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Thanks to Sumedha Verma Ojha for suggesting this book.

I personally knew D. R. Bhandarkar's daughter and her husband who was the editor of a Punjab newspaper. She was a very soft-spoken lady who was a professor of English at Allahabad (?) and used to treat me very affectionately.

Numismatics is FASCINATING. Of all artifacts from the past I find coins the most immediate and gripping. Perhaps imagining the coins circulating amongst different people within society and the many uses the money may have been put to lends them a special cachet. A good part of my story on Mauryan India is concerned with coins and minting.

I cannot claim to be a trained numismatist but I have made some comments on the Taxila hoard (in which a gold coin of Diodotus-I together with punch-marked coins have been found) which has been acclaimed by many western scholars.

When I used to meet Prof. D. R. Bhandarkar's daughter (Vasanti Mausi) about forty years back we used to disuss Plato's ideas about an ideal state but I had no idea that one day I would step into her father's territory. The situation was different in the case of another famous numismatist Prof.B. N. Mukherjee whom I met much later and who corrected misconceptions about some coins.

I do not know what has happened to D. R. Bhandarkar's beautiful Calcutta house which was ten minutes walk from ours. They had another house near Darjeeling. I have fond remembrances of Vasanti Mausi's husband Rewa Railwani who came to our house also. He was a fine person very different from present day self-seeking journalists.