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political or religious supremacy, and continual invasions of 

 foreigners unsettling entirely all domestic affairs and civic 

 arrangements could not excite so great an interest as to be 

 remembered with care and committed to posterity by recording 

 them. Nobody likes to remember saddening occurrences, and 

 a few bright spots excepted, the political history of India 

 reveals one of the most dismal pictures of human existence. 



Moreover the exalted position in the social ladder which a 

 Brahman occupies in his own estimation, does not induce him 

 to interest himself in the worldly fate of others. Every 

 Brahman regards himself as a descendant of one of the great 

 divine sages, and obtains, if pious, final beatitude through this 

 descent. To ensure it he has to remember and to revere the 

 memory of his three immediate predecessors — father, grand- 

 father, and great-grandfather ; and, as every previous ancestor 

 has observed the same practice, he is in his mind certain of 

 his ultimate prosperity. Why should he, therefore, engage 

 himself in the investigation of a subject in which he is not 

 interested and which can confer on him no benefit ? 



The subject of Indian history is a very difficult one, not 

 only from the absence of trustworthy ancient records, but 

 also from the necessity — and in this respect it resembles all 

 Asiatic history — that the historian should be an Orientalist. 

 Historical science is strictly allied to, and dependent on, 

 philological science, and without a knowledge of the mother 

 tongue of a nation, or, at all events of the languages in which 

 the original and most important sources of its history are 

 recorded, no person is competent to undertake to write the 

 history of a nation, for, being unable to read the original 

 records himself, first, he is not able to judge them critically ; and, 

 secondly, it is beyond his power to detect any mistakes made 

 by translators. Were all reports true and all translations 

 correct, the drudgery and anxiety of a historian would be 



