It is a pleasure to accede to Dr. S.S. Janaki's request that I should write a Foreword to the late Prof. V. Raghavan's lectures on The Concept of the Beautiful in Sanskrit Literature, originally delivered under the Dewan Bahadur Krishnaswami Rao Foundation at the Madras University on 27 and 28 February 1962. While I do not claim any deep knowledge of Sanskrit or of aesthetics, I too have been intrigued and held in fascination by the phenomenon of Beauty (in fact, my booklet On Beauty was published as early as 1945, three years after Prof. P. Ν. Srinivasachari's The Philosophy of the Beautiful); and, besides, being exact contemporaries, I was privileged to know and enjoy the friendship of Prof. Raghavan from the carly thirties to the time of his sudden passing in 1979. These were inducements enough to make me overcome my initial reluctance and agree to contribute this Foreword.
It is likely Prof. Raghavan left these lectures unpubli-shed because he had hoped to revise, and perhaps enlarge them. His Concepts of Alankara Sastra appeared in 1942, his study of Bhoja's Srngaraprakasa won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1966, and he presented a learned paper on Sri Aurobindo's Acsthetics at the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary National Seminar in 1972. Dr. Raghavan was always full of the subject, and his dual allegiance to Sanskrit literature and Karnatak music (notably as exemplified in Tyagaraja) constantly provoked lively speculation on the concept of Beauty and the impact of the Beautiful on seasoned human sensibility. Further, Raghavan was widely read in Western aesthetics from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Longinus to modern thinkers and critics like Ruskin, Lascelles Abercrombie, Jaques Maritain and Benedetto Croce. Had Prof. Raghavan found the time to turn his two lectures into a structured monograph with all the weight of his learning and experiential knowledge, he would doubtless have given us almost a definitive mono-graph on the subject. But that was not to be. Even so, these two lectures constitute an excellent historical and critical overview of the tantalising subjects of his choice.
The Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute is indeed happy and privileged to bring out this monograph on Sanskrit aesthetics by Dr. V. Raghavan, the doyen among Sanskritists. He is well known in India and outside for his pioneering and many-faceted contributions to Sanskrit literature and criticism and Indian Culture. According to his guru Prof. Kurpuswami Sastri, Dr. Raghavan was "a well-informed Sanskrit scholar of conspicuous ability". Prof. Daniel H. H. Ingalls, the most complete and classical Sanskritist associated with the prestigious Harvard University in the United States for a long time, admired Dr. Raghavan's combination of the "precision of a traditional Indian Sanskritist with a breadth of encyclopaedic knowedge".
"The Concept of the Beautiful in Sanskrit Literature" was the subject of Dr. Raghavan's lectures at Madras and Berkeley, California in the sixties. The subject of Indian aesthetics is yet to be built up by research work in Gita, Națya, Silpa and Citra and coordinating it with the useful related material in Alańkāra. Sastra. Dr. Raghavan was a unique scholar equally proficient in all these fields. Hence his research as contained in these lectures is yet original, relevant and useful. Unfortunately, it could not be publi-shed during his lifetime. The Institute is thankful to the family of late Dr. V. Raghavan, especially Mrs. Sarada Raghavan, for making the draft of these lectures available for publication by the Institute.
I cannot adequately thank the senior most critic-poet and versatile scholar Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, for his valuable Foreword.
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