PREMA-SAGARA OR OCEAN OF LOVE THE PREMA-SAGARA OR OCEAN OF LOVE BEING A LITERAL TRANSLATION OF THE HINDI TEXT OF LALLU LAL KAVI AS EDITED BY THE LATE PROCESSOR EASTWICK, FULLY ANNOTATED AND EXPLAINED GRAMMATICALLY, IDIOMATICALLY AND EXEGETICALLY BY FREDERIC PINCOTT (MEMBER OF THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY), AUTHOR OF THE HINDI ^NUAL, TH^AKUNTALA IN HINDI, TRANSLATOR OF THE (SANSKRIT HITOPADES'A, ETC., ETC. WESTMINSTER ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO. S.W. 2, WHITEHALL GARDENS, 1897 LONDON : PRINTED BY GILBERT AND KIVJNGTON, LD-, ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, CLEKKENWELL ROAD, E.G. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE IT is well known to aU who have given thought to the languages of India that the or Bhasha as Hindi, the people themselves call is the most diffused and most it, widely important language of India. There of the are, course, great provincial languages the Bengali, Marathi, Panjabi, Gujarat!, Telugu, and Tamil which are immense numbers of spoken by people, and a knowledge of which is essential to those whose lot is cast in the districts where are but the Bhasha of northern India towers they spoken ; high above them both on account of the all, number of its speakers and the important administrative and commercial interests which of attach to the vast stretch territory in which it is the current form of speech. The various forms of this great Bhasha con- of about stitute the mother-tongue eighty-six millions of people, a almost as as those of the that is, population great French and German combined and cover the empires ; they important region hills on the east to stretching from the Rajmahal Sindh on the west and from Kashmir on the north to the borders of the ; the south. there are Nizam's territory on Necessarily differences, verbal and over a district of this vast extent both grammatical, ; but these differences arrange themselves under two great divi- have been called the Eastern and the sions, which respectively Western Hindi. Of these the Western Hindi is now the more the on account of the extensive literature important of two, it and is and because of which has produced, yearly expanding ; and social Considerations. One of the political, commercial, modern literature of this Western Hindi was S'ri pioneers in the' in the of Fort William Lallu Lai Kavi, Bhasha Munshi College He was the author of several at the beginning of &is century. famed of which are the written in volumes, the most Mja-niti, in what is the dialect of Braj, and the Prema-Sagara, composed This latter book has now termed the classical form of Hindi. vi PREFACE in the hands always been treated as the first reading-book placed of of Hindi students, and it will long remain a book primary It is a value to every European resident in northern India. book perfect familiarity with the contents of which is absolutely essential to the for it contains the life-work of that missionary ; revelation of Deity which commands the most absorbing interest in among the people of India. The two great objects of worship act of are modern India, whose influence extends to every life, Rama and Krishna the former the of heroism ; being exemplar love. The in- and fidelity, and the latter the type of supreme cidents in the lives of these adored beings are familiar to every no Hindu throughout the length and breadth of India, and Western person can understand the people, and no missionary can address himself advantageously to the work of his calling, until he has made himself master of the facts, the philosophy, and the spiritual import of the records enshrined in the Rama- yana of Tuhi Dds, and the story of Krishna's life as related in the Bhagavad-Gita. It is the latter work which was presented to his countrymen in their great vernacular by Lallu Lai in the a translation of which into is in the Prema-Sagara } English given present volume. The passionate adoration which Hindus feel for S'ri Krishna is conveyed in the following words, quoted from an Indian newspaper of December 27th, 1892 : " We cannot but place him in the front rank of those who are regarded by the unanimous voice of all mankind as the spiritual lights which lead men to salvation. All his actions were Nish- kama [without desire], and he left his body while in Samadhi [holy meditation]. He is regarded by the greatest Rishis of this land as the Purna Brahma [perfect God], the incarnation of the Absolute. If one desires to see the very embodiment of the Vedanta philosophy, he will not be satisfied with Buddha or with R.ma or with Muhammad or S'ankara, Christ, Chaitanya ; the spiritual grandeur of S'ri Krishna alone will shine before him like the absolute space from whose standpoint the million-fold 37 curtain of May!, is non-existent. Such being the esteem in which S'ri Krishna is held, it is clear that no book could be better suited to the missionary, the and others are teacher, who called upon to mix among the people, in order to learn the great vernacular of India, than the Prema- Sagara of Lallu LS.1. This, in fact, has been the chief use to PREFACE vii which the book has been put by Europeans, and it must long continue to fulfil that office. The first edition of the half of text, containing only the story, was in and it published 1805 ; was not until 1810 that Lallu Lai the and completed text, reprinted the whole in a single volume. In the 1825 third edition appeared, with the addition of a and in another vocabulary ; 1831 edition followed. Eleven years after this in last, 1842, a carefully revised edition by Pandit Misra was Yoga Dhyan published under the patronage of the Government in India. Then in 1851 followed the standard text of Professor Eastwick, which was printed at Hertford under the liberal of the Honourable Court of Directors and this patronage ; has remained the text-book to the present day. There have been two translations into of this and useful work English popular ; one by Captain W. Rollings, of the 47th Regiment Bengal Native Infantry, and the other by Professor Eastwick himself. Captain Hollings's translation from one of the early editions is original and valuable, and the translator's intimate relations with Indians, and familiarity with colloquial Hindi and the ideas current among the people, enabled him to catch the meaning of phrases that would have proved obscure, or even unintelligible, to others less specially qualified. Unfortunately the Captain was a busy man rather than a scholar, and cannot have given sus- tained attention to the whole of his task. The result is a work of uneven merit, which cannot meet the requirements of a student of Hindi. Professor Eastwick made his translation expressly for the use that " has of learners, and states in his Preface every endeavour been used to make it as literal as possible, without rendering it between translation altogether unintelligible." A comparison fails to this claim for the Professor and text, however, support ; the form of his text for the of constantly departs from purpose his and sometimes imparting a quaintness to English rendering, other than that of the ideas apparently for no object presenting of Here and in a manner differing from that Captain Hollings. he with the there, however, perhaps accidentally, agrees Captain which are nevertheless found in his in omitting entire sentences, own Hindi text. Professor Eastwick also occasionally alters such as ideas which may have been deemed inelegant, changing " " " " " " an umbrella into a canopy," and a cuckoo into a bird," viii PREFACE a cuckoo to be a because in England people do not consider "with like an sweet songster. He omits the phrase gait " and to a for similar ; elephant when applied lady ^reasons changes "a young man" into "a man of extremely youthful in at appearance." His translation is furthermore, many places, to variance with his own text, which is the one he is supposed into affirma- be rendering, and he even changes interrogations is far from tions. In fact, the Professor's translation very literal, even to the extent of furnishing equivalents for all the sentences been as 'they occur. Poetic effect seems also to have studied, and words are introduced for which no equivalents are to be are found in the original, while points of idiom elsewhere passed over untranslated. The defects here indicated must have greatly detracted from the utility of the Professor's work. The translation of Professor Eastwick has, however, long been such as out of print, and the high price obtained for copies occasionally change hands is a sufficient indication that a transla- tion of the Prema-S&gara is still in demand. Unfortunately for India, Hindi lias not received the encouragement which its im- it the portance deserves, and is, therefore, only trader, teacher, and missionary, who, impelled by necessity, give attention to its study. The consequence is that those desirous of learning this rich, expressive, and useful language are left very much to their own resources. It is to meet this state of things that the present translation of Professor Eastwick's text has been prepared. It has been brought to the level of a beginner who, having acquired the elements of the language from a Grammar, takes up the Prema-Sagara as a text-book without any instructor to guide his first attempts at reading, translating, and acquiring Hindi style. No attempt has, therefore, been made to offer anything else than a faithful translation, sentence by sentence, for the practically useful purpose of teaching the learner the exact mean- ing of each phrase, and the explanation of every idiomatic turn as it occurs.