The Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum has among its collection a small manuscript (no. Sloane 3014; size 19 × 23 cm; foil. 23) entitled Verzeichnis der Malabarischen Bücher. It is written in German in a thin ornate hand on watermarked paper, and is obviously a catalogue of Tamil books, some of them well-known classics. The term Malabarisch (Malabari in English), which the author uses for people and language alike, is the name by which Tamil was generally known among the Portuguese and the Europeans who reached India soon afterwards. At one place (book no. 47) the author calls the language Tamul which, according to Caldwell, was the term employed by the French. The name of the author is not mentioned in the manuscript. There is a note in the Department's Catalogue of Sloane, Birch and Additional Manuscripts dated 1782 which reads: “Verzeichnis der Malabarischen Bücher: i.e. Catalogus linguâ Germanicâ, a Missionariis Evangelicis in urbe Tranquebar, an. 1709 compositus, quo recensentur 112 librorum Malabaricorum, inscriptiones breviores eorumque contenta indicate.” To this the List of Oriental Manuscripts, Vol. I, in the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts adds: “see Bibliotheca Rostgardiana … vendenda Hafniae, Anno 1726 … pars altera, no. 852.”

The inscription under notice is engraved on an outcrop of the Aravallis to the south-east of Delhi in a colony now being developed on the south of Srinivasapuri, a government residential colony on the Ring Road (South). The inscription is within the village limits of Bahapur, west of the modern Kalkajee Temple.

The question of the admission of Indians to the Covenanted Civil Service was perhaps the most important single issue connected with the British empire in India during the 19th century. The administration and the political security of the raj both depended very largely on this civil service. It was for this reason that, in 1793, important administrative positions were restricted to Europeans. Natives were thought to lack political reliability and personal morality; an additional disqualification was their lack of familiarity with Western principles of judicial administration. The objectionable legal statement of discrimination was later replaced by an admirable series of pronouncements of equality. Nevertheless, the Indian Civil Service was still, in the middle of the 19th century, a European elite body both in composition and function. There thus existed a conflict between professed intentions and practical reality. This antithesis underlay the development of the issue from the committee-room cliché that it was in 1853 to the crucial political problem that it had become by 1879.

Pre-nineteenth-century prose and prose fiction in Hindi dialects. It is well known that the use of Sanskritized prose in Hindi dialects dates from long before the beginning of the 19th century A.D. The pre-19th-century prose texts which have been preserved in Braj Bhāṣā, Khaṛi Bolī, and Rājasthānī dialects have a collective importance for our subject as antecedents of the Sanskritized style of standard Hindi, based on Khaṛī Bolī, which emerged in the 19th century. Their existence demonstrates that before this time there were already recognized traditions of prose-writing in the main western Hindi dialects, and that within these traditions it was customary to use Sanskrit words to supplement the vocabulary of one's dialect, and to work in the Devanāgarī script.

Pyo and jātaka. A considerable proportion of the corpus of Burmese literature consists of translations or adaptations from Buddhist texts in Pali. Some works are prose translations, but Pali texts also formed a basis for verse, particularly in the type of poem called “pyo”. There are a few pyo which merely enumerate precepts for virtuous conduct, and a small number dealing with secular subjects, but the majority narrate an episode from the Buddha's life or re-tell one of the jātakas. These are not exact translations: pyo have been described as written “by extracting suitable stories from the life of the Buddha and the jātakas, which are found in the Buddhist scriptures, and embellishing them in Burmese verse”, as “embellished translations”, and as “ornate translations”.