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It was during my visit to Calcutta in connection with a Seminar at the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad that I had a chance to meet Shri O P Acharya. He had come with Shri Jaikishandas Sadani, an old friend of mine who had come to see me at the Ramakrishna Mission Guest House where I was staying. He invited me and Shri Sadani to his house nearby. It was in the course of the conversation there that he spoke to me of his Sanskrit connection through his mother's side. His maternal grandfather Pandit Nityananda Shastri was a great Sanskrit scholar and a poet of repute. He then presented to me two of his Sanskrit compositions, the Hanumaddutam and the Sriramacaritabdhiratnam, a Sanskrit Mahakavya both of which he had got reprinted, the latter with the commentary Sana by Pandit Nityananda Shastri's elder brother Shri Bhagawati Lal Sharma and the Hindi gloss by Pandit Mohan Lal Sharma Pandey, the then Vice-Chairman of the Rajasthan Sanskrit Academy and the recepient of the President of India Certificate of Honour, courtesy Pandit Kalanath Shastri. This chance meeting was followed by a couple of other meetings in Delhi which Shri OP Acharya would visit in connection with his professional work. Shri Acharya was keen that the work of his maternal grandfather should come to the notice of more and more of Sanskrit lovers of both India and abroad. Now, it was evident that with a sort of Hindi rendering the circulation of the work was going to be limited to India and there too among the Hindi-knowing people. For wider circulation its English

rendering was a desideratum. Shri Acharya expressed the wish that I undertake it. Without fully realizing the gravity of the task, I agreed to the proposal mainly out of my consideration for him in spite of the heavy demands on my time and my none too good health. Having accepted it once, there was no going back on it. As is my habit, I saw to it that the work is completed as expeditiously as possible. In the meantime I was nominated a member of the Sanskrit Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi. The question of the publication of the English translation since the day I undertook it had been engaging my attention. In consultation, with my most revered friend Prof. Dhyanesh Narayan Chakrabarty who is also a member of the above Board along with me I submitted a proposal to the Board to bring out the English Translation as a Sahitya Akademi publication to which it gave its approval in its meeting on August 8, 2003. While working at the translation I feel that it was not like translating any other Sanskrit work. Being of the genre of Citrakavya, it required of the translator a special skill to portray the original in all its varied ramifications. Very often the poet would indulge in double entendre with adjectives yielding more than one meaning going with the words they qualify. One stanza would thus be yielding the sense of two, or in some cases of more than two, stanzas with the simile or the metaphor or the hyperbole serving as the corridor between them. Now, Sanskrit has a special flair for it but not necessarily English. But then that was the medium in which it was being put. The sanctity of its diction had to be maintained. I had to see to it that it looked like English and not some monstrosity superimposed on it. This I have tried to accomplish at great pains. Again, the poet belongs to that class where poets vie with each other in showing their pedantry to extract (vi)

acceptability for them from literary circles with similar orientation. This they do by means of use of recondite expressions, complex grammatical formations and highflown flights of fancy as also obscure little-known metres which would require of them with their out of the ordinary sequence of syllables to go scouting for words in lexica which have seldom been used, though recorded in them as also made-up words, the present work having a good quota of them, the classic example of them being the word aili for Sita, a word formed from ila, the earth; aili meaning the daughter of earth, ilaya apatyam stri, ila + a (n) i(nip). It is in line with the show of pedantry by the poet that he imagines situations when certain types of sounds are eschewed by certain characters. One such situation pertains to Sita. Once when in exile in the forest a parrot mistaking her lips for a Bimba fruit bites them with bemused Rama looking from a distance. After a while when he approaches Sita, she in her anxiety not to let him know as to what had transpired speaks to him in words which have no labilals . Similarly after Laksmana had slashed the nose of Surpanakha, in the conversation that ensues between the two the latter uses only the words which have no nasals, she having lost her nose not being in position to utter them. These attempts may amuse a reader but because of the difficult words may not enthuse him. The same in the case with the Citrabandhas, the pictorial arrangements of the metrical lines. Though dogged with these difficulties, I have proceeded on with the translation and have tried to make the best of it as per my capacity. While at it I have enjoyed the poem with all its rich descriptions of nature, seasons, hills and vales which being the essential ingredient of a Mahakavya according to tradition have provided ample opportunity to the author to bring out the poet in him. The Milk Ocean (vii)

when churned yielded fourteen jewels, ratnas. The ocean of the life of Rama, the Ramacaritabdhi, when churned yielded the fourteen cantos, each canto being one jewel given the name of the jewel come out of the Milk Ocean. The deep learning of the poet has tickled my scholarly sensitivity cultivated assiduously by my study of the Sastras at the feet of the masters in my earlier years. The poetic fancies have provided me inestimable aesthetic joy. I consider myself doubly fortunate in having undertaken the task and completing it in record time which was possible only through the grace of Lord Rama whose life the learned poet Pandit Nityananda Shastri has described in his inimitable style. His is a Rama Kavya with a difference. It is all the more reason, therefore, that it should catch the eye of those interested in the Rama Kavya tradition. As of those as cannot enjoy it in Sanskrit version can do so now through the present English version. That will be the ample reward for all my labours. Camp: Holy Nest Guest House, Dakshineshwar, Kolkata 3 rd February, 2004 Satya Vrat Shastri Hon. Professor, Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Ex Vice-Chancellor Shri Jagannath Sanskrit University Puri, Orissa