Sekasubhodaya, edited by Prof. Sukumar Sen is an interesting collection of stories of rich human interest of everyday life. These popular stories were current in Bengali in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries. This undated work is what may be called today a historical narrative as it is projected during the reign of King Laksmansena and very often refer to the King himself. The identity of writer, Halayudha Misra is uncertain. The story of the survival of the ms. is as interesting as the work itself. The language of the book is a mixture of Sanskrit and Bengali. The narrative style is known in French as Chante fable style is also interesting. The present work will be of interest of scholars of Linguistics and Folklore. Considering the peculiarity of the language the editor has given an English translation of the text.
The present text of Sekaśubhodaya is based on the edition published in 1927. It was full of printing errors and other lapses of an obvious nature and so a revised text, even without new manuscript material, has been a desideratum for some time. There was only one original manuscript which was lost soon after a transcript had been made by Rajanikanta Chakravarti for Umesh Chandra Batabyal the then Collector of Maldah. This transcript later came into the possession of Haridas Palit who very kindly permitted me to edit and publish it. The original manuscript was apparently not very well preserved and the transcript was not complete and full. It was made on inferior paper, and when used by me, it was in a dilapidated condition and some of the final pages were at a crumbling stage. I quote from the introduction of the earlier edition the following account of the original manuscript. "The manuscript, which was written on paper and in early¹ Bengali script, was used to be kept at the Bais Hazari mosque at Gour. The shrine is that of a Mohammedan saint, but it is much resorted to by local Hindus also. The manuscript was regarded as sacred, and would occasionally be taken out and read, and this reading was supposed to avert evil during epidemics and other public troubles. The late Mr. Umesh Chandra Batabyal was at Maldah as District Magistrate in early nineties. He came to hear of the manuscript from Babu Haridas Palit, then a homeopathic practitioner at Maldah and was able to obtain possession of it. The late Pandit Rajani Kanta Chakravarti, Head Pandit of the local zilla school and author of the first scientific history of Bengal in Bengali (which was the first attempt to work out the history of the Hindu period in Bengal from epigraphical records and traditional material), and Babu Haridas Palit together read the manuscript, which had a very old and worn out appearance, and prepared a rough transcript of it, from which a fair copy was made for Mr. Batabyal.
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