Sabha constituency in UP in May 1963. Raghu Vira's linguistic mission Raghu Vira was a linguist and nationalist. He tried to organize Indian leaders against the imperialist monopoly of English. He had mastered many languages including Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Punjabi. He coined some 1.50 lakh (150,000) scientific and parliamentary terms with Sanskrit as the common base just like Latin is for European languages. His Greater English-Hindi Dictionary remains his fundamental contribution to the cause of Indian languages. He was in touch with leading Tamil and Telugu scholars too for his research work. Apart from his work of creating for Hindi, a scientific, technical and legal vocabulary based upon Sanskrit, his reputation as a scholar will rest mainly on many editions of ancient Sanskrit texts, either his own direct work or inspired by him. Collection of manuscripts Raghu Vira aimed to re-establish India as Jagat Guru by researching, excavating and collecting an estimated three lakh Sanskrit manuscripts spread worldwide as the relics of the glorious work of the Hindu and Buddhist missionaries as cultural colonisers of Mongolia, China, Central Asia, South-East Asia and Indonesia. An account of his travel to Dunhuang is provided by his son, Lokesh Chandra: "My father, Professor Raghu Vira (1902–63), was a great friend and admirer of Aurel Stein from whom he had heard personal experience of his expeditions to Central Asia.1 The Dunhuang caves left a deep impression on my father’s mind. In 1955 he was invited to China for a study trip and stayed there from 23 April to 25 July. On 15 May, Premier Zhou Enlai received him and they discussed Dunhuang and the visit of the seventh-century Chinese monk Xuanzang en route to India. Their conversation is recorded in detail in my father’s account of his China trip. On 27 May, with 29 other members of the expedition, my father and his daughter Sudarshana Devi left for Dunhuang. The expedition included doctors, nurses, photographers, cooks, car mechanics, scholars from Peking University and The Academy of Sciences, archaeologists, and a female companion for Sudarshana. The Director of the Dunhuang Institute, Professor Chang, joined them on 28 May in Lanzhou. My father records the cold as unbearable, a jolting journey in a convoy plane and the bone-racking Polish car M20 crossing the vast desert. They arrived in Dunhuang on 30 May. The next day, my father visited