The Hindi Urdu Flagship has just published a free digital version of Rupert Snell’s classic introduction to Braj Bhasha, the wonderful medieval ancestor of modern Hindi. The book is available both online and as a downloadable PDF. There are a number of options for the PDF download including high-resolution, small file-size, and individual chapters.
Here is an introduction to the new digital edition from the author himself:
My book The Hindi Classical Tradition: a Braj Bhāṣā Reader has been out of print for some years, and is therefore being made available in PDF format here on the HUF website. The whole book may be downloaded as a single PDF, while separate PDFs of individual sections, at higher resolution, are also available (and recommended). I am profoundly grateful to HUF’s Media Coordinator Jonathan Seefeldt for his skill in rebottling this old wine; and also to readers for their continuing interest in this book.
I am gradually working on a new edition, which will be perhaps twice the length of the old one: it will contain new selections of poetry by Banārasīdās (Ardhakathānak), Harirām Vyās (Vāṇī), Hit Harivaṃś (Caurāsī pad), Keśavdās (Kavipriyā), Nābhādās (Bhaktamāl), Priyādās (Bhaktiras-bodhinī), Tulsīdās (Kavitāvalī), and parallel extracts from the Sudāmā carits of Nanddās, Narottamdās and Haldhardās respectively; it will also have expanded introductions to all the readings in the book, and new introductory material on aesthetics, poetics, form, and genre — together with a side-by-side comparison of the Braj Bhāṣā and Avadhī literary dialects. I hope also to include recordings of some of the Braj selections. The second edition is a “work in progress” – using that euphemism to describe a project on which not much progress is currently being made; but I’ll get there eventually, DVWP, inshallah.
-Rupert Snell