Roebuck, Thomas. A Collection of Proverbs, and Proverbial Phrases, in the Persian and Hindoostanee Languages.

€ 4.500,00

First edition. More than 5,000 Persian and Hindustani proverbs compiled by four important scholars from Fort William College, Calcutta - a "large and curious collection" (Lowndes). "The original plan for the book, laid out by William Hunter, the Secretary to the Council of the College of Fort William, had been to include proverbs in Arabic, Sanskrit, and Punjabi, as well as Persian and Hindustani. Hunter was transferred to Java, however, and he delegated the work to [Thomas] Roebuck, who had learned Hindi from [John] Gilchrist and perhaps acquired an interest in proverbs from him. The book itself, an enormous publication amounting to 803 pages, was edited by H[orace] H[ayman] Wilson, as Roebuck died in 1819 before the work could be completed. The task of translating the 397 page section of Hindi proverbs also fell to Wilson" (Pels/Salemink). The result of this year-long labour is the present massive proverb collection representing proverbial speech. Its publication preceded a shift in colonial writing some sixty or eighty years later, when a discourse about caste came to predominate colonial representations of Indian society.

No copy in auction records since 1915. Seven library copies listed on OCLC: at the Universities of Belfast, Aberdeen and Manchester, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the University of Alberta, Canada, and the Universities of Göttingen and Erfurt in Germany.

The lower flyleaf bears a brief ink quotation from Tota-Kahani, a collection of moral fables stemming from a Sanskrit original, published in an Urdu edition prepared by the British orientalist Duncan Forbes in 1852.