NINTH ALL-INDIA
ORIENTAL CONFERENCE
TRIVANDRUM
DECEMBER 20th to 22nd 1937
Observations taken more than a
century ago, these* papers describe many things which are
no longer actual, and they are become records. Records
not tha word recall long series of volumes edited for
the India Office and arrays of thick folios printed and issued
by several of the provincial Governments of India V Invalu-
able, however, as these are in regard to administration and
politics and economics and biography and the lives of British
and other European communities, they do not, except in casual
gleams, fill the void which is at the heart of Indian history,
uaiuily, our failure to conceive with what mind the peoples of
India lived through that history. For the Hindu period, though
at one epoch each district had its chronicle, its nila-pata of
‘blue-book’, as it was called, we have indeed no records, except
one or two formal histones and biographies and a number
of genealogies, rdjdvalis or va^dvalis, wh.ch are anything
but reliable. But at any rate we have enough of literature
through which transpires the genera] mentality ; and from
the epigraphical ‘records’ it has been found possible, as we
all know, to elicit much information concerning social and
economic conditions.
my italics/bold.
Trinketization 