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Preface
decided to hang around a sturdy old oak that Shri A. Ghosh, the former Director General of Archacological Survey of India, is. Our request and our persuasion worked. Ho gave a good look at the original scheme and decidod that the work being first of its kind, we should be well-advised not to make the scheme too discursive. The scheme was, therefore, modified to make it more practical and attainable in time. It is, however, one thing to make a plan and to provide for ample time for each author and quite another for the authors to decide when the time is ripe to put pen to paper. They are all so busy and so very much pressed for time. Then again, the material for the text and the illustrations had to be obtained or re-shuffled with difficulty and written out or re-shaped painstakingly. Their difficulties added to ours manifold.
What do the readers think was the number of letters, reminders, telegrams and cables that have been issued to obtain the contributions in time! Th number till now is four thousand, eight hundred and ninety-one. This is only to suggest how oppressive must have appeared our reminders. We offer our sincere apologies. Another reason of mentioning this fact at some length is to evoke readers' sympathics to the inadequacies that are bound to be there in a work of this nature. Those who would like to venture upon such a project in future (for, after all, ours is only a path-making effort) would do well to be patient and to take cognizance of the hazards of binding themselves to a time-schedule. Such a schedule could not be helped in our case, because it is in centuries that an auspicious occasion like the present one comes. It is appropriate that the project should have found its fulfilment on the occasion of 2500th year of the Nirvana of Bhagawan Mahavira, being celebrated in India and abroad.
It is with real gratification and pleasure that Bharatiya Jnanpith offers its sincere thanks to Shri A. Ghosh for his accepting the Editorship of these Volumes and also for re-accepting the same under trying circumstances on his return from Indonesia after a lapse of one year. His return has been worth waiting for in the best interest of the project. It has been my privilege to work with him and to observe how careful and unsparing to himself has been his devotion to the assignment. In the world of art and architecture, he is considered the model of an editor. Shri Ghosh has spared no pains to make it possible to have the first volume finalized in time for the occasion of the Nirvana Mahotsava Celebrations, when in a public function on November 17, 1974, this Volume is scheduled to be released by Shrimati Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister
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