Introduction
Introduction

Summary/Abstract: Around 327 B.C. “Macedonian arms had made the Greeks masters of the entire known world, from Sicily … to Afghanistan, where Alexander had halted. They did not learn the languages of their new subjects, but realized that if they were to rule them they must understand them, and that to understand them they must collect their books… Royal libraries were accordingly created in all the Hellenistic capitals…”. With very much the same aim roughly two millennia later, by the close of eighteenth century, in Calcutta and Madras a bunch of first intrepid scholars, later on named Orientalists and patronized by the honorable East India Company and its institutions, set off to work on collecting manuscripts with native texts as well as reading and translating their contents.

• Details
• Contents