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.”

In the works of the 10th-century Arabic classical geographers, as represented by al-Iṣŭakhrī (c. 318–321/930–933) and Ibn Ḥawqal (c. 367/977), there appears a passage which deals with three “kinds” (ṣinf) of Rus. At the mention of the first kind of Rus, only the name of their city is given, while the name of the city of the second “kind”—apart from that of the kind themselves—though mentioned by Ibn Ḥawqal, is not given by al-Iṣṭakhrī.

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 geographer Ibn Ḥawqal, who wrote his invaluable description of the Muslim world in the 10th century, devotes a paragraph to Sīrāf, the great port of the Persian Gulf. In the 12th century an anonymous author made an epitome of Ibn Ḥawqal's book, adding, however, a number of remarks concerning his own period. In the description of Sīrāf he interpolated the following passage:

Its inhabitants are very rich. I was told that one of them, feeling ill, made his testament; the third part of his fortune, which he had in cash, amounted to a million dīnārs, not counting the capital which he laid out to people who undertook to trade with it on commenda basis. Then there is Rāmisht, whose son Mūsā I have met in Aden, in the year 539; he told me that the silver plate used by him was, when weighed, found to be 1,200 manns. Mūsā is the youngest of his sons and has the least merchandise; Rāmisht has four servants, each of whom is said to be richer than his son Mūsā. I have met 'Alī al-Nīlī from the countryside of al-Ḥilla, Rāmisht's clerk, and he told me that when he came back from China twenty years before, his merchandise was worth half a million dīnārs; if that is the wealth of his clerk, what will he himself be worth! It was Rāmisht who removed the silver water-spout of the Ka'ba and replaced it with a golden one, and also covered the Ka'ba with Chinese cloth, the value of which cannot be estimated. In short, I have heard of no merchant in our time who has equalled Rāmisht in wealth or prestige.

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.

Of the poems found in the Sīra, four only are introduced as elegies on the death of the Prophet Muḥammad, all of which are ascribed to Ḥassān b. Thābit. They can, however, be seen on internal evidence to be the work of later Anṣarīs, and to reflect the inferior status to which the Anṣārīs were reduced after the sack of Madlna in 63/683; a consciousness of the restriction of their importance to the part they, as a community, played in supporting the Prophet in the early stages; a degree of resigned resentment at their meagre share in the fruits of power, and an intense sentimentality in concentrating their thoughts on the Prophet himself, with whom their glorious past was closely connected. They wished to view this as a personal relation and a privilege which by then was in fact a consolation. Occasionally one also senses Shi'ī undertones in the sentimental adulation of the Prophet (clearly a remote figure), and, as will be demonstrated below, one also notices the occurrence of the epithet “mahdi” and words of the same root. Both these tendencies are of particular significance in relation to the late Umayyad and early ‘Abbāsid periods.

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”.

The Khotanese version of the well-known Buddhist prophecy concerning Maitreya forms chapter 22 in the unnamed Buddhist miscellany in Khotanese verse, of which more than 4,000 complete lines are extant. The chapter concerning Maitreya was edited separately by E. Leumann (Maitreya-samiti, 1919), and later the whole work was edited and translated by the same scholar (E, 1933–6). The Maitreya story contains the verses:

pātcä Ānandi tta hvate ba|lysä ttu scätu Mittrai vīrä

ṣäte Ja⹃butīvä bihīysde | drrai ysārä ggaṃpha kho vaysña 3

ttī dasau ysāre hämäte ggaṃ|pha Jaṃbutïvä hamaṅgä

kho ju hva'ndi rraṣṭä nänārri | hārūṣkä āho jīye 4 (E 22.113–4).

1. In his fifth pillar edict, issued in the 26th year of his reign, Aśoka forbade the killing of certain animals. The relevant portion of the edict, as it appears on the Delhi-Topra pillar, is as follows: imāni jātāni avadhiyāni kaṭāni seyathā suke sālikā alune cakavāke haṃse naṃdīmukhe gelāṭe aṃbākäpīlikä (Allahabad version -kipilikā) daḷī (Allahabad version duḍī; Araraj, Nandangarh, and Rampurva versions duḷi) anaṭhikamache vedaveyake gaṇgāpupuṭake saṃkujamache kaphaṭasayake (Araraj, Nandangarh, Rampurva versions -seyake) paṃnasase simale saṃḍake okapiṃḍe palasate setakapote gâmakapote save catupade ye paṭibhogaṃ no eti na ca khādiyatī.