A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c19.s1.8

c19.s1.8

In belles-lettres, the first work that claims attention is *Sattasaī*, an anthology in Mahārāshṭri Prākrit passing under the name of the Sātavāhana ruler Hāla and comprising about seven hundred verses. Each verse is a vignette characterized by an unusual degree of realism, and the collection as a whole depicts ‘simple loves set among simple scenes, . . . the work of poets who wished really to express the feelings as well as describe the externals of the people of the land, the cowherds and cowherdesses, the girl who tends the garden or grinds corn at the mill, the hunter, the handworker’. On linguistic grounds the work is assigned by critics to the period A.D. 200-450; but it may possibly be a revised version of an earlier work. Another notable work of the age of the Sātavāhanas was the *Brihatkathā* of Guṇāḍhya, reputed to have been composed in the Paiśācī dialect but no longer available except through a number of later Sanskrit recensions; many legends are told about the composition and fate of the book, and its widespread influence on later literature in many languages is universally admitted. The tales of the *Brihatkathā* had for their hero Naravāhanadatta, a son of Udayana, and borrowed motifs from the *Rāmāyaṇa* and from Buddhist sources. The work seems to have survived till about the eighth or ninth century and is highly praised by such famous authors as Bāṇa and Dandin.