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FOREWORD
I was invited to deliver lectures in the 'Sir Sayajirao Gaekwad Honorarium Lecture Series' conducted under the auspices of the Baroda University and I could deliver these lectures-for this I must first of all express my heartfelt gratefulness to the organizers of that lecture-series and particularly to the learned lady Shrimati Hansa Mehta, who was then the vice-chancellor of the Baroda University. Had these gentlemen not invited me to deliver lectures in this honorofic series, then an occasion to write out these lectures in the form in which they have been actually written would have hardly arisen during my life-time. The topics discussed in these lectures were of course lying latent in my mind in the form of scattered impressions, but the task of expressing them in a well systematized form demands both concentration and labour. The fact that the Baroda University provided me an occasion to undertake this task constitutes a festival of joy for my life-this is what I feel.
Had I so desired I could write these lectures in the national language Hindi and had they been available in Hindi they would have received a very wide circle of readership. But despite all this I preferred my mothertongue Gujarati, and one and the chief reason for that is that I have been a supporter of not only ordinary education but even higher and highest education in different subjects being imparted through the medium of to discuss my own one's mother-tongue. Hence it was obligatory for me subject in my mother-tongue. In the course of fulfilling this obligation I had a realization of the special power inherent in the Gujarati language better devoted student makes an authentic than ever before. Certainly, if a attempt to discuss his own subject in his mothertongue then he can do particular justice to this subject and besides developing the structure of make manifest its internal strength. Particularly his mother-tongue can significant literature thus composed in different provincial languages does ultimately go to enhance the capacity of the national language and introduce rare augmentation in its mass of literature.
If even though expressed in Gujarati these ideas possess something like weight of their own then entering the arena of the national language they will after all shed lustre on it; on the other hand, if they possess even though expresed in the national no such permanent weight then language in the first count itself they will lie rotting in one corner. Since I view matters thus I have in a way subjected myself to the hard test of a touchstone; now to examine my performance is the task of those possessing expertize in the field concerned,
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