A of facsimile edition Francis Buchanan's hand-written manuscript of the Comparative Vocabularies containing the lexicon of Maithili - a New Indo-Aryan language - is being published for the first time in the form of a book. Based on intensive re- search carried out in Germany leading to collecting relevant Fachliteratur on the life and works of Francis Buchanan in order to weave authentic background knowledge about the time, place, method, and the circumstances in which he compiled the MS. of the Comparative Vocabularies in the Purnea and the Bhagalpur districts of the Bengal Presidency in the colonial Northern India, the book assiduously endeavors to determine, describe, analyze, and assess the worth and quality of Buchanan's pioneering contributions to the virtually non-existent and the newly-emerging genre of Maithili lexicography.
Winner of three Academy awards the Nepāla Rājakīya Prajñā-Pratisthāna Lhamu Prajñā Pasan Pu- raskara-1996, the Nepāla Pra- jñā-Pratisthāna Nepāla Prajñā Bhāsā Puraskara-2017, the Nepāla Samgīta Tathā Nātya Prajñā Pratışthāna Nepāla Samgīta Tathā Nātya Prajñā Puraskara-2018, and winner of the first Nepāla Vidyāpatı Maithili Anusandhana Pu- raskāra 2011. Professor Ramawatar Yadav is internationally well-known for his magnum opus, A Reference Grammar of Maithili (Berlin & New York. Mouton de Gruyter, 1996). Recipient of the British Council Scholar- ship, UK (1970-71), the Fulbright Scholarship, USA (1974-79), the British Council Visitor Award, London (1989), Senior Fulbright Visiting Scholar, USA (1989), and the Alexander-von-Hum- boldt Postdoctoral Senior Visiting Research Fellowship, Germany (1983-84, 1989-90, 2000-2001, 2013, 2018), Professor Yadav has published half a dozen books, and around 90 research papers in Nepal, USA, India, and Germany.
Research for this book was carried out at the Institut fur Skandinavistik, Frisistik und Allgemein Sprachwissenschaft (ISFAS), Christian- Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany as an Alexander-von- Humboldt Stiftung Senior Visiting Research Fellow during the three summer months of July-September of 2018. My deepest gratitude and most sincere thanks are therefore due to the Alexander-von-Humboldt Stiftung, Bonn, Germany for granting me a Senior Visiting Research Fellowship to enable me to collect the relevant Fachliteratur on the life and works of Francis Buchanan in order to weave authentic background knowledge about the time, place, method, and the circumstances in which he authored/compiled the MS. of the Comparative Vocabularies containing the Maithili lexicon in 1809-1811 CE in the Purnea and the Bhagalpur districts of the Bengal Presidency in the colonial Northern India.
I would like to acknowledge my deep debt of gratitude to the innumerable people who had been incredibly generous with their hospitality, time, expertise, and the numerous cups of coffee during my sojourn in Kiel. First and foremost, Prof. Dr. John Michael Peterson, Head of ISFAS, deserves special thanks; not only did he make my stay in Kiel highly pleasurable, he also accorded all possible assistance to me in a wide variety of ways - far too many to be recounted here. Suffice it to say, he was kind enough to exclusively hire a young, talented student-aide, Ms Annika Besser, to place orders on my behalf for the rather difficult-to-get books and articles through the Inter-Library Loan Scheme of the University of Kiel Library as well as download innumerable and incredibly old materials, including the PDF of Buchanan's Accounts and Journals of Districts of the Bengal Presidency of North India, and eventually store them all in a pen-drive in order for me to meaningfully use them during the writing of my book upon return to Kathmandu. To crown it all, Professor Peterson exerted hard and succeeded in getting my Schengen Visa of 90 days extended for two more weeks by the German Immigration Office in Kiel.
Prima facie, a vast volume of botanical writings on fern, and herbarium collections from Nepal, Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh and India may appear as hallmark of Francis Buchanan's oeuvre: quintessentially though he was a polymath of many disciplines. Scholars across the globe have zealously gravitated on admirably depicting Buchanan as physician, natural historian, antiquarian, botanist, ichthyologist, zoologist, geologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, topographer, statistical surveyor, 'intelligence gatherer" as an emissary of the imperial power, and prolific writer of voluminous Accounts and Journals. Rarely do they pause for a moment to take note of the existence of a number of meticulously prepared but thus-far unstudied and unpublished hand-written manuscripts of Buchanan's Comparative Vocabularies that are presently archived in the India Office Records of the British Library in London - much less discuss and analyze them in depth at some length. The scholars have given the topic short shrift, and indeed they are rather mute on the issue of depicting Buchanan as a pioneer lexicographer of the Vernacular languages of the first decade of the Nineteenth-century colonial Northern India - a lexicographical terra incognita of Vernacular languages in those days. As a consequence thereof, the study of Buchanan as a polyglot, an 'amateur' philologist, and a pioneering lexicographer has suffered from tremendous neglect. It's no wonder therefore that practically none of Buchanan's hand-written manuscripts of the extant Comparative Vocabularies, containing valuable lexicon assiduously compiled from an array of the Vernacular languages spoken in the vast swathe of a territory across the borders of India and Nepal during an extensive 'Statistical Survey' carried out at the cusp of the first and second decennia of the 19th century, have seen the light of the day till today.
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