This Dictionary is dedicated to my mentor Shri Gopal Dass Gupta (1912-98). Like most Hindu spiritual aspirants of his time GD had turned to Sri Aurobindo through Essays on the Gita, & diligently practiced this ideal offered by Sri Aurobindo in his Uttarpāra Speech: "...not only to understand intellectually but to realise what... He demands of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion & desire, to do work for Him without demand for fruit, to renounce self-will & become a passive & faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high & low, friend & opponent, success & failure, yet not to do His work negligently." Prior to settling in the Ashram GD had been a conscientious principled teacher in Govt. institutions, habituated to obey their principles & policies. Jayantilal Parekh appointed him stock-keeper of the reams of paper purchased for printing the 30-volume SABCL, & keeping a register of customers who had paid in advance & sending them volumes ready for dispatch. Then the research & publication (R&P) wing of JP's Archives charged him with compiling a glossary-cum-index of proper names in SABCL & in its own Archives & Research Journal (A&R). When GD's backbreaking fifteen years of labour was crowned by R&P's refusal to publish it, it was Harikant Patel, the Managing Trustee of the Ashram, who saw to it that a decent number of GD's 368-page Glossary & Index (G&I) ended up on SABDA's lap. Then GD, conscientious soul that he was, without care for his ailing 76-years old body, went on to add half-a-dozen more draining years of & produced a 30-page Corrigenda-cum-Addenda, as Supplement to the Glossary, which Harikant got published in 1996 - just two years before GD's body gave up. Prior to which he had instructed me on what he would like a revised edition to be. Providentially a professor of SAICE, keen to preserve GD's work, got it scanned & granted me a digital copy.My purpose in this 'brief compendium' is to place the proper names I have selected from GD's 'vast' G&I in what I believe to be their right context in the lives of Sri Aurobindo & the Mother, using my innate modus operandi defined by my classmate Rājendra Bālgé in 1964-65 as simplification by complification. I have omitted those entries on which ample material is easily available, those not used by Sri Aurobindo, & those about which GD repeats what was in SABCL & A&R as Sri Aurobindo's. I have added what I could obtain of the historical, political, & biographical background of those proper names directly connected with Sri Aurobindo, often with relevant quotations from him & Mother; as a result there are many half-to-four-five-page fusions of history & biography inspired by two scholarly works built on such fusions aimed at promoting European Enlightenment (q.v.) - note that like them, I too, am rather lax in giving my sources: (1) ex-ICS, C.I.E. (Companion of Indian Empire), C.E. Buckland's Dictionary of Indian Biography, London, 1905, reprinted by Indological Book House, Varanasi & Delhi, 1971. Its preface declares: "This Dictionary purports to be a handy Work of Reference, giving the main facts ['notices' he calls them, i.e. Imperial Edicts] of the lives of about 2,600 persons - English, Indian, Foreign, men & women, living or dead - who have contributed to the welfare, service, & advancement of India...or have gained some special notoriety [as enemies of Pax Britannica]. It has been thought desirable to commence the present volume from about 1750 AD...when the British power in India was be
