Catalogo

My intention to publish an edition of the Vyavahārasaukhya goes back many years. During an extended research stay at the Deccan College Research Institute in Pune in 1953–1955, I obtained, through the good offices of Professor S.M. Katre and Dr. M.M. Patkar, a microfilm of a manuscript of this text from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune and two from the Anup Sanskrit Library in Bikaner.
On my return to Belgium, I transcribed the manuscript from Pune and collated those from Bikaner. After my transfer to the University of Pennsylvania, I received a microfilm of a codex from Sarasvati Bhavan in Varanasi, which had been ordered and prepared years earlier, but mislaid on a shelf until one of my students retrieved it. This manuscript, too, was collated with the other three.
These circumstances only partly account for the further delay in completing this edition. Notwithstanding intermittent efforts, the burdens of teaching and guiding students to the Ph.D. degree, and other research projects, prevented me from carving an uninterrupted period of time to work on the Vyavahārasaukhya.
Finally, after reaching retirement, I was able to return to the text I had processed when the only way I had of typing devanāgarī script and Roman script with the required diacritic signs were the fonts, Madhushree and Manjushree respectively, created by Professor Madhav M. Deshpande.
Much time has been spent since to adapt the earlier format to the modalities of current computer publishing. I hope that an edition of the Vyavahārasaukhya, a text attributed to a famed Hindu minister of the Mughal emperor Akbar, will provide a new and valuable component in the history of Indian legal procedure and a window into Sanskrit legal scholarship under Muslim rule.
In addition to the institutions that allowed me to make use of manuscripts in their collections, and the authorities at the Deccan College who made access to these manuscripts possible, I wish to thank Professor Patrick Olivelle, who, as on prior occasions, shared with me his extensive technical expertise in editing Sanskrit texts. It was Patrick, also, who established contact with Dr. Federico Squarcini, to whom I am grateful for having the volume
published. I also wish to thank my colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Emeritus William L. Hanaway, for helping me uniformly to transliterate Persian terms used in the Introduction. Last, but not least, my thanks go to my loving companion of fifty-three years, whose sharp eye for detail has saved this volume from many inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Working on the Vyavahārasaukhya was yet another imposition on her time and her own research, in addition to the constant physical and moral support she provided after major surgery weakened me in the final stages of this project.
Ludo Rocher
Philadelphia, February 2014