JOURNAL 



OE THE 



ASIATIC SOCIETY OF BENGAL. 



Part I.-HISTORY, LITERATURE, &e. 



No. I.— 1876. 



The Prologue to the Bdmdyana of Tulsi Dds. A Specimen translation, 

 —By F. S. Growse, M. A., B. C. S. 



The Sanskrit Bamayana of Valmiki has been published more than once, 

 with all the advantages of European editorial skill and the most luxurious 

 typography. It has also been translated both in verse and prose, and — in 

 part at least — into Latin as well as into Italian and English. The more 

 popular Hindi version of the same great national Epic can only be read in 

 lithograph or bazar print, and has never been translated in any form into 

 any language whatever. Yet it is no unworthy rival of its more fortunate 

 predecessor. There can of course be no comparison between the polished 

 phraseology of classical Sanskrit and the rough colloquial idiom of Tulsi 

 Das's vernacular, while the antiquity of Valmiki's poem further invests it 

 with an adventitious interest for the student of Indian history. But on the 

 other hand the Hindi poem is the best and most trustworthy guide to the 

 popular living faith of the Hindu race at the present day — a matter of 

 not less practical interest than the creed of their remote ancestors — and its 

 language, which in the course of three centuries has contracted a tinge of 

 archaism, is a study of the greatest importance to the philologist, since it 

 serves to bridge an otherwise impassable chasm between the modern style and 

 the mediaeval. It is also less wordy and diffuse than the Sanskrit original, 

 and — probably in consequence of its modern date — is less disfigured by 

 wearisome interpolations and repetitions ; while, if it never soars so high 

 as Valmiki in some of his best passages, it maintains a more equable level 

 of poetic diction and seldom sinks with him into such dreary depths of 



