Dr. Siddheshwar Varma's Pahari Dictionary of 27 North-Western Himalayan Dialects Vol.1, Part 2, (Kangri Group) (An Old and Rare Book)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

In 1953, the present writer had the opportunity to do some field work in the dialects, of Kangra District. He sojourned at Hamirpur, where he had opportunity to examine several dialects, besides the dialect of Hamirpur, which has offered the main material in this treatise. Besides the dialect of Haminrpur, the following dialects have also been handled: (i) the dialect of Sujanpur, a town to the north of Hamirpur, as the adjoining map will show. An enthusiastic teacher from Sujanpur, but posted at Hamirpur Master Tej Ram, D.B. Primary School, Hamirpur, translated into the Sujanpur Dialect, portion of a One-Act play in the Dogri of Jammu. The title of the play was Devakājanma by Prashant published in the Dogri Journal, Nami Chetana for 1953, pages 14-18. Parallel expression from Jammu and Sujanpur dialects have been given in this treatise here and there. Another contribution of Master Tej Ram was the translation into Sujanpur dialect, of a short story in Jammu Dogri entitled "Might is right" by Shri Tej Ram Khajuria of Jammu. Another valuable help was the one by the peon of the Resident Magistrate of Hamirpur, his dialects being of Palampur. The remarkable feature of this dialect is the conversion of the aspiration of Sanskerit (jh,bh,dh) into tone as in other Panjabi dialects, but without changing the (gj b d) into (kcpt). This is presumably a precurser (precep for) of Panjabi voiceless stops concerned, e.g. for 'horse' Palampur has (gota), which Pabjabi dialects have (kota). Anbother dialect handled considerably in this treatise is the one of Fatehpur, a village 11 miles from Hamirpur. A remarkable feature of this dialect, which it also partly shares with other dialects of Kangra, is the preservation of the sense of the ancient past participle in strictly passive and not in impersonal sense, e.g. for the sentense "he struck me" it has 'tini me kutia, lit "by him I was struck", the following abbreviations have been used for the Dialects handled.

The research project in connection with his D. Litt. dissertation on the Vedic grammatico-phonetic manuals (Pratisakhyas) had ha developed ped the the taste taste in the mind of Dr. Siddheshwar Varma for the study of Vedic Language and literature in general and its linguistic aspects in particular. The thorough study of Vedic language and afterwards his inclination entirely towards linguistic brought him the honour of being called in the literary world "a true lover of knowledge, the king of Indian linguistics and the founder of Hindi terminology". As one goes through the various types of works from the pen of Dr. Varma and comes across that Dr. Varma had a deep and sound knowledge of ten Indian languages and eleven European languages, everyone without any hesitation can assert that he was a linguist in real sense. In the field of linguistics his main endeavour was to explore the peculiarities of the non-literary languages and dialects. This was the reason that in the prime of his youth, he started on the most difficult and dangerous research expeditions to North-Western Himalayan regions at his own expenses for the collection of multifarious linguistic materials. In the series of these research expeditions Dr. Varma was enabled to reap the rich harvest in the form of some abstruse infor- mation of dialects of this area which were published from time to time through our Institute either in the form of books or research papers in Vishveshvaranand Indological Journal. He also discovered 27 dialects of which sixteen belong to Pahari group, six to Kashmiri and five to the Kangra valley region. He prepared the dictionaries of these dialects, having three parts according to the region and entrusted the same to Acharya Vishva Bandhu Ji, the Founder Director of V. V. R. I., as the Institute began to function as the "clearing house" for Dr. Varma voluminous literary writings.

The Institute could not take up this work for publication for a long period because of its very highly technical nature particularly the phonetic symbols used in the work. Now, with the advent of modern technology in the printing, the Institute ventured to undertake this work for publication, as the present work is of great historical importance.