THE NITIPRAKASIKA. 



3 



and its contents was also given in that work. 2 The Nltipra- 

 kasika contains much valuable and hitherto unknown infor- 

 mation, and I shall give a short English epitome of it so 

 far as I have not described it previously. This short intro- 

 duction will be followed by the Sanskrit text. Of this I 

 possess two copies: one was supplied to me by M.E.Ey. 

 T. Krishna Row, a learned Brahman of Triplikane, and the 

 other I procured from Mysore. The former is written in 

 Telugu letters, and contains a complete commentary compiled 

 by one Sitarama, the son of Nanjunda. 3 The name Nanjunda 

 is in common use in Mysore, in Bellary and its neighbour- 

 hood; and a learned Kanarese Brahman from Mysore, 

 whom I consulted, states that Sitarama lived about three 



2 In my monograph *' On the Weapons, &c. of the ancient Hindus," I have 

 frequently made mention of the contents of the Nltiprakasika and of the 

 Sukranlti, declaring that the former was till now utterly unknown, and that it 

 contained a description of the Dhanurvgda (see the Preface, pages 4 and 9, 

 and pages 170 and 175 of the Madras Journal of 1879). The (London) 

 Academy gave on the 9th October 1880 a short notice of my hook, and, 

 in spite of my statement, twice assigned the Dhanurveda to the Sukranlti, 

 which it called an ancient work on the Dhanurveda ascribed to Us'ana. The 

 critical notice closes strangely enough with this sentence : " Professor 

 Oppert makes no mention of the edition of the Nltiprakasika brought out by 

 Rajendra Lai Mitra in the Bibliotheca Indica." 



Wishing to correct these statements I wrote on the 11th November a letter 

 to the Editor of the Academy, which was not published, and among other 

 things suggested, that as the Nltiprakasika had never been printed, and 

 as Dr. Rajendralal Mitra had published an edition of the Kamandakiya, the 

 critic might have made the mistake by confounding the name of the title 

 Nltiprakasika with the word Nttisdra, as the Kamandakiya, being a Nttisdra, 

 is generally called Kamandakiya, Nttisdra. This remark of mine is probably 

 the origin of the correction contained in the Academy of December 24th, 

 1880, page 459, which runs as follows :— " In a notice of Professor Oppert's 

 Weapons, &c. , of the Ancient Hindus, which appeared in our issue of Octo- 

 ber 9th, read in the last clause Kamandakiya for Nttiprakds'ikd. n As I had 

 myself quoted the printed Kamandakiya more than twenty times, and as I 

 had laid stress on the fact that the Nltiprakasika had not only not been 

 printed but was utterly unknown, and as it was not necessary to allude to 

 Dr. Rajendralal Mitra as an editor of the Kamandakiya, I cannot but admire 

 the ingenious manner of this correction. 



3 Nanjunda is a Dravidian name for Siva, meaning one who has eaten poison 

 (from nauju, poison, and unda, one who has eaten), a supplementary name to 

 the well known Sanskrit Nilakantha. 



