Gujarat Sahitya Akademi has great pleasure in bringing out this reprint of Sanghadasa's famous Vasudevahindi which was since long out of print and was in demand by the scholars of Prakrit and of Indian narrative literature the world over. As the earliest available version of Gunadhya's lost Brhatkatha, its unique importance is well recognized. Credit goes to the great German Indologist Ludwing Aldorf for having drawn attention of scholars to the great value of the Vasudeva-hindi for reconstructing the original Brhatkatha and to the fresh evidence it provided to establish Indian source for the world famous collection of popular tales, Arbian Alfly-Layla wa Layla or One Thousand and One Nights, also popular called The Arbian Nights. He was also first to point out the archaic character of the Maharastri of the Vasudevahindi and detect the Vedha Metre used in its descriptive passages teeming with long com-pounds. There after Jagdishchandra Jain has studied in detail the relationship between the Vasudevahindi and the three preserved Sanskrit versions of the Brhatkatha. Mayrhofer has studied it as one of the earliest text of narrative art. Prakritists, Indianists and Comparative Folklorists owe a great debt to the Late Munis Caturvijayji and Punyavijayji for having brought to light this priceless gem of Classical Indian literature. The Ma-habharata, the Ramayana, the Pancantantra, the Jataka-katha and Brhatkatha are the five great Indian Classics that have be-come an invaluable part of the world literature, the Universal Literature. Of these the Brhatkatha is lost in its original form, and the idea of its contents, form and nature we can derive only through its later versions, namely, the Brhatkathasloka-sangraha, the Brhatkathamanjari and the Kathasaritsagara in Sanskrit, and the Vasudevahindi in Archaic Jain Maharastri. The Jainas deserve great credit for making and preserving one of the earliest versions, which along with the madhyakhanda of Dharmasena (which supplemented Sanghadasa's work) provide invaluable materials for working out the history and growth of the Brhatkatha tradition. The scholarly world owe gratitude to the Jain Atmanand Sabha of Bhavnagar for having published the premier edition of this Classic in 1933. In the present photo compose reprint we have put together the earlier two separately issued parts in one volume.
Dr. B.J. Sandesara's Gujarati translation of the Vasudevahindi, published in 1939, is also out of print since several years. It is also being reissued with some necessary revisions.
Let us hope the availability now of the text of the Vasudevahindi would give a philip to further studies of the Brhat-katha tradition.
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