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Handiqui has provided us with much food for thought concerning this problem.
Numerous commentaries on the Setubandha composed in the South, the Setutattvacandrika2 from Bengal, the Ramasetupradipa of Ramadasa of Rajasthana etc. evidence a revival of Prakrit studies in the second millenium of the Christian era. The commentarial extracts given by Prof. Handiqui will be very useful also for the later history of Prakrit studies.
It is quite evident that the future scholars working to settle various recensions and prepare a critical text of the Setu. bandha shall have to build on the foundations laid by Prof. Handiqui. The readers will no doubt welcome this translation and study of the Setubandha with several years' painstaking and careful work at their back, and appreciate them as a major contribution in the field of Prakrit philology. The Prakrit Text Society is not only extremely glad to publish this work, but it is also grateful to Prof. Handiqui for very generously bearing the publication cost of the work and donating it to the Society,
2. On p. 98 of the Introduction Prof. Handiqui has drawn our attention to the fact that the Commentator Kulanatha cites a Desi lexicon different from the Desinamamala of Hemacandra. It may be observed in this connection that in the setutattvacandrika, a seventeenth century compilation from earlier commentaries of Srinivasa, Kulanatha, Lokanatha and others, a Desi lexicon called Desisära is cited. It seems to have been composed in Anustubh metre and gives meaning equivalents in Sanskrit. In the Desinamamala of Hemacandra, the citations from one of the earlier authorities have the same features. It is likely that the Desisara was among the sources that served Hemacandra.
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