The All-India Oriental Conference (1919) is functioning as the premier forum for the presentation of studies and researches in the entire field of Orientology in India for over sixty-five years now. Conceived as the Indian counterpart of the International Congress of Orientalists (1873), it has taken under its purview all the major humanistic disciplines, including Language, Literature, Religion, Philosophy, History, Archaeology, Numismatics, Technical Sciences and the Fine Arts. While the studies in these disciplines relating to India predominate the fifteen Sections into which the Conference is divided, five of the Sections relating to Iranian, Islamic, Arabic and Persian, South-East Asian, and West Asian Studies amply cover the other regions and make the Conference truly Oriental.
Since its inception in Poona in 1919, the Conference has organised 31 biennial Sessions at different educational centres in India, and, on account of its wide scope, it has been quite popular among scholars. It might be stated with justification that during the last six decades and more there has hardly been any student of Indological research in India who has not been associated with the Conference. The number of scholars who have presented papers at one or the other of its Sessions number over 4000 and the number of papers presented has reached the staggering figure of about 15,000.
In order that information about the papers presented at the Conference may be easily available to interested students of the different disciplines, the Conference has been issuing, periodically, fully documented consolidated indexes of the papers. Three volumes of the Index have already been issued, being:
Vol. I. Sessions I-XII, 1919-1944 (Poona, 1949. Authors: 1400; Papers: 3000)
Vol. II. Sessions XIII-XVII, 1945-1954 (Poona, 1959. Authors: 1200; Papers: 2250)
Vol. III. Sessions XVIII-XXII, 1955-1965 (Poona, 1967. Authors: 1250; Papers 2500)
The said three volumes are being continued with the issuance of the present volume which makes the Index up to date:
Vol. IV. Sessions XXIII-XXXI, 1966-1982 (Hoshiarpur, 1985. Authors: 2500; Papers 7000).
The bibliographical detalls of the literature relating to the Sessions XXIII-XXXI (1966-1982), which forms the basis of the present volume of the Index, are given elsewhere below. This literature primarily consists of the several volumes of the Proceedings of the different Sessions, in which are printed the Presidential addresses and the full texts of select papers submitted to the Conference, and the several volumes of the Summaries of Papers which contain the summaries of all the papers submitted to the Conference Sessions. When the full text of a paper appears in the Proceedings volumes, its reference in the Summaries of Papers is not indicated in the Index. Papers published in Vol. 111: Pandita Parishad of Session XXI (1961, Srinagar) have also been included in this volume of the Index, though that Session had taken place during the period covered by the last volume of the Index, since the said vol. III was published only in 1968 when the relevant Index volume had already been issued.
A brief explanation of the arrangement of the matter and its documentation in this Index might be made here. When an entry is referred to the Proceedings volume of a Session, the reference given would be the number of that Session and the relevant page numbers, but when the reference is to be Summaries of Papers the word 'Sum.' would also be added. In the case of papers where even a summary is not available but only the title of the paper is available, the fact would be indicated by the addition of the words 'title only.
The Index is divided into two Parts, viz. AUTHOR INDEX (pp. 1-427) and SUBJECT INDEX (pp. 429-890), the entries in each being arranged according to the Roman alphabet. The reference value of the Index and its potency to meet all the possible needs of the user have been kept in view in the presentation of the Index, as indicated below. Some of the innovations made here tend to raise this work considerably higher than the level of a conventional 'Index' and make it, more or less, a 'Bibliographical digest'.
1. The Authors have been given serial numbers, printed in antique type against their names, and their Papers have been given serial numbers, in order to enable cach paper being referred to by a reference number.
2. Surnames with variant spellings have all been brought under the most frequen: spelling but with due cross reference to each of the variants, in its natural place. Against the actual entries giving their names, the respective variant spellings have, however, been preserved. (Sze, for instance, under Sarma/Sharma: Sastri/Sastry/Shastri/Shastry
3. Helpful annotations have been added, in small type within brackets, to papers whose titles are not fully expressive of their contents,
4. In the case of papers, of which only summaries are available in the Conference literature, the publication of their full texts, if any, have been traced to the extensive periodical literature, commemoration volumes, collected writings etc., and recorded against the respective entries in the Index. For the full texts of unpublished papers, enquiries might have to be addressed to their authors whose addresses are available in the Summaries of Papers.
5. Key words indicatory of the first entry in the left hand and the last entry in the right hand facing pages have been given in the left and right outer corners of the pages for easy reference to the Index, the page numbers having been relegated to the inner corners of the pages.
6. Papers dealing with the same or allied topics have been brought together in the Subject Index, with due cross references.
7. Papers on broad but distinctive subjects like Kalidasa, Purana, Rasa, Sahityasastra, Veda etc. have been grouped together and indexed under appropriate sub-groups, both the sub-groups and the papers under them having internal alphabetisation. Cross references haye also been given at the natural places where these papers would have occurred in their normal alphabetical sequence. See, for instance 116 papers on Kalidasa (pp. 597-605) grouped under the following sub-groups: General: Birthplace and identification; Characters; Commentators; Diction; Dramas Geography; Life and Society; Love; Miscellaneous; Motifs; Music and other arts; Poetic acumen Religious and Philosophic ideas; and Upama. See again under Rgveda (pp. 746-61) where 111 papers on Rgveda have been grouped under: General; Accent; Authorship; Chandas; Commentators; Concepts; Deities and Divinities; Geography; Grammar; Language; Linguistics; History; Khila; Legends Life and Society; Literary studies; Oral tradition; Padapatha; Religion, Philosophy and Mysticism; Rituals and Sacrifices; Rivers; Sakhas; Science; Seers and sages; Text studies; War; Women; and Word studies.
In view of the fairly detailed Preface by the compiler of this Volume, Professor K. V. Sarma, there was, indeed, no need for this Foreword. But I did not want to miss the opportunity which it afforded me publicly to thank Professor Sarma, on behalf of the All-India Oriental Conference, for having undertaken and very competently carried out the onerous task of preparing this sumptuous Fourth Volume of the Index of Papers presented at the Conference. I believe that this Volume, like its predecessors, which, incidentally, were prepared by Professor Sarma himself, adequately reflects the kind of work which the All-India Oriental Conference has been promoting all these years. And I should specially like to add that, through his expert and imaginative editing of this Volume, Professor Sarma has, as it were, set forth a model of what a good Index should be like. I have no doubt that this volume, like the earlier ones, will be enthusiastically welcomed by all serious students of orientology both in India and outside.
The first three volumes of the Index were published by the All-India Oriental Conference itself. But, owing to financial stringency, the Conference was not in a position to bear the responsibility this time. I, therefore, approached Professor Veda Vyasa, President of the Vishveshvaranand Vedic Research Institute Society, Hoshiarpur, to have this Volume published under the auspices of that Institute. Himself being a keen votary of orientology, he readily agreed. The grateful thanks of the All-India Oriental Conference are pre-eminently due to Professor Veda Vyasa and the Vishveshvaranand Vedic Research Institute.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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