Museum in the provincial capital, the seat of the University). The collection of all these requires time and a long-thought-out and steadily-pursued plan of aquisition, as much as money (In science we require apparatus, which is a question of money only).
As Professor Ernst Leumann (of Strassburg) writes:
“It is generally not known or scarcely noticed, to what an extent the history of any science is dependent on the local distribution of its materials. Denmark has only produced Pali scholars, Northern Buddhism is chiefly cultivated in Paris, and other branches of Indian studies are more or less confined to particular seats of learning. The real explanation [ of this fact ] lies in the dispersion of the materials. Rask furnished Copenhagen with a splendid collection of Pali MSS, which roused the interest of Danish scholars, just as Hodgson sent to Paris an excellent collection of the writings of the Northern Buddhists as preserved in Nepal. So the famous general Sanskrit library of Chambers went to Berlin and found there an indefatigable interpreter in Weber, while the India Office and the Bodleian have become seats of Indian philology through the MS libraries of Colebrooke and Wilson. In later years also Cambridge received a series of MS treasures from the enlightened activity of Daniel Wright with the consequence that two Cambridge scholars (Cowell and Bendall) have made them their special study. The majority of the 500 MSS, which Buhler sent to Berlin belong to the literature of the Svetambara Jains. This has had the effect that Jain philology [? philosophy] is comparatively much cultivated in Germany.” (Ind. Antiquary, 1898, p 308)
Research, then, depends on the collection of materials, and the materials must be complete, i. e., light from all sides must be thrown on our subject, the original sources in all languages must be brought together. Thus, for a complete life of Shivaji one has to study books and MSS written in seven different languages: Persian, Marathi, English, Hindi, Dutch, Portuguese and French. Even the old printed records are not always available except at the European capitals. Witness the extreme rarity in India of the French printed sources on Shivaji and his son cited by Orme in the appendix to his Fragments.
V. How to collect rare books.
The collection even of printed books when rare is a slow process. It took me fifteen years of patient watching before I could procure a copy of Ravenshaw’s Gaur or Robinson’s Asam (1841). And rare books are becoming rarer and more difficult to acquire with every succeeding year. I have recently been buying the old Portuguese works dealing with the history of India, among them Castanheda’s Historio do Descobrimento e Conquista da India in 8 volumes, giving a contemporary Portuguese account of Sher Shah’s wars in Bengal. A high price had to be paid for a set of this work. As my Lisbon correspondent, Dr. D. G. Dalgado, wrote to me in April last “The reason why all the old Portuguese books are so very costly is that the Brazillians buy them at any cost. One of them, who came here for a month took away 30 cases costing about £1,000. They are starting new libraries everywhere there. There were two copies of Castanheda at £7 and £8, and both of them were bought by the Brazillian referred to above.” Indian Universities must be prepared to meet such competition, if they mean to acquire the indispensable requisites of research.
The case of Persian MSS which it is hopeless to expect to buy and can only be transcribed for the use of our research scholars,—is even worse. In my experience, ten years have to be spent in the preliminary hunt before the apparatus for the history of a single Mughal Emperor can be exhaustively collected by the purchase of the printed works and transcription of the MSS, in the various European and Indian libraries. For instance, there is a history of a portion of Aurangzib’s reign in Persian verse in the Nizam’s library, but though the authorities were most courteous, it was exactly one year from the date of my application when the MS actually reached my hands for being copied. Again, the earliest and most authentic history of the Muslim monarchies of the Deccan, viz, the Burhan-i-masir, was kindly lent me by the India Office, London. But this volume lacks the first eight leaves, which I had to get photographed from the British Museum copy of the work
