In the first issue of our Bulletin the Director was good enough to allow me to insert a very diffident and tentative attempt to record the characteristic sounds of Bengali in the script of the International Phonetic Association, and to reduce them to some sort of rule for the benefit of students. Writing at a long distance of time and space from Bengal, I was not so rash as to suppose that my assertions were beyond question. On the contrary, I hoped and wished to provoke discussion on a subject which has only recently become the subject of serious study. I was not surprised, therefore, when a valued colleague (not himself a Bengali) told me that some Bengali friends of his were convinced that my attempt was a failure and my statements incorrect. This criticism, however, was not of much help to me, since it did not give details.

The pepole distinguished by the name of Kade, because they speak a language differing form those of their neighbours, live mostly in the Katha district of Upper Burma, and inhabit a tract of country lying roughly between 95° E., and 24° and 24° 30′N.

Ānandavardhana has been assigned by Biihler and Jacobi to the middle of the ninth century, on the strength of Rājatarangi, v. 34, which makes him one of the ornaments of the court of Avantivarman (A.D. 855–84). The statements of Kalhana; no doubt, must be accepted with caution, but it is unlikely, as we shall see from several other considerations, that the tradition in Kāśmīr, thus embodied in the Rāja-tarangi, regarding a famous author, should have maintained a false or unfounded account. We are pretty certain of the time of Abhinavagupta, Ānandavardhana's commentator; for, as he himself states, his commentary on the Īśvara-pratyabhijñā was written in A.D. 1014–15, while his Krama-stotra was composed in A.D. 991. This would certainly place him towards the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century.

The Director of the School of Oriental Studies has invited me to contribute to this first number of the Bulletin a sketch of the history of the foundation of the School. The present article has only the modest ambition of supplying to the future historian of the School certain references, dates, and facts indispensable for his task.

The Devanāgarī alphabet has been shown by Bühler to have been -L derived from the Brahmī, in which the earliest documents and most of Asoka's inscriptions are written. With the revival of Sanskrit learning and literature, which took place in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. under the Gupta emperors, the development of the Brahml script proceeded apace. The first step or innovation was the method adopted by which the letters were made to hang from the horizontal top-line. This line first appears to a marked degree in the period, dating from 350 after Christ, but becomes only fully developed in the scripts circa A.D. 800–1200. Thus the p of the Baijnāth Prasastī (A.D. 804) has an open top, but appears with a closed top, , in the Kanheri cave inscriptions, only to open out again in the tenth century. The character may be regarded as having become fixed in the eleventh century (vide Bhimadeva's script A.D. 1029). And similarly with other letters.

It is not my intention in this note to discuss the question of Urdu Orthography in any comprehensive manner. All I wish to do is to draw attention to two points in Urdu Orthography in regard to which European printing presses can render us a great deal of service.

In the following pages is presented a translation of a passage from Shaḍakshari Dēvar's famous Kanarese poem Śabaraśaṅkara-vilāsa. Some of the more tedious passages I have omitted; enough remains to show how the pious Śaiva conceives his Paradise. Certainly Shaḍakshari's visions of heaven are very unlike those of Dante and Milton. But they have much value as documents both of religion and of poetry.

When I wrote my note on (33) , etc. (Bulletin, I, 3, p. 39), I was unaware, that Père Havret had discussed and amplified his previous translation of the passage in a small pamphlet entitled La Stèle Chrétienne de Si-ntgan-fou: quelques notes extraites d'un commentaire inédit, which was published at Leiden in 1897. Through the kindness of my friend Mr. A. C. Moule I have since had access to these notes, where it is conclusively shown that the passage in question conceals an allusion to the following words in the Slhih chou clti, spoken bv the envoys from Yüeh-chih to the Emperor Wu Ti: “Notre état est à trois cent mille li d'ici; on y observe constainment les présages célestes. Or, le vent d'est a soufflé d'après les lois harmoniques durant des centaines de décades sans discontinue; et les images azurés ont donné leur note musicale des mois entiers sans interruption. De lá, nous pûmies inférer qu'en ce même temps il se trouvait en Chine un prince vertueux.” Pére Havret then turns to the sentence in the Inscription, and interprets it in the light of his discovery: “En définitive, il faut voir dans ces nuages et dans ce vent, non point des phénomènes météorologiques qui accompagnèient le voyage d'Olopen, mais une formule flatteuse pour l'empereur T'ai-tsong dont la renommée attirait vers la Chine les prédicateurs d'Occident.” It will be seen that the compliment is delicately implied rather than actually expressed in the Chinese text, being only recognizable by one who is acquainted with the passage in the Shih chou chi. My translation, therefore, may stand; but the initial note about Kaban's forecasting of the weather will need some modification.

In 1912 Pandit Ganapati Sastri, the learned editor of the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series, began to publish a group of thirteen plays, all apparently by the same author, which now fill numbers 15–17, 20, 22, 26, 39, and 42 of the series, and for which he claims Bhāsa as author. As Bhāsa was considerably earlier than the great Kālidāsa, who speaks of him in the prelude of his Mālaxikâgnimitra as a poet of established reputation, and as no works of Bhāsa have hitherto been known to survive, this discovery has naturally aroused much interest, and the erudite accepted.

Dr. John Steele has very kindly sent me some criticisms on the Notes which I contributed to the first number of the Bulletin, and I propose to deal with these before proceeding-further.

On February 23rd, 1917, the School of Oriental Studies, London Institution, was formally opened by His Majesty King George V. The King was accompanied on this occasion by the Queen and Princess Mary, and the Royal Party included the Countess of Airlie, Lady Mary Trefusis, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, Minister of Education, Lord Hylton, Lord Stamfordham, Colonel the Hon. C. Willoughby, Commander Sir Charles Cust, and Sir Clive Wigram.

An interesting attempt has been made by Professor H. Lüders to vindicate for the shadow play an important place in the development of the Indian drama. The term denoting the performers of such plays he holds to have been Çaubhika, or, in vernacular form, sobhiya; they explained to the audience the shadow pictures displayed before them, and thus were precursors of the true drama. The example of Java is called into service to meet the obvious criticism that every consideration tells in favour of the view that the shadow play is later than, and based upon, the true drama.

The following poems have never been translated before. I have added to my translations only such comments as are indispensable. I hope in a subsequent essay to discuss the importance of pre-T'ang poetry, and to give references to the sources which I have used.

Readers of the Arabian Nights, The Assemblies of El Hariri, and contemporaneous Oriental literature of a similar stamp, become familiar with a type of humanity characteristic of the locality and epoch in which those romances of Eastern life are laid. This characteristic type is a combination of merchant and divine, who is a great traveller and purveyor of news. He is always dignified, a gossip and a busybody in a gentlemanly way, and distinguished no less for his punctilious performance of all the external observances of the creed of Islam than for his assiduity in his commercial operations. To my mind residence in the country occupied by the Hausa people cannot fail to prompt the thought that between this typical personality and the average man of Hausaland there is a striking kinship in character, if not in race.

‘[Raban] consulted the omens in the sky and carried with him the true Scriptures; he observed the winds in their relation to the musical tubes, and quickly passed through difficulties and dangers.’

being defined in the dictionaiy as the plain sense of the passage is that Raban tried to forecast the weather by means of divination before starting on his journey; our translators, however, probably because they had an uneasy feeling that this was not quite the right thing for such an eminent Christian to do, have one and all fought shy of this obvious rendering. It is not necessary, of course, to assume that Raban actually did resort to such practices, for we have already seen that the author of the inscription suits his language to the taste of his audience; the second clause, indeed, alludes to a form of divination which is peculiarly Chinese.

That language is an ethnographic document of fundamental importance is a plain truism. It also hardly needs stressing that the knowledge of all aspects of tribal life, without exception, is essential to a sound knowledge of any one aspect. To omit, for instance, the study of religion, or economics, or social organization when dealing with a native society, results not only in our ignorance of the subject omitted, but also lowers the value of all that has been recorded. All aspects of tribal life play into each other; to sunder a few of them from the rest results in a mutilation of the whole, and language is not an exception in this respect. The study of the linguistic aspect is indispensable, especially if we want to grasp the social psychology of a tribe, i.e. their manner of thinking, in so far as it is conditioned by the-peculiarities of their culture. All this is clear and well known.

[The following pages form a portion of what has been written by me for the section of the Grundriss der Indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde, dealing with the Indo-Aryan Vernaculars. The work was not completed when the War broke out, and as there is no immediate prospect of their publication as originally intended, I gladly accept Sir Denison Ross's suggestion, and offer them as they stand for preliminary publication in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies.]

47. We have completed our geographical survey of the Indo-Aryan Vernacular and their dialects. It has been seen that they have been divided into three families, a Midland, an Intermediate, and an Outer. We shall now consider the mutual relationship of these families, and it will be more convenient to consider their growth downwards from the source than to folloAv their course upstream. The treatment must necessarily be historical, but the portion dealing with those stages which preceded that of the Indo-Aryan Vernacular lies outside the frame of the present work, and my account of them will be as brief as is consistent with gaining a clear idea of the whole subject.

Of these poems all but three are now translated for the first time. Aversions of Nos. 8, 11, and 14 were published by Pfizmaier (Denkschriften der Kais. Akad. d. Wissensch in Wien, vol. xxxvi), but they were so incorrect that I need make no apology for translating these three poems again.