Hot Sale The Concept of The Beautiful in Sanskrit Literature

Book Specification

Book Description

About the Author

Dr. V. Raghavan (1908-79) He joined the Sanskrit Department of the University of Madras in 1935 and since then was engaged on the New Catalogus Catalogurum project; was the professor and Head of the Department during 1955-68

Fellow of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1969-70.

Received the Kane Gold Medal for Sanskrit and indological research from Asiatic Society, Bombay, 1953.

Received the Sahitya Akademi Prize for the best book on Sanskrit Research (Bhojas Srngara Prakasa), 1966; Elected Fellow of Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1964; and of the Sahitya Akademi (posthumously in 1979).

Received the Padma Bhushan from the President of India, 1962.

Member of the Sanskrit Commission of the Government of India, 1956 and of the Central Sanskrit Board since inception; Honorary Member, Ecole Francaise dExtreme Orient and the Academy of Sciences, Vienna; Awarded Gold Medal and Diploma by the Noble Order of St. Martin, Vienna 1967; Elected President, International Association of Sanskrit Studies, 1973.

Foreword

It is a pleasure to accede to Dr. S.S. Janakis request that I should write a Foreword to the late Prof. V. Raghavans lectures on The Concept of the Beautiful in Sanskrit Literature, originally delivered under the Dewan Bahadur Krishnaswami Rao Foundation at the Madras University on 27 and 28 February 1962. While I do not claim any deep knowledge of Sanskrit or of aesthetics, I too have been intrigued and held in fascination by the phenomenon of Beauty (in fact, my booklet On Beauty was published as early as 1945, three years after Prof. P.N. Srinivasacharis The Philosophy of the Beautiful) ; and, besides, being exact contemporaries, I was privileged to know and enjoy the friendship of Prof. Raghavan from the early thirties to the time of his sudden passing in 1979. These were inducements enough to make me overcome my initial reluctance and agree to contribute this Foreword.

It is likely that Prof. Raghavan left these lectures unpublished because he had hoped to revise, and perhaps enlarge them. His Concepts of Alankara Sastra appeared in 1942, his study of Bhojas Srngaraprakasa won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1966, and he presented a learned paper on Sri Aurobindos Aesthetics at the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary National Seminar in 1972. Dr. Raghavan was always full of the subject, and his dual allegiance to Sanskrit literature and Karnatak music (notably as exemplified in Tyagaraja) constantly provoked lively speculation on the concept of Beauty and the impact of the Beautiful on seasoned human sensibility. Further, Raghavan was widely read in Western aesthetics from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Longinus to modem thinkers and critics like Ruskin, Lascelles Abercrombie, Jacques Maritain and Benedetto Croce. Had Prof. Raghavan found the time to turn his two lectures into a structured monograph with all the weight of his learning and experiential knowledge, he would doubtless have given us almost a definitive monograp