Bhandarkar Report 1904
BHANDAKAR REPORT on the search of Prākṛit and Saṃskṛit manuscripts 1904 [3 of 69]
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3. When I got my orders, I felt that for such a preliminary tour as I had been asked to make it was necessary to settle the programme before starting. The programme, however, cannot be settled in such cases unless sufficient time is allowed beforehand to ascertain the places where there are collections of manuscripts available and to adopt measures to persuade the owners to allow the collections to be seen. This feeling I have since found confirmed by my own experience and by the experience of the late Dr. Bühler as given in the following passage from his report of 20th June 1869: —
“From the experience which I have thus gained myself, as well as from the judgment which I have formed on tours made by other scholars, and from the opinions of gentlemen who are well acquainted with this country, it would appear to me advisable that, whenever any scholar intends to proceed on a tour in search of manuscripts, he should fix at least three months beforehand on the part of the country which he wishes to visit, and that he should send a good Śāstrī to make enquiries and to obtain lists of the books extant in the various libraries. By this means the scholar would be enabled to devote most of his time to the examination of the manuscripts mentioned in the list previously prepared by his Śāstrī."
As I had to go on tour immediately on receipt of the orders, anything like what has been recommended in the above extract was out of the question. Under the circumstances I did the next best thing by going to Indore first. It was at the instance of Captain Luard of Indore, the Gazetteer Officer in Central India, that the Government of India resolved to depute me on special duty. It was he who had reported that there were large numbers of manuscripts extant in Central India both in private libraries and in. temple records and had suggested the advisability of taking steps to get them catalogued. In his office, therefore, I expected to get ready information about at least a few such collections of manuscripts.
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