generation which, despite the routine of official life, found sufficient leisure to devote himself seriously and whole-heartedly to intellectual pursuits and make definite contribution to Indology in general.
The present index, as the author explains in his luminous Introduction, is the outcome of several factors, the chief of which is the Review of Prof. Kirfel's Verse-Index to this 'crest-jewel' of Indian literature by the late Prof. Dr. V. S. Sukhtankar, which appeared in the Oriental Literary Digest, of which I was the Chief Editor then. After such correspondence and discussion Rao Bahadur Divanji, convinced of the need of a really critical Index-Verborum, despite the many existing word-indices, began collecting his material in all seriousness, and this book which is being published now bears out in full the expectations that his friends had at the time when the work was first planned. It is much to be regretted that Dr. Sukhthakar who first gave concrete shape to Rao Bahadur Divanji's unfulfilled perception of the need of such an index, is no longer with us to contribute this Foreword. His unrivalled knowledge of the Mahabharata Textual Criticism and long contact with its critical edition would have been sufficient guarantees for the real need of this Index which, in a sense, he initiated by his inspiring appeal to Indian Scholarship in that review. My only qualification for the task is that I was the Managing Editor of the Journal in which that review appeared, and was a close personal friend of the late Professor, associated with him very closely during the past seven years. I do so in the spirit of the Gitä which has been referred to by the learned author in his Introduction.
It will be noticed that in the preparation of this Index Rao Bahadur Divanji has kept the needs of philosophers, lexicographers and linguisticians before him. The author has sacrificed much of his time for the sake of the scholars of the Gitä, and if there is any criticism, it is that he is far more conscientious and far more thorough than he has a right to be. The division of word-units into primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary, with the exact references under each head, and an index of words common to primary and the rest of the wordunits, makes the work of the reader far easier than a mere lexicographi
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