Thoughts as I researched my Lifestyles in Early South Asia:
Wow, and I thought I had been working a long time and having plenty of frustrations. Just read the intro to the critical edition of the monster work on ancient architecture (Manasara Silpasastra) that I'll be reading as my last primary work for my own monster history book(s). The poor guy who did this (in 1933, Prasanna Kumar Acharya) dealt with...
...the fact that this work, which he really wanted to translate, was only available in fragments, and he had to actually go out and find more manuscripts (he found about 10, in 4 different writing systems; 2 he'd heard of, in yet another writing system, were lost; this is not shabby for obscure Sanskrit works)
...He also dealt with literally thousands of Sanskrit technical terms whose definitions were not known -- so he not only studied those manuscripts and many other primary documents but traveled all over South Asia with architects and archaeologists and gathered information before making his conclusions.
...Unfortunately there are still lacunae after all this work. Of course his translation reflects when lacunae are present, when a term is not guaranteed accurate, etc.
...This all took SEVENTEEN years.
...Then someone had promised to get it published. And in those long-ago days before good communication the guy wasn't there when our guy showed up in his city. But finally someone else helped, and also offered him a professorship.
...Then somebody reviewed it. And of course claimed he could do much better and that our guy hadn't looked at archaeology, which is ridiculous. (Apparently the reviewer hadn't actually read the work.) And that somebody, very famous in his day, published his own a year or so later -- which I just got as a PDF and I'm pleased to report that he'd just strung together some pictures and added some captions. Definitely not better than our guy. He comes across as a crazy religious kook.
Current time travel apparatus location: Pondicherry, India
