The search for Sanskrit and Prakrit Mss. in Bihar and Orissa was instituted in 1918 by Government under Sir Edward Gait, the then Governor of the Province and also the President of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society. We had in view the possible recovery, from Bihar and Orissa, of lost Prakrit originals, e. g. Gunadhya's Brhatkatha. That hope has not yet been realised. But during the Initiation of the search for the last nine years, several im- sea.ch portant Mss. have been brought to light. One of these in the form of a Jayapatra recording legal pro- cedure and judgment in a Maithila court court (Jayaswal, J. В. О. R. S. 1924. pp. 47-8) arrested attention, and provoked discus- sion by Indianists (Jolly, J. B. O. R. S., 1920, pp. 246) An old copy of the Karna Parvam of the Mahabharata dated La. Samvat 327= 20th August 1447 A. C. (Jayaswal, J. B. O. R. S., X, 47) has been acquired for the Society, and was asked and given on loan to the Bhandarkar Research Institute at Poona for their edition of the Mahābhārata. Besides, the search succeeded in tracing a number of Mss. not described in any descriptive catalogue before. A text on Hindu Politics, written after the fashion of law-digests, by the Maithila lawyer Chandeśvara brought to light by the Search was printed and published in the Journal of the Society (Jayaswal, J. B. OΟ. R. S, 1923). The first nine years' search in Bihar has been devoted to Mithila, one of the most ancient and continuous centres of Sanskrit learning, and in Orissa to the district of Puri, where the perennial source of Sanskrit culture has never failed. Only recently, since last year, the scene of the search has been shifted to Bhagalpur and Jaipur.
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