The author of Varna-Ratnakar Kavisekharacharya Jyotiriswar Thakur (1280-1340) is quite a well-known figure and an expert musician. He was in the court of a King of the Karnata dynasty Harasimha Deva or Harisimhadeve who defeated a Mohammedan invader. Varna-Ratnakar, deals with the poetic convention of describing royal life and surrounding the earliest vernacular prose-work in the North India and presupposes a developed state of Maithili literature. He is said to have moulded the genius the great Vidyapati Thakur (1360-1448) and his successors.

The Kaleidoscopic view of the life in North Eastern India of the 14th century as presented in Varna-Ratnakar, is a rich collection of over 6500 words. It also offers a valuable commentary on the epic graphic and other literary records of the contemporary and earlier period.

Pandit Harprasad Sastri, discovered the manuscript of Varna Ratnakar in Nepal Darbar Library and got it published by Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1940. It was ably edited by Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee and Pandit Babuaji Mishra.

The importance of the Varna-Ratnakar as rightly mentioned in his learned introduction by Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee (1890-1977), a great orientalist and linguist of our times, "as being one of a comparatively small number of authentic works in a modern Indo-Aryan. Its position is equally important with the caryas and the Srikrishna-Kirtana of Bengali, the Jnanesvan of Marathi and the earlier Old Western Rajasthani, Braj-bhaka and Awadhi works.

**Contents and Sample Pages**