At the time when we were students, we constantly felt the need for a ready reference, a handbook that would give us in a nutshell the idea about a certain technical term in literary criticism. Whenever we needed to look up such a term, we had to undergo a lengthy process of searching through a number of alamkara texts. As a result, we were much heartened when this project was taken up under the DSA. Originally, it was intended that we should work as a team, with the Late Prof. Rabisankar Banerjee as Principal Investigator. At his sudden and untimely demise, all work was thrown out of gear, and it was quite some time before it could be taken up again. Hence this delay in completing the task.
Our major objective in implementing this project was, as we have already stated, to provide a handy source of reference in literary criticism and aesthetics, not for experts, but for students principally, and also for people from other disciplines, as well as for Sanskrit scholars from other specialisations. This work, we hope, will save them the trouble of hunting through numerous tomes to find what they are really seeking. This kind of book is fairly common in other languages, e.g., English. But such works about Sanskrit literature are rare, and mostly written in languages other than English. We hope that this work will act as a Kosa of older times, and be able to cater to the needs of scholars and students both in India and outside. It was a difficult undertaking, as we had no proper model to work on, and with the loss of Prof. Banerjee, we have been forced to change the technique of work. Add to it our lack of experience, and there should have been nothing but disaster. But we have, we hope, managed to salvage something out of the ashes, and turned out a reasonably successful Kosa.
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