Page:Fifty years of the Indian Antiquary.djvu/12

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
6
Fifty Years of the "Indian Antiquary"


French.— M. A. D'Abbadie, M. A. Barth, M. J. Bloch, M. Sylvain Levi, M. de Milloue, Prof, de la Vallee Poussin, M. Emile Senart.

Italian — Dr. L. P. Tessitori.

Norwegian.— Prof. Sten Konow.

Russians.— Prof. S. d'Oldenburg, E. Rehatsek.

Swede.— Prof. J. Charpentier.

Women Authors. — Lady Grierson, Miss L. M. Anstey, Mrs. Mabel Bode, Mrs. Anna M. Childers, Miss Mabel Duff (Mrs. Rickmers), Mrs. Murray- Ainslie, Miss E. Lyall, Miss C. A. Nicholson, Mrs. Ramabai (R. D. M.), Mrs. F. A. Steel, Miss L. A. Thomas, Miss Putlibai Wadia (Mrs. J. K. Kabraji).

The Journal has always been and still is, printed in the same Press in Bombay (Mazgaon), at first owned by the Bombay Education Society's Press and subsequently by the British India Press. The illustrations have likewise been chiefly produced in the same building in London (Hanover Street, Peckham) by the late Mr. William Griggs (W. Griggs and Sons) and his successors Messrs. Charles Whittingham and Griggs Ltd. The relations of the Editor-Proprietors with the Presses and the Illustrating Firms have always been most cordial, enabling them to surmount together the many difficulties of publication brought about by the conditions of European life in India, by the many widely divergent vernacular characters used, and latterly, by the Great War. One set of several expensive plates had to be reproduced and despatched three times, owing to enemy action, before they reached the pages of the Indian Antiquary. The meticulous accuracy of the Peckham firm's reproduction of Inscriptions has been everywhere acknowledged by scholars. In this way 478 plates of Inscriptions have been published in the Journal itself and 624 in its Supplement, the Epigraphia Indica. In the matter of securing accurate reproductions of Inscriptions, the Editor-Proprietors have never spared expense, owing to their importance to historical research, notably in the case of the Asoka Inscribed Edicts on the Iron Pillars at Delhi and Allahabad, which were scientifically reproduced at great cost in 1883-4, in the result found to be justified [Vide Prof. Buhler's fundamental article on the subject in the 13th vol. (1884)].

The Indian Antiquary has seen many changes take place in the fifty years of its history. Among them the following may be specially noticed here. When the Journal was started it was still the fashion to talk of the 1000 years between Asoka and the Muhammadan ascendancy as a blank as to dates and real history, but thanks to the efforts of many contributors to the Indian Antiquary it has been a principal means of filling up this great gap almost year by year. In the accomplishment of so great a feat, its main contribution has been the systematising of the method of recording reproducing and editing inscriptions and settling the principles of