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PREFACE THE late Dr, MAURICE WINTERNITZ was the foremost T in that galaxy of German orientalists who have by their researches and publications rendered yeoman service to the cause of Sanskrit literature and made a valuable contribution to the understanding of Indian Culture. During his whole life this great savant tirelessly laboured to serve the noble cause of Indological studies by writing books and essays and editing numerous works dealing with the various aspects of Sanskrit and Prakrit literature, His “HISTORY OF INDIAN LITERATURE” will always stand as an immortal pillar to his fame bearing testimony to his intense devotion to learning and scholarship. The work will be read with respect and admiration so long as even one student of Sanskrit literature lives on this earth. * In that monumental work Dr. WINTERNITZ has drawn a graphic and authoritative outline of three extremely rich secular literatures written in three main languages of the old Indo-Aryan family, namely, Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali, and dealing with three distinct strands of the Indic culture, the Brahmanic, the Jainist and the Buddhist. It is no mere accident that he wrote the great composition in his own national, the German, language. He had an almost equal mastery of the English language, and he was no doubt aware that most of those who would make use of his book were English-knowing rather than German-knowing. Still he preferred. like most other German scholars to enrich his own mother tongue by publishing his magnum opus in the German language. In doing so he was in effect paying homage to the spirit of Indo-Germanic culture and acting upon his supreme faith in Aryan ideology,
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