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EDITOR'S PREFACE
11
would have exceeded my own resources by far, had they not been met for the greater part by a generous subvention made by Mr. J. R. D. Tata and the other directors of his Trust. Finally, the management and workmen of the Nirnay Sagar Press did their very best to give excellent printing at a time of growing inflation, acute shortages, through days when transport strikes and riots in the streets made it difficult or hazardous even to reach the press. There must be many who could have prepared a satisfactory edition of Bhartṛhari, while the text itself is very simple when compared, for example, with the rare and difficult works discovered by Muni Jinavijayaji; but without the co-operation of the press workers, nothing could have reached the general public.
It
To the reputation enjoyed among orientalists by my father, the late Prof. Dharmanand Kosambi, I owe the cheerful cooperation received. is a matter for sorrow that he did not choose to live till this work appeared, to judge with what success and results the critical methods which he himself taught me in my boyhood had been applied here. It seems to me that no major social problem of our times is solved by fasting to death, or by the parallel though more effective philosophy of the Mahatma. The dedication, therefore, is to the men from whose writings I first learned that society can and must be changed before we attain the stage at which human history will begin. The senseless bloodshed and increasing distress of our times are inevitable only because of the present class-structure of society; Bhartṛhari's poetry of frustration provides at most an escape, but no solution.
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay 26; June 4, 1948
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