I 
PREFACE. 
* 
In the year 1886 it was my privilege to read, at the 
International Congress of Orientalists at Vienna, a paper 
on the Mediaeval Vernacular Literature of Hindustan with 
special reference to Tul’s! Das. The preparation of this 
necessitated the arrangement of the notes on the entire 
vernacular literature of Northern India, which I had 
collected through a long series of years, although the essay 
itself dealt with only a portion of the literature which 
existed before the 17th century. 
Encouraged by the attention with which this paper was 
received, I have endeavoured to give in the present work a 
more complete view of the vernacular literature of 
Hindustan from the earliest times to the present day. It 
does not pretend to be more than a list of all the vernacular 
writers whose names I have been able to collect, nine 
hundred and fifty-two in number, of whom only some 
seventy have been previously noticed by Garcin de Tassy in 
his Histoire de la literature hindouie et hindoustanie. 
It will be observed that I deal only with modern 
vernacular literature. I therefore give no particulars 
concerning authors of purely Sanskrit works, and exclude 
from consideration books written in Prakrit, even when 
it may have been a vernacular, as not connoted by the term 
modern. Nor do I record the names of Indian writers 
in Arabic or Persian, or in the exotic literary Urdu, and 
