A History of Kanarese Literature

Fifty years ago very few, even of the Kanarese people themselves, had any idea of the range of Kanarese literature, or of the relative age of the books which constitute it. Our present knowledge is the fruit of patient work on the part of a small number of painstaking scholars, who have laboriously pieced together the scattered information contained in inscriptions on stone and copper and in the colophons and text of palm-leaf manuscripts.