Inscriptions of the Paramaras, Chandellas, Kachchhapaghatas and Two Minor Dynasties, part 1, Introduction.

• Author: Salomon, Richard

This first part of the seventh volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (CII) was published thirteen years after the second part of the same volume, containing the inscriptions of the Paramaras (reviewed in JAOS 105 [1985]: 786-87). Part 3, which is to contain the Chandella, Kacchapaghata, and other inscriptions, is still unpublished. The reasons for this peculiar situation are not clear; a postscript to the editor's preface (p. viii) refers only vaguely to the printing being "delayed due to various reasons." From the date of the preface itself, 1974, we learn that the entire volume was actually completed some twenty years ago. But this is hardly the first such difficulty in the long and somewhat checkered history of the publication of the CII, which was first proposed by James Prinsep in 1837 (p. v), but whose first volume, Alexander Cunningham's Inscriptions of Asoka, did not actually appear until 1877. The publication of subsequent volumes of CII proceeded slowly and irregularly, and with many changes in the originally intended publication scheme; Cunningham's statement of the original purpose of the enterprise, "to bring together, in a few handy and accessible volumes, all the ancient inscriptions of India which now lie scattered in the journals of our different Asiatic Societies" (CII, I: i), vastly underestimated the scope and volume of Indian epigraphic studies in decades to come, as well as the difficulties involved in preparing complete and definitive editions of the inscriptions. Thus, although seven volumes in 114 years might not seem a very impressive rate of production, it must be realized, first of all, that volume II actually consists of two entirely separate parts (Sten Konow's Kharoshthi Inscriptions and Heinrich Luders' posthumous Bharhut Inscriptions), while other volumes (IV, V. V. Mirashi's Inscriptions of the Kalacuri-Cedi Era and Trivedi's present volume VII) are massive multi-part productions. Moreover, two volumes have been re-issued in entirely revised forms, constituting in effect new volumes: these are E. Hultzsch's revision, published in 1925, of Cunningham's volume I on the Asokan inscriptions, and D. R. Bhandarkar's extensive reworking, published posthumously in 1981 (reviewed in JAOS 105 [1985]: 787-88), of John Faithfull Fleet's vol. III, Inscriptions of the Early Gupta Kings, originally published in 1888.

In any case, true scholarship comes slowly, and patience is rewarded from time to time by the...