Rama Caritam of Sandhyakaranandin

Born in 1853, Mahamhopadhyaya Haraprasada Sastri graduated from the Presidency college in 1876 and passed the M.A. examination from the Sanskrit College in 1877, being placed in the First Class and obtained the Degree of Sastri. His research work Bharata Mahita was published in the Vangadarsana edited by Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya. A few articles by Harprasada were published, even when he was a student, in the Vangadarsana and the Aryadarsana, edited by Jogendranath Vidyabhushan (1845-1904). He was appointed the principal of the Sanskrit College. He assisted the former in his Bengali translation of the Rgveda. He also worked with Rajendralala and assisted him in compilation of his Buddhist Sanskrit Literature of Nepal. As a matter of fact the succeeded Rajendralala, after the latter’s demise, the projects of the Asiatic Society for discovering and cataloguing of old manuscripts. Among his noted discoveries three are very important; they are: Saundarananda kavya of Asvaghosa, Ramacarita of Sandhyakaranandin and Kirtilata of Vidyapati Thakura. Besides, he discovered the Varnaratnakara of Jyotirisvara. But the most important discovery of Haraprasada was the mistic songs of the saint poets of the Vajrayana sect. The four collections of such songs he discovered were the Caryacaryaviniscaya of Luipada, the Dohakosa of Sarohavajra, the Dohakosa and the Dakarnava of Kanhapada. He discovered all these four collections in 1907 in Nepal and then edited and published them, in 1916, under the title Hajara bacharera purana Bangala bhasaya Bauddhagana o Doha. Sastriji also edited for the first time Asvaghosa’s Saundaranada which was published in the Bibliotheca Indica series of the Asiatic Society (1910).