In the Winter of the year 1971-1972, the University Grants Commission invited me as a National Lecturer to deliver a few lectures at the different Universities. Many Universities were very kind in extending invitations to me and I very much regret my inability to accept their kind hospitality. As a sequel, I could deliver lectures at only three Universities: Karnataka University, Dharwar, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad and Jiwaji University, Gwalior. 1 am grateful to the authorities of these three Universities for all the courtesy and kindness which they showed to me when I visited these Universities. I carry very happy memories of the days spent with the Post Graduate Departments at these places.
The Commission had in their invitation expressed a desire that these lectures could be on topics of one's own research and interest. The topic that I selected was the Rgvedic Foundations of Classical Poetics. The lectures that I delivered are now appearing in print. I am grateful to the Commission, not only for the honour they did by inviting me as a National Lecturer in Sanskrit, but also for thus providing me an opportunity for putting my thoughts together and placing them before my colleagues and Post-Graduate students at the different Universities. It was indeed an exciting experience for me.
In these lectures I have profusely drawn on the work of the earlier scholars like Bloomfield, Gonda, Velankar, Divekar and many others. I very gratefully acknowledge my debt to these scholars.
The Rgveda is a mine of gold, a veritable mine of information for that early period. Religion, History, Mythology, Philosophy, Culture all stand reflected here and efforts have been made to study the Rgveda from all these different points of view. The Rgveda has also struck its readers as a literary composition and efforts have been made to study the rhetorical elements in it. Here is an effort to put all this material together with a view to arriving at something like a poetics of the times. To be sure, there was neither a Bharata nor an Abhinavagupta nor a Mammața. But a period that witnessed such a wide and varied poetical activity on the part of generations of poets ought to yield something interesting on the side of the theory which could have been but vaguely present howsoever unconsciously in the minds of the practising poets. This theory, these possible thoughts and working methods of the Rgvedic poets have been the subject of my study in these lectures. I have tried to be as objective as possible but the subjective element in any presentation and in any interpretation can never be wholly avoided and indeed, need not be avoided. For when that is avoided, one wonders what remains! All knowledge is, I believe, Savikalpa, and therefore perhaps, one's own.
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