Preface

THESE pages have to be written many years after the Kashmiri texts here presented were collected, and amidst urgent tasks concerning the results gathered in a wholly different field of work, that of my Central-Asian explorations. These conditions mule me feel particularly grateful for the fact that Sir George Grierson in his Introduction has dealt so exhaustively with the manner in which those texts were originally recorded, and with all aspects of the linguistic interest which may be claimed for them. It has thus become possible for me to confine the preface he has asked for to a brief account of the circumstances which enabled me to gather these materials, and to some personal notes concerning that cherished Indian scholar friend, the late PANDIT GOVIND KAUL, whose devoted assistance was largely instrumental in rendering them of value for linguistic research, and whose memory this volume is intended to honour.

My interest in the language and folklore of Kashmir directly arose from the labours which, during the years 1888-98, I devoted,  mainly in the country itself, to the preparation of my critical edition of Kalhana's Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir and of my commentated translation of it. The elucidation of the manifold antiquarian questions which these tasks implied, and which in various ways constituted their chief attraction for me, was possible only in close touch with Kashmir scholars, and needed constant reference to the traditional lore of their alpine land. In addition it was necessary for me to effect extensive archaeological researches on the spot. What leisure I could spare from onerous and exacting official duties at Lahore for the purely philological portion of those tasks was far too scanty to permit of any serious study of Kashmiri. But during the eight summer vacations which I was privileged to devote in Kashmir to my cherished labours, and particularly during those between 1891 and 1894, which I spent mostly on archaeological tours elucidating the historical topography of the country and tracing its ancient remains, I had opportunities for acquiring some colloquial familiarity with the language. I should probably have been able to make more systematic use of these opportunities had not convenience and conservative attachment to the classical medium of Kashmir scholarship made me prefer the use of Sanskrit conversation with my Pandit friends and assistants at Srinagar and wherever they shared my tours and campings.

Meanwhile, Sir George Grierson had commenced his expert linguistic researches concerning Kashmiri. They were, for the first time, to demonstrate the full interest of the tongue and the true character of its relationship on the one hand to the Indo-Aryan vernaculars and on the other to the language group, called by him "Dardic" or "Pisaca", the separate existence of which, within the Aryan branch, he has the merit of having clearly established. His Kashmiri studies were at the start directed mainly towards the publication of the remarkable works by which the late Pandit Isvara Kaul had endeavoured to fix the phonetic, grammatical, and lexicographical standards for what he conceived to be the literary form of Kashmiri. There was every prospect that these standards, through the exhaustive labours bestowed by Sir George Grieraon upon their record and interpretation, would establish themselves for a language which so far had remained free from the systematizing influence of Pundit grammarians. Pandit Govind Kaul, though a close personal friend of Pandit Isvara Kaul, and fully appreciative of his scholarly zeal and ingenuity, was inclined to doubt at times the thoroughgoing regularity in the application of all the phonetic distinctions, inflectional rules, etc., laid down by this Kashmirian epiphany of Panini.

I should in no way have felt qualified to decide between the conflicting authorities, even if I could have spared time for the close investigation of the differences of detail concerned. But I realized the value which might attach to an unbiased phonetic record of specimens of the language taken down at this stage from the mouth of speakers wholly unaffected by quasi-literary influences and grammatical theories. In the course of my Kashmir tours I had been more than once impressed by the clearness of utterance to be met with in the speech of intelligent villagers, very different from the Protean inconstancy which certain phonetic features of Kashmiri seemed to present in the mouth of the townsfolk of Srinagar, whether Brahmans or Muhammadans. In addition, my interest had been aroused from the first by the rich store of popular lore which Kashmiri presents in its folk tales, songs, proverbs, and the like.

So in the course of the second summer season, that of 1896, which I was enabled through a kind dispensation to devote to my Rajatarangini labours in the alpine seclusion of my cherished mountain camp, Mohand Marg, high up on a spur of the great Haramukh peaks, I endeavoured to use the chance which had opportunely offered itself for securing specimens both of the language spoken in the Sind Valley below me (the important Lahara tract of old Kashmir) and of folklore texts. Hatim Tilawon had been mentioned to me as a professional story-teller in particular esteem throughout that fertile tract. He was a cultivator settled in the little hamlet of Panzil, at the confluence of the Sind River and the stream draining the eastern Haramukh glaciers, and owed his surname to the possession of an oil press. When he had been induced to climb up to my mountain height and had favoured Pandit Govind Kaul and myself with his first recitation, we were both much struck by his intelligence, remarkable memory, and clear enunciation. His repertoire of stories and songs was a large one. Though wholly illiterate, he was able to recite them all at any desired rate of speed which might suit our ears or pens; to articulate each word separate from the context, and to repeat it, if necessary, without any change in pronunciation. Nor did the order of his words or phrases ever vary after however long an interval he might be called upon to recite a certain passage again. The indication of two or three initial words repeated from my written record would be quite sufficient to set the disk moving in this living phonographic machine.

It did not take me long to appreciate fully Hatim's value for the purpose I had in view. He did not at first take kindly to the cold of our airy camping-place nor to its loneliness, being himself of a very sociable disposition, such as befitted his professional calling exercised mostly at weddings and other festive village gatherings. But it was the cultivators' busy season in the rice fields, some 5,000 feet below us, and his ministrations were not needed by them for the time being. So I managed, with appropriate treatment and adequate douceurs, to retain him for over six weeks. Owing to the pressure of my work on Kalhana's Chronicle it was impossible to spare for Hatim more than an hour in the evening, after a climb, usually in his company, had refreshed me from the strain of labours which had begun by daybreak.

Progress was necessarily made slow by the care which I endeavoured to bestow upon the exact phonetic record of Hatim's recitation and the consequent need of having each word where I did not feel sure of it, repeated, eventually several times. Whenever a story was completed I used to read it out to Hatim, who never failed to notice and correct whatever deviation from his text might have crept in through inadvertence or defective hearing. Though able to follow the context in general, I purposely avoided troubling Hatim with queries about particular words or sentences which I could not readily understand. I felt that the object in view would be best served by concentrating my attention upon the functions of a phonographic recorder and discharging them as accurately as the limitations of my ear and phonetic training would permit.

I could not love adopted this safe restriction of my own task, and might well have hesitated about attempting the record of these materials at all, if I had not been assured from the start of Pandit Govind Kaul's most competent and painstaking collaboration. The intimate knowledge which long years of scholarly work carried on in constant close contact had given me of his methods and standards, enabled me to leave certain essential portions of the work entirely to his share and with fullest confidence in the result. I could feel completely assured that with that rare thoroughness and conscientious precision which distinguished all his work on the lines of the traditional Sanskrit scholar, his record of Hatim’s text written down in Devanagari characters simultaneously with my own would be as exact as the system, or want of system, of Kashmiri spelling current among Srinagar Pandits would permit. I was equally certain that he would spare no trouble to make his interpretation of it, both in the form of an interlinear word-for-word version and of an idiomatic Sanskrit translation, as accurate as possible.

Sir George Grierson's remarks upon the advantages which he derived from Pundit Govind Kaul's labours makes it unnecessary for me to explain here the special value attaching to them. It will suffice to state that Pundit Govind Kaul's text as written down at the time of dictation was always revised simultaneously with nay own. The interlinear translation was then added in the course of the following day, after reference to Hatim wherever doubts arose about the meaning of particular words or phrases. The preparation of the fair copy of both, with the idiomatic Sanskrit rendering added, was a task which helped to keep Pandit Govind Kaul occupied during my absence in Europe for part of 1897. During the summer of the next year I enjoyed onto more the benefit of his devoted assistance in labours dear to us both, and in the peaceful seclusion of my alpine camp. But my big Rajatarangini task, then nearing completion, claimed all my energy and time. Thus the lacuna left in Pandit Govind Kaul's record of Hatim's last tale, due to the accidental loss of the concluding few pages of his original manuscript, escaped attention at the time.

When it was brought to my notice by Sir George Grierson fully fourteen years later. I was encamped once more at the very spot where we had recorded those stories. But, alas, Pandit Govind Kaul was no longer among the living to give aid; and, what with years of Central-Asian exploration and long labours on their results intervening, those records seemed to me as if gathered in a former birth. Fortunately, Hatim was still alive and quite equal to the stiff climb which his renewed visit demanded - the photograph reproduced bore shows him as he looked then. His recollection of the story was as fresh as ever, though increasing years and prosperity had made him give up his peregrinations as a public story-teller. So it was easy for another old retainer, Pandit Kasi Ram, to take down from Hatim's dictation the missing end of the story; it ran exactly as my own record showed it.

During the years which followed the completion of my main Kashmir labours the efforts needed to carry out successive Central-Asian expeditions and to assure the elaboration of their abundant results, kept me from making definite arrangements for the publication of those linguistic materials. They had meanwhile, together with my collection of Sanskrit manuscripts from Kashmir, found a safe place of deposit in the Indian Institute's Library at Oxford. But it filled me with grateful relief when my old friend Sir George Grierson, after a preliminary examination, kindly agreed in the autumn of 1910 to publish these texts, and, thus enabled me to leave them in the hands most competent for the task.

It was the solution I had hoped for all along, and realizing how much wore difficult this task was than the original collection of the materials, I feel deep gratification at the fact that a kindly Fate has allowed him to complete it amidst all his great labours. In view of all the progress which Indian linguistic research for more than a generation past owes to Sir George Grierson's exceptional qualifications and powers of critical work, it would be presumption on my part to appraise how much of the value which may be claimed for this publication is derived solely from the wide range and provision of the scholarly knowledge he has brought to bear upon it.

It is the greatness of his own share in the work which makes me feel particularly grateful to Sir George Grierson for his ready consent to its dedication to the memory of Pandit Govind Kaul. It affords me an appropriate opportunity for recording some data about the life of a cherished friend and helpmate whose memory deserves to be honoured for the nobility of his character quite as much as for his scholarly gifts and labours. The association of Pandit Govind Kaul during close on ten years with my own efforts bearing on the history and antiquities of Kashmir has always been appreciated by me as a special favour of Fortune, or to name the goddess under her own Kashmirian form - of Sarada, who is the protectress of learning as well as of the alpine land which claims to be her home; for he seemed to embody in his person all the best characteristics of that small but important class among the Brahmans of Kashmir to which the far-off and secluded mountain territory owes its pre-eminent position in the history of Indian learning and literature.

I cannot attempt to indicate here the evidence to be gathered both frown the Sanskrit literary products of Kashmir and from surviving local tradition, which makes me believe that high scholarly attainments and a special facility of elegant rhetorical or poetic expression were to be found among the truly learned in Kashmir more frequently combined than elsewhere in India with a keen eye for the realities of life, power of humorous observation, and distinct interest in the practical affairs of the country, Kalhana himself, the author of the Rajatarangini, with whose personality, I felt, I was becoming so familiar across the gap of long centuries, seemed aptly to illustrate this typical combination of feature. In Pandit Govind Kaul I found them all again and united with a high sense of honour, a bearing of true innate nobility, and a capacity for faithful attachment which from the first made me cherish him greatly as a friend, not merely as an accomplished mentor in most things appertaining to Kashmir and its traditional post. A brief account of his descent and early associations will best explain the growth of these strongly-marked characteristics.

Pandit Govind Kaul was born in 1846 as the eldest son of Pandit Balabhadra Kaul (1819-96), who, by reason of his personal qualities, great scholarly attainments, and social position, was universally respected among the Brahman community of Srinagar. Pandit Balabhadra's own father, Pandit Taba Kaul, had been a Sanskrit scholar of great reputation in the closing period of Afghan rule in Kashmir. Being connected as hereditary ‘Guru' with the important Brahman family of the Dar, he had enjoyed a substantial Jagir, and this was allowed to continue when Maharaja Ranjit Singh's conquest in 1819 established Sikh dominion over Kashmir. Pandit Birbal Dar, his patron, has held an influential administrative position already under the Afghan regime. But he incurred the suspicion of Azim Khan, the last governor from Kabul, and persecuted by him, he was obliged to flee from Kashmir to the Panjab. Of the adventurous escape which he made with his young sun Pandit Rajakak, in mid-winter 1818-19, across the snow-covered mountains, and of the cruel treatment endured by those of his family he was obliged to leave behind, Pandit Govind Kaul told me interesting traditions. The experienced advice which Pandit Birbal supplied to Maharaja Ranjit Singh is believed to have contributed greatly to the success of the campaign, which, in the following summer, placed Kashmir in the power of the great Sikh ruler.

The high administrative posts which Pandit Birbal, and after his death his equally capable son Pandit Rajakak, held during the period of Sikh rule in Kashmir (l8l9-46), necessarily assured a prominent social position and relative affluence also for Pandit Taba Kaul and his son Pandit Balabhadra Kaul. The latter was thus enabled to devote himself during his youth solely to Sanskrit studies, and to lay the foundations of a scholarly renown which made him, from an early date, a prominent figure among the Pandits of Kashmir. But, the far-reaching political changes which followed the accession of Maharaja Gulab Singh of Jummu to the rule of Kashmir at the close of the First Sikh War, in 1846, led to the loss of the family's Jagir and threw a heavy strain upon Pandit Balabhadra's resources. Though restricted to what income his functions as hereditary Guru and as a teacher of Sastras could secure, and maintaining throughout, his long life a dignified retirement, Pandit Balabhadra succeeded not only in giving his three sons an excellent education, but in accumulating also an important collection of Sanskrit manuscript.

His tasks were, no doubt, facilitated by the support he derived, from his close connection with the remarkably able men who succeeded Pandit Birbal as heads of the Dar family. Pandit Rajakak, the latter's son (1805﷓66), had distinguished himself as an administrator already during the troubled times of the closing Sikh regime, and quelled a rebellion in the hill tract of Drava. When conditions had become more settled under the Dogra rule he rose high in Maharaja Gulab Singh's favor by greatly developing the shawl industry of Kashmir, then monopoly and financial mainstay of the State. Endowed with a genuine love of knowledge and with that intellectual adaptability which has distinguished the best brains of Kashmir through successive historical periods, he had taken care to secure for his son, Pandit Ramjiv Dar (circ. 1850﷓83), not only a sound training in Persian and Sanskrit, but also some familiarity with English and with Western ways. It was no easy departure in days when close relations with Europeans were apt to be looked at askance as infringing upon the traditional policy of seclusion and the security it was meant to assure.

It was in intimate association with Pandit Ramjiv Dar that Pandit Govind Kaul spent most of his early manhood. The experience he thus gained of the world of affairs, of rulers and ruled alike, did much to widen the horizon of his thought, and interests beyond that of the traditional student of Sastras. Pandit Ramjiv seems to have been a man of an unusually active mind and of considerable practical energy. During his short but fruitful life he had the good fortune to serve a ruler so well qualified, as the late Maharaja Ranbir Singh to appreciate his varied mental gifts and activities. It was the cherished aim of the late Maharaja to combine the preservation of inherited systems of Indian thought and knowledge with the development of his country's economic resources along the lines of modern Western progress. Having proved his ability as an administrator of Kashmir districts, Pandit Ramjiv gradually became the Maharaja's trusted adviser in a variety of departments which were created to further that policy, including those of education, agriculture, sericulture, etc. The manifold administrative duties entrusted to Pandit Ramjiv did not divert his attention from scholarly interests, and consequently he kept Pandit Govind Kaul as much as possible by his side wherever his tours of inspection, etc., took him. Thus, Pandit Govind Kaul was able to acquire a great deal of first﷓hand knowledge of Kashmir and the neighbouring territories in all their varied aspects.

Pandit Govind Kaul had, from his earliest youth, received a very thorough literary training in Sanskrit under his father's direct guidance. In accordance with the traditions of Kasbmir learning he had devoted particular efforts to the study of the Alamkara-sastra and the poetic literature which is bound up with it. His stock of quotations from the latter seemed inexhaustible. He was thoroughly at home also in Vyakarana, Nyaya and the Saiva-sastra, and he read widely in the Epics and Puranas. As far as Sanskrit literary qualifications were concerned, he was well equipped for the charge of the "Translation Department", to which he was appointed in 1874. By creating it together with a State Press it was the Maharaja's intention to diffuse a knowledge of Sanskrit works on law, philosophy, etc., among wider classes of his subjects through the medium of Hindi. Other branches of the same department were intended to secure the same object with regard to selected works in English and Persian. It is needless to discuss here the practical utility of the scheme or the causes which, owing to the lingering illness of the Maharaja, hampered its execution during the closing years of his reign. It is enough to remember that it provided suitable employments for such highly deserving scholars as Pandit Govind Kaul and the late Pandit Sahajabhatta, who was to become another of my Kashmir assistants, and that among the works undertaken, but never finished, there was also a Hindi translation of the Sanskrit Chronicles of Kashmir.

In 1883 Pandit Ramjiv Dar was carried off by a premature death. Soon after, the Translation Department ceased to exist, together with several other institutions which had owed their creation to his stimulating influence. The last year, preceding Maharaja Ranbir Singh's death in 1886 and the first of the reign of his son and successor were for Kashmir a period of transition. Traditional methods of administration and economic conditions bequeathed by long centuries of practical seclusion were giving way without there being the machinery as yet available to effect needful reforms on the lines developed in British India. It was in various ways a trying time for all those representing the intellectual inheritance of the valley, and after a short spell of work as a teacher in the Sanskrit Pathasala, maintained by the Darbar at Srinagar, on scant pay - and that often in arrears - Pandit Govind Kaul found himself without official employment.

His learning and sound methods of scholarly work had already, in 1875, attracted the attention of Professor George Buhler, when that great Indologist had paid his memorable visit to Kashmir in search of Sanskrit MSS. The very commendatory mention which Professor Buhler's report made of Pandit Govind Kaul's attainments and of the help he had rendered, directed my attention to him from the start. The personal impression gained within the first few days of my arrival at Srinagar at the close of August, 1888, was quite sufficient to convince me how amply deserved that praise was. I was quick to notice Pandit Govind Kaul's special interest in antiquarian subjects, such us mode me then already forth the plan of a critical edition and commentary of Kalhana's Chronicle of Kashmir. I was equally impressed by his dignified personality, which combined the best qualities of the Indian scholar and gentleman. A short archaeological tour which we made in company to sites round the Dal Lake helped to draw us together in mutual sympathy and regard. So it was to me a great source of satisfaction when, before my departure for the plains, Pandit Govind Kaul, with his revered father's full approval, accepted my offer of personal employment and agreed to follow me to Lahore fur the cold weather season.

It was the beginning of a long period of close association between us in scholarly interests and work. It continued practically unbroken for nearly eleven years, throughout my official employment in the Panjab University at Lahore, and down to Pandit Govind Kaul's lamented death in June, 1899. Neither my visits on leave to Europe nor an interval in 1892-3, when he was tempted to accept employment at the Court of Jammu on H.H. the Maharaja’s private staff, implied any real interruption. It was, in the first place, my labours concerning the critical publication and elucidation of Kalhana's Chronicle of Kashmir, for which Pandit Govind Kaul's multifarious and ever devoted assistance proved of the greatest value. As to the character and extent of this help it is unnecessary here to give details. They have been recorded at length, and with due expression of my gratitude, both in the Introduction to my text edition of the Rajatarangini, published in 1892, and in the Preface to the commentated translation of it, with which, in 1900, on the eve of departure for my first Central-Asian expedition, I completed my labours hearing on the early history and antiquities of Kashmir.

Nor need I give here details regarding the large share taken by Pandit Govind Kaul in another important if not equally attractive task. I mean the preparation of a classified catalogue of the great collection of Sanskrit MSS., over 5,000 in number, which, through Maharaja Ranbir Singh's enlightened care, had been formed at the Raghunath Temple Library at Jammu. The support I received from successive British residents in Kashmir, including the late Colonels R. Parry Nisbet and N. F. Prideaux, and from my old friend the late Raja Pandit Suraj Kaul, then Member of the Kashmir State Council, furnished me with the means for organizing the labours by which, in the course of 1889-94, this very valuable collection was saved from the risk of dispersion and rendered accessible to research. They were effected mainly through Pandit Govind Kaul and our common friend the late Pandit Sahajabhatta. A full acknowledgment of their devoted services will be found in the Introduction to the volume which contains the descriptive catalogue, together with the plentiful and accurate extracts prepared by them from previously unknown or otherwise interesting Sanskrit texts.

It would have been quite impossible for me, burdened as I was all through my years at Lahore with heavy and exacting official duties, to undertake the big tasks referred to, had not a kindly Fortune provided me in Pandit Govind Kaul with a coadjutor of exceptional qualities. With a wide range thorough traditional knowledge of the Sastras and a keen sense of literary form he combined a standard of accuracy and a capacity for taking pains over details which would have done high credit to any European scholar trained on modern philological lines. Though he was no longer young when he joined me, he adapted himself with instinctive comprehension to the needs of Western critical methods, such as I was bound to apply to all my tasks. With infinite and never-failing cure he would record and oollate the readings of the manuscripts upon which I depended for the critical constitution of the Rajatarangini text, and also those of other Kashmirian works, almost all unpublished, reference to which was constantly needed for its interpretation. Yet I knew that scrupulously careful as he was about the formal correctness of his Sanskrit writing and speech, the exact reproduction of all the blunders, etc., to be met in the work of often ignorant copyists caused him a kind of physical pain.
It was the same with the labours he had to devote to the collection and sifting of all the multifarious materials needed fur the elucidation of antiquarian problems. However much wanting in style and other literary attractions the Kashmirian texts such as Mahatmyas, later Chronicles, etc., might be which had to be searched, I could always feel sure that none of their contents which might be of interest by their bearing on the realities of ancient Kashmir would be allowed by Pandit Govind Kaul to escape his Index slips. The value of the help he could give me in regard to the latter labours was greatly increased by the familiarity he had gained with most parts of the country and its varied population during the years spent by the side of his old patron Pandit Ramjiv Dar. Though for various practical reasons I had but little occasion to use Pandit Govind Kaul in that role of travelling camp literatus which made his worthy Chinese epiphany, excellent Chiang Ssu-yeh, so invaluable to me during my Central-Asian explorations of 1906-8, he was yet exceptionally well able to visualize topographical and other practical facts bearing on archaeological questions.

But, perhaps, the greatest advantage I derived from his long association with my labours was the chance it gave me to study in close contact those peculiarities of traditional Indian thought, belief, and conduct which separate Hindu civilization so deeply both from the West and the East, and which no amount of book knowledge could ever fully reveal to a 'Mleccha'. Pundit Govind Kaul's porsonality seemed to embody in a particularly clear fashion some of the most characteristic and puzzling features which constitute the inherited mentality of India, traceable through all chances of the ages. Attached with unquestioning faith to the principles and practices of his Brahman caste, he would make no concessions whatsoever in his own person to altered conditions of life. Yet he was ever ready to explain to me how the slow adaptation in others was reconcilable with traditional tenets. His meticulous observance of religious rites shrank from no personal hardship or sacrifice; he would, e.g., keep the fast days enjoined by the three different systems of worship traditional in his family, even when the chance of the calendar would bring them together in most embarrassing succession. Yet, in the privacy of my study or in the solitude of my mountain camp he was fully prepared to brush aside in my case most of the outward restrictions to which the profanum vulgus might attach importance.

His strongly conservative notions were the clearest reflex of those which have governed the administration of Kashmir throughout its historical past. Their instinctive application by Pandit Govind Kaul to the modern conditions of his country helped me greatly in comprehending how limited in reality were the changes undergone by its social fabric in the course of long centuries, notwithstanding all foreign conquests from the north and south. In his unfailing grave politeness and courtly dignity I could recognize, as it were, the patina which generations of influential employment and social distinction have deposited on the best representatives of the true ruling class of Kashmir. Whenever Pandit Govind Kaul was by my side, whether in the alpine peace of my beloved Kashmir mountains or in the dusty toil of our Lahore exile, I always felt in living touch with past ages full of interest for the historical student of India.

A kindly Fate had allowed me, notwithstanding constant struggles for leisure, to carry my labours on the oldest historical records of Kashmir close to their completion by the time when in the spring of 1899 my appointment to the charge of the Calcutta Madrasa and the far more encouraging prospect of freedom for my first Central-Asian journey necessitated what seemed merely a temporary change in our personal association. In view of the new field of work which was soon to call me to the 'Sea of Sand' and its ruins far away in the north, I felt anxious to assure to Pandit Govind Kaul scholarly employment in his own home, worthy of his learning and likely to benefit research. By what appeared at the time a special piece of good fortune, my friend Sir George Grierson was then anxious to avail himself of Pandit Govind Kaul's methodical holp for completing and editing Pandit Isvara Kaul's great dictionary of Kashmiri. It was a philological task of considerable importance, and for more than one reason I rejoiced when, before my departure from Lahore, this collaboration of the best Kashmirian scholar of his time with the leading authority in the field of Indian linguistic research had been satisfactorily arranged for.

But Fate, with that inscrutable irony on which Pundit Govind Kaul, like another Kalhana, loved to expatiate with appropriate poetic quotations, had decreed otherwise. The farewell I took at Lahore from my ever devoted helpmate was destined to be the last. From a rapid visit to Simla to see Sir George Grierson he brought back an attack of fever which, after his return to Kashmir, proved to be of a serious type and ultimately was recognized as typhoid. For weeks his strong constitution held out, supported by the loving care of his family and such proper medical attendance as I endeavoured to assure from afar. But in the end he succumbed, and separated by thousands of miles at the time in the strange mountains of Sikkim, I learned early in June, 1899, the grievous news that my best Indian friend had departed beyond all hope of reunion in this janman.

Pandit Govind Kaul left behind a widow, who, after years of pious devotion to his memory, has since followed him, and a young son, Pundit Nilakanth Kaul, who, while prevented by indifferent health in early youth from following a scholar's career, has grown up worthily to maintain the family's reputation for high character and unswerving devotion to duty.

The prolonged stays I was subsequently able to make in Kashmir before and after my successive Central-Asian expeditions had to be spent on work relating to regions far away, and wholly different in character, from what I have to look upon as my Indian alpine home. But my love for Kashmir has remained unchanged, and so also my gratitude for the great boon it had given me in Pandit Govind Kaul's friendship and help. That I was enabled to prefix a record of his life to this volume and thus to do something to preserve his memory, is a privilege I appreciate greatly. I owe it solely to the scholarly zeal of Sir George Grireson, who has rescued and elaborated the materials which we had collected, in a previous common birth, as it were. For the personal service thus rendered the expression of my warmest thanks is due here in conclusion.

AUREL STEIN
23, Merton Street, Oxford
September 21, 1917

Hatim's Tales