A Comparative and Critical Dictionary of Vedic Interpretation (A Specimen) (An Old and Rare Book)

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In 1929, our Institute issued the First Fasciculus of the work entitled Vaidika-sabdartha-parijata representing the project of a Vedic Lexicon (kosa) which the venerable co-progenitors of the Institute, Swamis Vishveshvaranand and Nityanand had been pursuing, the former from 1903 to 1923 and the latter from 1903 to 1914 when he expired, and which had been entrusted by the former, towards the end of 1923, to the present writer. The work, as planned till then, aimed at recording. with grammatical and etymological annotations, the meanings which the Indian as well as the foreign Vedists had assigned to the words occurring in the extant Samhita-texts, about a dozen in number. Copies of the said fasciculus were presented to nearly one hundred savants who, generally, recieved it well.

But from amongst them, Caland added to his general remarks the following two very constructive suggestions: (1) that as a work of this nature and calibre was not likely to be undertaken soon again, its scope should be widened to make it exhaustively comprehensive and (2) that, as the Editor of this work would have ranged before him for his use, the basic as well as the elucidative and critical materials to an extent far beyond the reach of any other individual worker in this field, he must not remain content with presenting, on howsoever scientifically and historically sound lines, a record of only previous interpretations but should also form and unhesitatingly record his own judgements.

Having decided to act upon these valuable suggestions, the Institute undertook, in the early thirties, also to compile and publish another auxiliary work, to wit, A Vedic Word-Concordance, being a grammatically classified and textually concorded universal vocabulary register of about 400 Vedic texts, as still available, with complete textual references and commentary bearing on phonology, accent, etymology, morphology, grammar, semantics, metre, text-criticism and proto-linguistics. The Institute, therefore, bifurcated its project into the two sub-projects of (1) the Word-Concordance and (2) the Dictionary.

Both these sub-projects continued to be pursued, side by side till 1953 when it was realized that as the Concordance was indispensably needed towards the work on the Dictionary, the former alone should be first pursued and completed and the latter taken up, again, thereafter.

The Concordance, registering an aggregate of over 1,25,000 words, has since been completed (1935-65) in Volumes I-V, subdivided, altogether, into 16 Parts, running to about 11,000 pages (10″×7½"). Fifteen of these parts, have been issued as Nos. I-XV and the sixteenth as No. XV (a) in the Institute's Santakuti Vedic Series. The Volume I treats of the Samhitas, the Volume II the Brahmanas and the Aranyakas, the Volume III the Upanisads and the Darsanas and the Volume IV the Vedanga-sutras and other works of ancillary nature. The Volume V provides the two Consolidated Indices, (1) Ab Initio and (2) Ab Ultimo to the Volumes I-IV.