History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c15.s2.t12.3

c15.s2.t12.3

i.e., “the poet Yaśovarman, who had been served by Vākpatirāja, the illustrious Bhavabhūti, and other poets, (himself) became by his defeat (at the hands of Lalitāditya) a panegyrist of his (Lalitāditya’s) virtues.”² Unfortunately, there is no extant work which we can attribute to him with certainty, although the play entitled Rāmābhyudaya³ and some poems cited in Vallabhadeva’s Subhāṣitāvali are said to have been the compositions of one Yaśovarman, identified with his Kanauj namesake. The stanza also gives us the names of two literary geniuses—Vākpatirāja and Bhavabhūti⁴ —who adorned his court, and, as we shall see below, Kalhaṇa’s testimony is amply confirmed by the literary tradition of the Jains and by Vākpati himself. Of the two, Bhavabhūti was the more gifted poet and Vākpati frankly acknowledges his debt to him saying : “even now in his rugged compositions excellences are sparkling like drops of the *amrita* liquid of poetry, which have come out of the ocean (called) Bhavabhūti.” He is the author of the three well-known Sanskrit plays, *Mālatīmādhava*, *Mahāvīracarita* and *Uttararāmacarita*. Hertel is of opinion that “all of them must have been composed in Kanauj” in order to be performed “before an audience of pilgrims in the temple of Kālapriyanātha, who evidently was Yaśovarman’s family deity.”¹ It is, however, usually assumed that the Lord Kālapriya is the same as the Mahākāleśvara, whose famous shrine at Ujjain in Malwa is mentioned by Kālidāsa (*Raghuvamśa*, VI, 34), and Bāṇa (*Kādambarī*, p. 53, ed. Peterson) etc. But this identification seems inadmissible inasmuch as Bhavabhūti tells us in the *Mālatīmādhava* that his ancestral home in Padmapura, corresponding with modern Padmāvatī or Narvar in the Gwalior state,² is “on the road to the south” with reference to the shrine of the Lord Kālapriya. We have, therefore, to look for some place to the north of Padmāvatī, and it is quite likely that Yaśovarman, who was perhaps a Śaiva or a Śākta (witness his visit to the goddess Vindhyavāsinī) had a temple of this description in the capital also.³ The