Shadavashyaka Banav Bodh Vrutti

Author(s): Prabodh Bechardas Pandit
Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

Page 10

GENERAL EDITOR'S FOREWORD
during the ary and histauscripts;
I have great pleasure in presenting to the scholars in Indian Linguistics Professor P. B. Pandit's "A Study of the Gujarati Language in the 14th Century-with a critical edition of the Sadāvaśyaka-bālāvabodhavịtti of Taruņaprabha" which is published as 71st volume of the Singhi Jain Series.
It is not an insignificant coincidence that my own early research work began with the search for Old Gujarati manuscripts; the vast number of manuscripts in which the literary and historical traditions of Gujarat have been preserved during the last one thousand years have attracted many scholars; I edited a collection of source material for the history of Gujarati Language, Prācīna-Gujarati-Gadya-Sandarbha, in 1930, in the research series of the Gujarāta-Purātattva-Mandira of Gujarāta Vidyāpīth. I had selected a number of prose writings of the 13-16 centuries; besides other samples of early Gujarati texts, I had also selected, for this edition, a number of narratives from a manuscript of Taruņaprabha's Şadāvaśyaka-bālāvabodhavịtti. It is gratifying to see that now Professor P. B. Pandit has brought out the complete text of Taruņaprabha's work, together with a linguistic study and a comprehensive etymological word-index.
Professor Pandit has used four manuscripts for the critical edition; Taruņaprabha composed the text in the year 1411 V.S.; one of the dated manuscripts used by Professor Pandit belongs to the year 1412 V.S.; the text thus made available to us is, therefore, fairly reliable. It may, however, be noted that Taruņaprabha's text must have been quite a popular work during his time and a number of manuscripts must have been copied by his pupils, probably at the time of Taruņaprabha's writing; a diligent search of the various manuscript collections will show many more manuscripts of this work; a comprehensive study of this text material will provide useful data not only for textual criticism but also for dialectal variations in early Gujarati.
The printing and publication of this work has been unusually delayed. I received the press copy for the work in 1956, and I decided that the printing should be done at the Nirnayasagara Press; the progress of printing at the Nirnayasagara Press was so slow that after a few formes of the text and index were printed we decided to withdraw the work from the Nirnayasagara Press in 1965 and requested the Āryabhūşaņa Press of Poona to undertake the work; it took six more years for the Aryabhūşaņa Press to complete the printing.
I may add a personal note to this Foreword. Professor P.B. Pandit's father, Pandit Bechardas Doshi and I were colleagues in the Gujarāta Vidyāpītha; both of us have worked together in the same field of research for many years; Pandit Bechardas's work has also been published earlier in the Singhi Jain Series. Now, with the publication of his son's work, I think we are symbolically handing over the tradition of learning and scholarship to the new generation. My best wishes to those who carry forward this tradition.
7-7-1973
MUNI JINAVIJAYA