A History of Sanskrit Literature: Classical Period, Vol. I c5.39

c5.39

¹ Jacobi in *Verhandl. d. V Orient. Kongress*, Berlin 1881, II. 2, pp. 133-56; Weber in *ZDMG*, XXVII, p. 174 f. and in *Ind. Streifen*, III, pp. 217 f. 211 f. The arguments turn chiefly on the silence of the commentators and rhetoricians, and on grammatical and stylistic evidence, which need not be summarised here. Although the intrinsic evidence of taste, style and treatment is at best an unsafe guide, no student of Sanskrit literature, alive to literary niceties, will deny the obvious inferiority of the supplement. The extreme rarity of MSS for these additional cantos is also significant; and we know nothing about their source, nor about the source of the commentary of Sītārāma on them (the only notice of a MS occurring in R. L. Mitra, *Notices*, x, no. 3289, p. 38). It must, however, be admitted that, though an inferior production, the sequel is not devoid of merit; and there are echoes in it not only from Kālidāsa's works but also lines and phrases which remind one of later great Kāvya-poets. The only citation from it in later writings is the one found in Ujjvaladatta's commentary on the *Uṇādi-sūtra* (ed. T. Aufrecht, Bonn 1859, *ad* iv. 66, p. 106), where the passage *ravaḥ pragalbhāhata-bherī-saṁbhavaḥ* is given as a quotation with *iti Kumāraḥ* (and not *Kumāre*). It occurs as a variant of *Kumāra°* xiv. 32*a* in the NSP edition; but it is said to occur also in Kumāradāsa's *Jānakī haraṇa*, which work, however, is cited by Ujjvaladatta (iii. 73) by its own name and not by the name of its author. If this is a genuine quotation from the sequel, then the sequal must have been added at a fairly early time, at least before the 14th century A.D., unless it is shown that the passage in question is a quotation from Kumāradāsa and an appropriation by the author of the sequel. The question is re-opened by S. P. Bhattacharya in *Proceedings of the Fifth Orient. Conf.*, Vol. I, pp. 43-44.