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A History of Sanskrit Literature: Classical Period, Vol. I c8: Chapter VI. The Later Decadent Poetry and Prose

A History of Sanskrit Literature: Classical Period, Vol. I c8

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English

Contents

Chapter VI. The Later Decadent Poetry and Prose

1. General Characteristics

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As a term of popular criticism, the epithet 'decadent' would at first sight appear too vague and facile to be applied to a literature which extends over several centuries and comprises abundance and variety of talent and effort ; but when we consider the strange combination of elaborate pains and insufficient accomplishment of interminable prolixity and endless dreariness, characterising the poetical and dramatic literature which was produced from the 10th century onwards, the appropriateness of the description will be obvious. It is true that no strict theory of evolution is applicable to literature, and that occasional burst of individual excellence upsets all complacent labelling ; but there can be no doubt that in the period we are considering the truly creative epoch of Sanskrit literature had exhausted itself ; and there was no ability to rise to a new form of art, no turning point, nor any return to the earlier manner of the great poets. The entire literature was imitative and reproductive ; and even if some brilliant flashes are perceptible here and there, the general characteristics are so even and uniform that there is hardly any breach of continuity in its monotonously long course of history. The poets of the period suggest facility rather than inspiration, subtlety rather than judgment, immense and varied learning rather than vigour and versatility of spontaneous power. With all their inherited affluence and inborn talent for elaborate composition, the greatest of them is scarcely a poet at all, but a consummate versifier, who sums up all the traditions of poetic art that can be learned by clever artisan. If there is no innovation, there is also no adaptability of old-world art to new-world usage. What was once living and organic becomes mechanical and fossilised. All this means not progress, but decided decline, or at least stagnation, in which the shallow streams of poetic fancy move sluggishly within the confines of conventional matter and manner.

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This is nowhere so evident in this period as in the cultivation of the Mahākāvya, the so-called great poem, which makes no attempt to escape from its stiff limitations, but contents itself with a cotinuation of the established tradition. The moulder of its form and spirit is not Kālidāsa but his stalwart successors, among whom Bhaṭṭi and Māgha appear to have wielded the greatest influence. The admiration for Kālidāsa is doubtless unfeigned, but the failure to take him as a model arose from an incapacity to comprehend his spirit. Bhāravi had certainly vigour and variety, but he was, in the opinion of later generations, entirely eclipsed by Māgha, while Kumāradāsa's mediocre attempt to reproduce Kālidāsa's simpler method produced little impression. Bhaṭṭi and Māgha, therefore, were preferred by authors of laborious talents as models of imitative literary exercises ; for here it was possible to make up by learning and rhetoric what was lacking in passion and poetry On the one hand, the work of Bhaṭṭi became the precursor of some marvellous triumphs of literary ingenuity, Māgha's poem, on the other, started a long series of artificially sustained compositions, which seldom went beyond the stereotyped form, theme, manner and method, and included all the customary appendages and embellishments. No one would deny that Māgha was a poet, but very few would assert that he was one of the greatest kind ; and yet he became practically the sole arbiter of poetic taste to later generations. This was possible because the standard of verse-making, which he brought into vogue, confirmed the tendency to limit poetry to prescribed and prescribable form, to abstention as much as possible from what is individual and conformation to what is conventional. On the positive side of his excellence, Māgha himself was indebted to this process of conscious or unconsious conventionalising, which he brought to its acme and which all his successors adored. But while Māgha was a poet, not many of his successors were ; they had his qualities without his genius, his defects without the power of redeeming them. The fine sense of restraint and balance which we find in Kālidāsa is something quite different from the new standard of erudite correctness and massive craftsmanship, in which hardly any one can be put above Māgha, but which, up to a point, can be acquired and applied by labour and dexterity.

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The tendency to uniformity and consequent monotony is also perceptible, though in a less obvious degree, in the shorter poems of this period. Perhaps in no other sphere than that of erotic poetry there is greater opportunity for individual variation, but the convention established by Amaru and Bhartṛhari is seldom overstepped. One comes across almost invariable touches of consummate elegance and occasional freshness of conception and execution, to which the large number of erotic stanzas quoted in the Anthologies bear witness ; but the elegance is often the product of mechanical adroitness, and refined ingenuity replaces spontaneity of poetic inspiration. In the Stotra literature of this period there is perhaps greater personal element, which inspires more impressive devotional fervour, but in course of time this type of composition also becomes, like erotic poety, decrepit and confined to the narrow limits of standardised topic, mood and phraseology. The small body again of didactic and satiric writing, which presents wise and earnest reflections or mocking arabesques of men and manners, has a piquancy of its own ; but here also the earlier models are too slavishly followed, and the descriptions and reflections are of a too broad and obvious character. A new field of poetic adventure is afforded by the opportunities of historical themes, but the method is too favourable to rhetoric not to be perilous to history. There are also a few Prose Kavyas, but Bāṇabhaṭṭa had set an example too dangerous for smaller men, while the Campū, as an off-shoot of the Prose Kavya, is late, secomndary and incopetent. The fact that outside exegetical and scholastic writings this period cannot show much prose, and that the small amount of literary prose that it can show is not of much consequence, would of itself indicate the poverty of the literature in one of its important aspects. A greater interest, therefore, attaches to the prose story-books, which show some sense of the value of a straightforward style, rare in the studied masterpieces of the Prose Kavya and the Campū; but the collections, though always amusing, are often pedestrian and sometimes unredeemingly gross, and they seldom pass beyond conventional assumptions to an original or superior vein of literature.

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It is evident that one of the outstanding features of the poetical literature of this period in almost all its branches is its extraordinary lack of originality and independence. The writers are undoubtedly gifted with considerable literary skill, but they are capable masters, as well as unfortunate victims, of a rigid convention. The convention believed that the general alone was orthodox, and that there was no room for the individual; in practice, it led to a standardisation of idea and expression, of form and theme. On the positive side, it aimed at a wellinformed utilisation of accumulated experience and experiment, at the achievement of order, regularity and correctness in accordance with fixed principles and patterns, at the establishment of a kind of literary etiquette regarding what to say and how to say it, and at the stabilising of a poetic diction as the proper uniform of poetry. Once we accept the scheme and the standard, there is much excellent writing in this period, if not much excellent literature. Within his limits, the author is a master of his craft; if he does not betray any knowledge of other modes and ideals, he never stumbles in regard to his own mode and ideal, for which no labour is too arduous for him, no ingenuity too refined; moments of greatness are rare, but there is nothing slipshod or slovenly; and above all, he has that indescribable but real quality called breeding.

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The works of the period, therefore, are based upon solid and extensive acquirements; they are careful and sustained products of an urbane and highly cultured poetic art. The poets have no hesitation to treat the most worn-out and commonplace subjects on the tenaciously conservative plan and procedure; but in the extraordinary command of a rich and recondite vocabulary, in the grace and fluency of phrasing, in the painful accuracy of grammatical forms, in the elaborate adjustment of sonorous sound and sense, in the skilled use of difficult and diverse metres, in the ingenuity of wielding a weighty, ornamented and complex diction, their achievements possess a degree of massively and mechanically polished efficiency which is indeed astonishing. The process is lower but surer; it cannot attain pinnacles nor plumb profundities, but it can float on a conscientious level of equable and pleasant accomplishment. In no other period, and perhaps in no other literature, we have such a large number of productions, ranging over many centuries, which may not have given us poetry of the right kind, but which are perfect triumphs of poetic artifice in its best and worst senses. For bulk of work, unfailing workmanship and general competence, it is impossible to ignore them entirely, but it is also impossible to admire them heartily.

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But whatever we may in our day think of it, the literature itself never shows any dissatisfaction with the fetters and limitations that it creates for itself, nor is its audience ever puzzled or repelled by them. There is always a complete agreement and understanding between the poets and their admirers, involving a perfect accommodation of the works to the standard of excellence demanded and the mental attitude or aptitude of their readers. Otherwise, the vast and contented multiplication, with only small variations, of the same types of composition for several centuries would not be intelligible. That the claims of most of these writers to the name of poet could be disputed probably never entered into their own conscience, nor into the head of their admiring contemporaries and imitators; but when one considers the question absolutely, and not with reference to particular conditions, one cannot fail to recognise that this literature seldom possesses the freedom which emphasises creative imagination and aims at achieving anything other than what accepted tradition approves. The literature will never lack its fit readers, though few, but it will never have any wide appeal.

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For, all this means an attempt to mechanise an activity of the human mind which refuses to be mechanised, to reduce to norms and categories what can never be normal and categorical, to immobilise the mobile by throwing a bridle on the neck of Pegasus. That the art of poetry could be systematised, after the method of positive sciences, appears to have been one of the tacitly fundamental postulates of the system of Poetics, which had sprung up in the meantime, and which concerned itself chiefly with a pedagogic and practical exposition of the decorative devices of literary expression. The belief that the explanation of the verbal arrangement was enough for understanding the process of poetic creation led naturally to the formulation of definite canons and conventions for the benefit of the aspiring poets.¹ The rhetorical works, therefore, taught craftsmanship rather than creation, a doctrine of technique rather than free exercise of the poetic imagination, a respect for convention rather than individuality of treatment. Sanskrit Poetics reached the rank of an independent discipline at about the time when Sanskrit poetry itself, in the hands of less imaginative writers, was becoming a highly factitious product of verbal specialists. The Poetics naturally reflected the temper and encouraged the tendency of the poetry. With surprising assiduity and astuteness, it analysed precedents and formulated prescriptions; and in a period in which industry was reckoned higher than inspiration it came to have perforce an authority disproportionate to its importance. Both in theory and practice, therefore, we have a willing and unquestioned obedience to modes and models, laws and means, in accordance with a well defined and unalterable norm. The result was, on the one hand, a severe restriction of poetic imagination and expression, but, on the other, a correspondingly high proficiency in the attainment of mechanical excellence. The allied disciplines of Grammar, Lexicology, Erotics and Prosody also brought in their highly refined mass of rules, normatively defined and classified with equally fertile and elaborative acumen. If the poet was not an expert in the long list of sciences and arts prescribed for his mental equipment, he was at least well versed in the technical requiraments and conventions of these studies, which were meant to instruct him in the artifices of his craft, in the adroit manufacturing of standardised poetry.

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¹ For a discussion of the whole question, see S. K. De, *Sanskrit Poetics as a study of Aesthetic* in *Dacca University Studies*, Vol. i, pt. 2, p. 83 f.

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That the poetry of this period should be a product of high cultivation, meant chiefly for a highly cultivated audience, is also a natural corollary of the fact that it flourished in an age in which scholastic cultivation of learning was becoming universal. In almost every branch of knowledge, in the various arts and sciences, the really creative age was almot finished by the 10th century ; it was succeeded necessarily by a scholastic stage of critical elaboration, the chief work of which consisted not only in systematising the accumulated stock of dogmas and doctrines but also in making fine and subtle distinctions in matters of detail. It was the age of commentaries and of commentaries on commentaries, of manuals and manuals of manuals. All this, of course, meant spread of learning and intellectual activity, but the learning was circumscribed and unfruitful, and the intellectual activity dissipated itself in elaborate but useless refinements. Under an astonishing mass of curious erudition and endlessly fertile dialectic acumen, there is, generally speaking, very little independent thinking or constructive ability ; and the learned distinctions are in most cases trivial niceties which concern accidents rather than essentials. The different systems of speculative thought may now be supposed to have well nigh run their course and attained their natural termination in a stage of uncreative but prolix scholasticism.

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In the literature of the period the scholastic tendency reflects itself in the portentuous employment of the intellect to a disproportionate finical end. With the general subsidence of the creative impulse, we have a stage of weighty and ingenious elaboration, made with talent, industry and learning, but with an exaggerated consciousness of art. The influence acted in twofold ways. The range and quality of poetic thought and expression become, on the one hand, extremely limited and studied in having its mechanism ponderously well established, and, on the other, extremely abundant and subtle in working out strange and unnatural variations. Marvellous erudition goes hand in hand with marvellous refining of trivialities. The lost art of an earlier generation is thereby not revived, nor is a new art created out of its ashes; but the accumulated resources become the means of porade and dexterity.

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We have thus a class of admirable but secondary writers, in whom intellect and fancy become more powerful than sentiment and imagination, and technical skill and learning get the better of originality of conception and execution. They choose the broad and easy path of mechanical conventionality; and with ready-made words and ideas, forms and themes, it is not difficult to acquire impressive facility and attain respectable workmanship. But the productions become too much alike, being fashioned after same pattern; their subjects have too little variety, their treatment fundamentally similar, and their style and diction employ the same commonplaces of words, ideas, epithets and conceits, In order to counteract this monotony, inseparable from working with rigidly similar means and materials, it is inevitable that there should be an oppressive and unnatural display of erudition and technical cleverness. The key-word is grace, of which there is enough, but the word becomes almost synonymous with strained and strange refinements. Instead of reducing the encumbrance of ornament, the quest of the adorned becomes morbid and fanatical, but it is too often in the lower rhetoric that bedizenment is sought. It is not prodigality of beauty but of ingenuity. The poet is always on the watch for unexpected analogies and dexterous turns of expression; he cultivates astoundingly clever manipulation of words, their sound-effects in alliterative jingle and chiming assonance, the multifarious ways of splitting them up for diversity of meaning; an idea is turned to every conceivable distortion; the most far-fetched conceits, which bear the same relation to beautiful ideas as play upon words bear to charming wit, are laboriously discovered; the most obscure recesses of learned or mythological allusions are ransacked. It is needless to comment on this subtle pedantry and appalling taste, which do not wait upon nature but try to anticipate her and thereby defeat themselves. The whole procedure of the decadent poetry bears an analogy to the methods of the scholastic pedagogue, but the effect is one of a conjuror's tricks, astonishing but puerile.

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All these excesses betoken the close of the literary age, but the history of Sanskrit poetry does not, curiously enough, close formally with the 10th century. It loses all genuine interest thereafter, but works continued to be produced plentifully and unbrokenly for several centuries. The amazing profusion of production need not surprise us, nor need it prove that the works are not decadent. The volubility of bad poets is a parallel to the prolixity of scholastic pedants. Working on well defined lines and with well established mechanism, it is possible for average ability and industry to multiply the accepted patterns in vast number and imposing magnitude. The quantity here is, therefore, not an index to quality; it is a kind of mass production on a regular scale; and it would be idle to value the products in the higher sphere of poetry. The average poetry may have attained a respectable level, but there is hardly any great poetry. The hundreds of names that range over several centuries include indeed those of some poets who are not yet utterly discrowned, but on their brows, the laurels are thin and brittle; and it is difficult to say if most of them will ever recover much or anything of the great reputation which they long held. New names are also being constantly unearthed by the pious care of assiduous scholars, but it cannot be said that in their totality they add much of real worth to the store of Sanskrit poetry. It is even doubtful it most of the versifying authors who have be 'discovered' really deserve a resurrection from the limbo of oblivion. Amiable antiquarians who have made the attempt have succeeded only in keeping a few names half alive and in securing a limited recognition of the merits of a few others. Even as 'minor' poets they are hardly of much importance. A true minor poet ought be more than a mere name and to be fairly readable; but few, save scholars, know more than the names (if so much) of these obscure scribblers of the period.

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Much of the artificial and recondite tendencies of this literature would have been counteracted had it been popular in the proper sense of the term, or had real contact with life and its realities. But from the very beginning it was sequestered for the study or for cultured society, which was hardly the nourishing soil of human interest and intercourse. It had little, therefore, of the *gaité de cœur*, the bold and joyous popular sentiment, its rough good sense, its simplicity, directness and freedom; the poetry was lofty, exclusive, refined and cultivated. It was composed for an urban and sophisticated audience, and had its own system of phraseology, its own set of ideas and conceits and its own refinement of emotional analysis. It course of time, its stylistic elegancies and sentimental subtleties must have spread down and reached the masses, and there is no reason to suppose that their appreciation was always restricted to a privileged circle. But in the less creative stage. the poetry had less universality of appeal and became more factitious and remote. In receded further from common life and common realities and became almost excusively a product of artificial and erudite fancy. Its environment, innate characteristics and conditions of growth encouraged, to its extreme limit, a taste which preferred the fantastic and the elaborate to the fervid and the spontaneous. In the cultivation of all that is odd, weighty and elaborate, the poet became indifferent to the natural graces of thought and emotion in their most simple forms, and his subtle and ponderous style ceased to have a really wide appeal.

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There may have been in this period a close touch between Sanskrit and Prakrit poetry, but there is no evidence to show that Prakrit poery, at least in this period, was in any sense popular poetry. As a matter of fact, it was as stilted as Sanskrit, and was doubtless influenced by the same literary tradition. Even in the preceding period, the *Setu-bandha* and the *Gauḍa-vaha* are in no way less artificially constructed than the contemporary Sanskrit Kavyas, while Rājaśekhara's Prakrit verse and prose in the present period show that they were composed by a poet and for an audience who were both familiar with Sanskrit models. The remark is also applicable, to a certain extent, to the Apabhraṃśa poetry, which was gradually coming into prominence, but which never received as much literary recognition as the Prakrit. Being essentially derivative, neither Prakrit nor Apabhraṃśa poetry proved a solvent for the stiffness and pedantry of Sanskrit poetry, which, on the contrary, reacted upon them and made them share its artificialities. If there existed a popular literature, it was never adequately represented by Prakrit or Apabhraṃśa poetry, nor was its influence palpably perceptible on Sanskrit. Occasionally, here and there, a new trait, like the use of rhyme, emerges; but even rhyme is sparingly used in Sanskrit, only in some Stotras and lyric stanzas. It is not until we come to Jayadeva's *Gīta-govinda* that we find the first positive instance of the reaction of popular literature on Sanskrit and the first successful attempt to rennovate the older form and substance by the absorption of the newer life and spirit. This was indeed not an isolated phenomenon, but the result apparently of a fairly widespread tendency, the importance of which cannot be exaggerated. It did not, however, prove powerful and extensive enough to renew and remodel entirely the declining Sanskrit poetry or save it from its approaching stagnation. It is curious, therefore, that the extreme and affected classicality of Sanskrit poetry and drama continued uninterrupted for a long stretch of centuries, and a true romantic reaction never set in. It is only with the advent of British rule in the 19th century and at the touch of contemporary European literature, that the romantic art came to prevail, not in Sanskrit poetry which was all but dead, but in modern Indian literature, which started vigorously in a new environment and under totally new influences.

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There was, thus, in its long course of history from the 10th century onwards, no absorption of new influence nor any attempt to deviate from the beaten track. The average Sanskrit poet could never refuse or defy convention, and there were few rebels among the hundreds of self-satisfied imitators. But the process appears to have commenced even before the 10th century. The poetic convention was not conscious work of a single mind, but it was spread over a long period of time and established by degrees by the influence of several great writers, commencing from Bhaṭṭi and Māgha. Inherent drawbacks in the literature itself, the whole cast of its thought and expression, its general outlook, its monotony of subject, conservative taste and limitation of treatment, its adoption of an affected poetic diction—all these, combined with declining poetic power, which concerned itself more with elaboration than creation, became fatal to the growth of real poetry and indicated that the literature now badly needed a change. Such a change, however, did not come with the Muhammadan occupation of the country, either for better or for worse. Although there is evidence to show that imperial rulers from Akbar to Shah Jahan, as well as local Muslim potentates, were patrons of Sanskrit learning and literature, the equilibrium does not appear to have been much disturbed. It is, therefore, not correct to say that the process of decadence was brought about or hastened by foreign rule and its attendant disturbances, for the seeds of decadence were already there and were germinating for some time. We have seen that the epoch of really great and creative writers had already gone by, and the decline had commenced, not only in literature, but more widely in various branches of Sanskrit learning. The foreign dominion, therefore, was never responsible for the process; but it must be said that it never brought in its wake any vigorous poetic or dramatic literature, contact with which could have retarded the decline or furnish fresh impetus for revival. If a literaturef, after creating great things in the past, does nothing more of the same kind for several centuries and practically limits itself to the abundant reproduction of laborious trifles, then the conclusion is obvious that it has come to its natural termination; and it is futile to lay the blame upon external disturbances, which might have seriously affected men's mind, but which never actively discouraged nor caused any paucity of literary production, nor even broke in upon its atmosphere of aloofness from real life.¹

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¹ The utilisation of Persian literature is late and scanty. The *Kathā-kautuka* (ed. Sivadatta and K. P. Parab, NSP, Bombay 1901), for instance, of Śrīvara, who flourished in the 15th century and wrote to please his patron Zain-u'l-'Ābidīn of Kashmir, renders into facile Sanskrit the theme of Yūsuf and Zulaikhā. The work, in 14 chapters, is composed entirely in Śloka, and is virtually a rendering of Mullā Jāmī Nūr-u'd-dīn's work, for a comparison with which see R. Schmidt, *Das Zathākautukam des Srīvara vergletchen mit Dschāmī's Jusuf und Kuleikha*, Kiel 1898.

2. The Mahākāvya

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Magha is the last sturdy figure among the earlier group of Mahākāvya writers; and he naturally becomes, by his popularity and position, the puissant and glorious founder of the tribe in later times. In accepting his work, as well as that of Bhaṭṭi in some cases, the Mahākāvya does not, however, connect itself with the best and highest tradition; for there is no return to the earlier and more limpid manner of Aśvaghoṣa and Kālidāsa, whose classic examples never made it feel entitled to emancipate itself from the bondage of an inferior convention. Even Magha's influence is badly and inadequately represented; for his obvious rhetorical mannerisms are reproduced rather than his rare poetic qualities. The Mahakavya, as an extensive and elevated poetic endeavour, probably came to be regarded as the highest type of composition and as the indispensable test of a great poet. It had a prodigious vogue; but, notwithstanding high pretensions and conscientious effort, it is perhaps the most laboured and least animated of all the types of poetic composition affected in this period. The works have received praise for their sustained and careful conformity to the recognised standard of erudite fancy and verbal proficiency, but they have deserved censure because they are so obviouly elaborate exercises in metre and language rather than fruits of poetic inspiration. In different circumstances and in other times, the worthy authors might have achieved individuality and distinction, but here they content themselves with a mastery of the conventional style and ignore qualities which we demand of those whom we designate masters.

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We have already spoken of the general characteristics and particular tendencies of the Mahakavya as practised by Kalidasa's great successors. In this period they are so firmly established by the authority and popularity of these distinguished writers that we find little variation of the general scheme, method, topic and style. As a rigidly fixed type, the Mahakavya ceases to develop, but there is progressive increase of artificiality and decrease of taste. The theme, placidly accepted from well known legendary sources, are, as before, too slender to support a lofty and extensive poem, and there is no sense of the central story and its regular unfolding. For the human drama it lacks sinew; it contents itself with romance and fantasy. The prodigality of loosely connected divagations, descriptive. argumentative or erotic, is wearisomely similar in every poem. It hampers, interrupts and buries under its load the inadequate and unsubstantial narrative. but it is a convenient outlet for the exhibition of technical skill and learning. In poetry, there is perhaps nothing wrong if the subject is of little importance, but the treatment in this case is also narrowly conditioned, and the manner displays all the deadly weaknesses of pseudo-classicism, the climax being reached in the childish tricks of the Citra-bandhas, which are repeated in almost unbroken tradition.¹ The poets may be uninspired but they are exceedinly active. They do not know what tedium means ; they can go on weaving hundreds of elaborate stanzas and build up a verbal edifice of magnificence, in which scholarly ingenuity masquerades under the name of poetry and reduces it to a magnificence of futility.

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¹ The tricks are progressively discredited even by the rhetoricians, although they become the subject, as we shall see, of specialised treatises. As an evidence of the author's extraordinary command over the language, they may be regarded as curiosities, but when an apologist of Sanskrit poetry speaks of them as "giving word-puzzles in a poetic garb," he indulges in an enthusiastic confusion between word-puzzles and poetry !

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The Mahakāvya writers of this period, therefore, both gain and lose by their chronological position. They find ready to their hands a system of poetic composition, working on well defined lines, and following recognised principles and an established tradition, as well as an audience trained to the manner by a succession of brilliant writers. But with consequent facility and finish of execution, the freedom of conception and treatment is forfeited. There must either be the reproduction, in varied combinations, of stock situations and familiar motives, or the forced invention of strange and unnatural themes ; the one tending to monotonous repetition, the other to unhealthy wildness. With diminishing poetic power and increasing verbal skill, the poets of this period choose the former alternative. If they had not the genius to rise superior to their circumstances and leave the beaten path, they had at least the genius, in a flawed and limited sense, to work out finical variations and produce *tour de force* of considerable rhetorical cunning, if not of poetical brilliance. It is true that all the works cannot be outright condemned, and some of them are curious mosaics of the good and bad of their exemplars ; but the task of sifting much dross to find pure gold may be a delight to the scholar, but hardly repays the trouble of the ordinary reader.

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We have thus in the Mahākāvya of the period industrious monuments of poetic skill, but not much of real poetry. Most of them are hardly human documents; they embody cold and methodical practice in conventional art and artifice. They all think the same thought and speak the same speech. It is difficult to maintain that the passion in these poems is ever genuine, but the poets need not have taken so much pains to cover up whatever trace there is of it under a prodigious amount of pedantry and bad rhetoric. Some of the poems still possess a limited popularity, and can still be declaimed by school-boys; but most of them are hopelessly dead and require little criticism.

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A typical instance of the decadent Mahākāvya is furnished by the *Hara vijaya*¹ of the Kashmirian Ratnākara, son of Amṛtabhānu, who flourished under Cippaṭa Jayāpīḍa (832-44 A.D.) and Avantivarman (855-84 A.D.) in a period of considerable literary activity. It is a stupendous work of 50 cantos and 4, 321 verses, but main narrative is extremely scanty, and the interest is made to dissipate itself into a number of subsidiary channels. It relates the story of the slaying by Śiva of the demon Andhaka who, born blind of Śiva himself, regained sight by his austerities and became a menace to the gods. But the author must show his knowledge of polity in eight cantos (ix-xvi) and of erotic practice in another ten or eleven (xvii-xx, xxii-xxviii); the latter digression concerning Śiva's host, who appear to be better lovers than warriors, works out the usual paraphernalia of purely descriptive matter, such as plucking of flowers, sporting in water, sunset, moonrise, stormy sea, pangs of lover's separation, feminine toilet and blandishments, drinking bouts and merriment, love-play, and sunrise! The opening description in six cantos (i-vi) of the city of Śiva, his Tāṇḍava dance, the Seasons, Śiva's capital on Mount Mandara, and praise (in terms of Kashmirian Śaiva philosophy!) and appeal to Śiva by the Seasons fleeing for protection to him, are balanced by the closing accounts of the sending of messenger, the demon’s kingdom in heaven, exchange of defiances, preparation for the campaign and the imaginative battle lacking the virtue of imagination, all of which occupy twenty cantos (xxxi-l) and include the tricks of the Citra-bandha (canto xlviii) and a tremendous hymn to Caṇḍī (canto xlvii) in 167 Vasantatilaka stanzas! Ratnākara’s work, with its utter lack of taste and sense of proportion, persistent straining of effort and interminable dreariness, beautifully exemplifies the desperate state to which the Mahākāvya had already descended. Ratnākara is styled Vāgīśvara and Vidyāpati; his mastery of speech and specialised learning perhaps justify the titles; but he is hardly a poet of distinction. He fancied his powers of writing a Mahākāvya, but his own assertion that one who is not a poet can become a poet, and even a great poet, is characteristic of the attitude which is apt to confuse pedantry with poetry. Although Kalhaṇa (v. 35) mentions him, Alaka writes a gloss on his work, the anthologists take notice of some of his verses¹ and Kṣemendra praises his command of the Vasantatilaka metre, yet the rarity of copies of his work in later times, even in Kashmir,² is perhaps singificant of the fact that the work could never live and was not unjustly consigned to oblivion.

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¹ Ed. Durgaprasad and K. P. Parab, with comm. of Alaka, NSP, Bombay 1890.—On Ratnākara's imitation of Māgha see Jacobi in *WZKM*, IV, 1890, p. 240 f. On the lexical meterials in the poem see R. Schmidt in *WZKM*, XXIX, p. 259 f.

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¹ For the anthology verses see Peterson, *Subhāṣitāvali*, p. 96; Aufrecht in *ZDMG*, XXXVI, p. 372 f. Some of the verses are undoubtedly striking, but they shine in the reflected glory of conventional words and ideas.

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² The first detailed account of the work was given by Bühler in his *Kashmir Report* (extra no. of *JBRAS*), Bombay 1877, pp. 43-45. The published text contains many lacunae for want of good manuscripts.

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The Kapphiṇābhyudaya³ of Ratnākara’s younger contemporary Śivasvāmin, who also adorned the court of Avantivarman, is a work of exactly the same type. Notwithstanding a limited recognition by anthologists, rhetoricians and lexicographers, this work also suffered a similar, but not unexceptionable, neglect.¹ Like Ratnākara, Śivasvāmin, son of Arkasvāmin, was probably a Kashmirian Śaiva, and his poem is dedicated to Śiva (xx. 45); but he does not disdain to invoke and glorify the Buddha. Contrary to general practice, but probably on the advice of a Buddhist monk and teacher named Candramitra, Śivasvāmin selects for his theme the Buddhist legend² of Kapphiṇa, which exists in two different versions in the Sanskrit *Avadāna-śataka* and in the Pali commentaries. Śivasvāmin shows a first-hand knowledge of Buddhist doctrine and its terminology, but he selects the simple Avadāna story of king Kapphiṇa of Dakṣiṇāpatha, who invades the territory of Prasenajit of Śrāvastī but is converted into Buddhism by a miracle, and works it out of all recognition and in the full and approved manner of the Mahākāvya, as prescribed by the rhetoricians. Although he speaks of having studied Kālidāsa, Bhartṛmeṇṭha³ and Daṇḍin, his work is obviously modelled on those of Bhāravi, Māgha and even Ratnākara.⁴ Although it is less ambitious in having the respectable limit of twenty cantos, against fifty of Ratnākara, it is composed in no less difficult and ornate diction and with no less leisurely display of abundant skill and learning in the employment of language, metre⁵ and rhetorical ornament. He cannot, of course, omit the customary appendages of disproportionately lengthy descriptions (cantos viii-xv) of the six seasons, enjoyment of water-sports, plucking of flowers, toilet, sunset, moonrise, drinking parties, union of lovers and sunrise, as well as of sending of messengers, councils of war, political discussion and artificial battle-scenes, including the tricks of the Citrabandha (vi-xviii) and a hymn to the Buddha in Prakrit and his replying sermon in Sanskrit (xix-xx)! In spite of the novelty of his central theme, Śivasvāmin can claim no more merit than that of producing a literary curiosity of Śāstric knowledge, technical facility and misplaced ingenuity; and as a successor of the great composers of artificial verse, he is entitled to all the censure and perhaps to some of the praise allotted to Bhaṭṭi and Māgha, as well as to his contemporary Ratnākara¹

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³ Ed. Gaurishankar, Panjab Univ. Orient. Publication Series, Lahore 1937. The first notable account of the work was given by Seshagiri Sastri in his *Report of Sanskrit and Tamil MSS.*, No. 2, Madras 1899.

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¹ It is noteworthy that manuscripts are rare even in its place of origin. No Kashmirian MSS were available for the above edition, which is based chiefly, but unsatisfactorily, on fragmentary Oḍiyā and Newārī copies.

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² This is in no way surprising when we remember that in the next century Kṣemendra, another Kashmirian, includes the Buddha among the Avatāras in his *Daśāvatāra-carita*.

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³ The title of Śivasvāmin's work, however, reminds one of the *Bhuvanābhyudaya* of his predecessor Śaṅkuka, which is mentioned by Kalhaṇa (iv. 704).

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⁴ For the close resemblances, see Gaurishankar, *op. cit.*, pp. li-lxix.

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⁵ For metrical analysis, see Gaurishankar, pp. lxx-lxxiii. Śivasvāmin employs altogether 42 different metres, but in canto vi he makes a display of 37 kinds of metre, as against Bhāravi's 16 and Māgha's 22 in cantos v and iv respectively of their poems.

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¹ We are told in an apocryphal verse of the *Sūkti-muktāvalī* that Śivasvāmin wrote some seven Mahākāvyas, several dramatic works and eleven lacs of hymns and narratives composed day by day in praise of Śiva. We are mercifully spared of them.

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The *Śrīkaṇṭha-carita*² of Maṅkhaka, another Kashmirian work in twenty-five cantos, composed between 1135 and 1145 A.D., shows the same stereotyped form, method and diction, but reverts for its theme to the Purāṇa legend of Śiva's overthrow of Tripura. As usual, the story here is of the slightest importance, and the whole stock-in trade of accessories is liberally brought in. After preliminary prayers and benedictions in one canto, the work dilates upon the theme of good and bad people (canto ii) and gives an account (canto iii) of the author, his family and his country. Maṅkhaka's father was Viśvāvarta, son of Manmatha, and his three brothers Śṛṅgāra, Bhaṅga and Alaṃkāra (familiarly called Laṅkaka) were all, like himself, scholars and employed as state officials. Ruyyaka, mentioned in the last canto (xv. 30, 135 f), is probably the same as Ruyyaka, author of the *Alaṃkāra-sarvasva*,³ who apparently instructed the poet in the art of rhetoric. The story is taken up, in cantos iv and v, with a description of Kailāsa and its deity, but it is interrupted for several cantos (vi-xvi) with the digressive descriptions of the spring and the usual erotic sports and amusements, and of sunset, moonrise and morning. We return to the martial exploits, involved in the story but handled in the conventional manner, in the following cantos (xvii-xxiv), ending with the burning of Tripura. In the last canto, however, which was probably added later, we have an account of some historical and literary interest, written in the simpler and easier Śloka metre, of an assembly of learned men, held under the patronage of the poet's brother Alaṃkāra, a minister of Jayasiṃha of Kashmir (1127-1150 A.D.), on the occasion of the completion and reading of the poem. It includes thirty names of scholars, poets and officials, stating their capacities and their tastes. But for these personal details, which have a value of their own, the *Śrīkaṇṭha-carita* shows only a faithful observance of the rules of Poetics regarding the composition of a Mahākāvya, and is consequently a work of little originality. As a pupil of Ruyyaka, Maṅkhaka shows much cleverness in the use of rhetorical ornaments, and succeeds in achieving some rich and charming effects in language and metre; but, generally speaking, his work lacks lucidity of expression,¹ as well as freshness and variety.

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² Ed. Durgaprasad and K. P. Parab, with comm. of Jonarāja (c. 1417-67 A.D.). The first detailed account of the work appeared in Bühler's *Kashmir Report*, cited above, pp. 50-52.

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³ Ruyyaka's work cites five verses from Maṅkhaka's poem without naming the author (see Jacob in *JRAS*, 1897, p. 293 for these verses). The Southern tradition of Maṅkhaka's collaboration with Ruyyaka in the *Alaṁkāra-sarvasva* does not seem to be authentic; see S. K. De, *Sanskrit Poetics*, i, pp. 191-93.—Maṅkhaka appears to have written his work a few years earlier than the date of Kalhaṇa's historical poem.

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¹ If our Maṅkhaka is identical with the author of the *Maṅkha-kośa*, then he was also a lexicographer, whose partiality for recondite words would not be surprising.

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It is not necessary to take further detailed notice of the form and content of other Mahākāvyas of this period, which are even more stiff productions, composed in strict accordance with the established norm. Some of the more extensive poems, again, like the *Hara-carita-cintāmaṇi*² of Jayadratha, are not really Mahākāvyas, but works of the Mahātmya type, which retell in the Śloka metre old and new Śaiva myths and legends, some of which are directly connected with places of pilgrimage in Kashmir. Similarly, the *Kādambarī-kathā-sāra*¹ of still another Kashmirian Abhinanda, son of Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, is not a regular Mahākāvya, but is only an elegant metrical summary of Bāṇa's romance in eight cantos, composed mostly in Śloka ; it has the honour of being quoted by Abhinavagupta, Kṣemendra and Bhoja, and apparently belongs to the first half of the 9th century. Although the author mentions one of his ancestors in the seventh degree as a Gauḍa, it is not clear if he is identical with the Gauḍa Abhinanda,² who is cited extensively in the Anthologies, but whose verses are not traceable in the *Kathā-sāra*, or with Abhinanda, son of the Śatānanda and author of the *Rāma-carita*, whose date and place of origin is uncertain.³ This last-named work,⁴ incomplete even in thirty-six cantos, weaves a Mahākāvya of the elaborate kind out of the well-worn Rāmāyaṇa story, commencing from the abduction of Sītā and ending with the death of Kumbha-Nikumbha ; four supplementary cantos written by other hands complete the narrative. The *Daśāvatāra-carita*⁵ of Kṣemendra, also composed in Kashmir in 1066 A.D. is again, not strictly a Mahākāvya, nor a religious poem, but gives an interesting account of the ten incarnations¹ in the regular Kāvya style, being an abstract, more or less, of Purāṇic stories; but, like Kṣemendra's other abstracts,* it is of little distinction in its eulogy or narrative.

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² Ed. Śivadatta and K. P. Parab, NSP, Bombay 1897, the text going up to 22 Prakāśas. The form Jayadratha, and not Jayaratha, of the author's name occurs in the printed text, as well as in Bühler's account, while the Kashmirian titles Rājānaka and Mahāmāheśvara indicate that he was a Kashmirian Śaiva. It is possible that he should be distinguished from and was in fact a brother of Jayadratha, the well known commentator on Abhinavagupta's *Tantrāloka* and Ruyyaka's *Alaṃkāra-sarvasva* (see S. K. De, *Sanskrit Poetics*, i, p. 197 f). He flourished in the first quarter of the 13th century under Rājadeva of Kashmir.

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¹ Ed. Durgaprasad and K. P. Parab, NSP, Bombay 1888, 1899 ; ed. Acintyaram Sarman, Lahore 1900 ; also ed. in the *Pandit*, vols. i-ii. Kṣemendra in his *Kavikaṇṭhābharaṇa* also refers to a *Padya-kādambarī* composed by himself.

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² For references and discussion of the question, see S. K. De, *Padyāvalī*, pp. 182-84 and *New Ind. Antiquary*, II, p. 85.

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³ Of the anthology verses quoted under the name Abhinand, only two in *Sadukti-karṇāmṛta* (out of 22) and two in *Sūkti-muktāvalī* are traceable in the *Rāma-carita* (see introd., pp. vii-xiii). The earliest reference to this poet is that by Soḍḍhala in his *Udayasundarī-kathā* (pp. 2-3), which belongs to the first quarter of the 11th century, while Bhoja quotes extensively, but anonymously, from the poem at about the same time. The problem is complicated by the fact that the editor of the *Ramā-carita* makes a plausible case of its author having belonged to Gauḍa ; but the identity of his patron Hāravarṣa Yuvarāja, son of Vikramasīla, with Devapāla, son of Dharmapāla of Gauḍa, is, without further evidence, highly problematic.

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⁴ Ed. K. S. Ramaswami Sastri, Gaekwad's Orient. Series, Baroda 1930.

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⁵ Ed. Durgaprasad and K. P. Parab, NSP, Bombay 1891.

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¹ *Viz.*, Matsya, Kūrma, Varāha, Nṛsiṁha, Vāmana, Paraśurāma, Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, the Buddha and Karkya—a list slightly different from that of Jayadeva.

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² The *Rāmāyaṇa-mañjarī* (ed. Bhavadatta and K. P. Parab) and the *Mahābhārata-mañjarī* (ed. Śivadatta and K. P. Parab), NSP, Bombay 1903 and 1898: and the *Bṛhatkathā-mañjarī* mentioned above. The *Bhārata-mañjarī* is dated 1037 A.D.

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The only Mahākāvya which need detain us is the *Naiṣadhacarita*³ of Śrīharṣa, not so much for its intrinsic poetic merit as for the interesting evidence it affords of the type of enormously laboured metrical composition which was widely and enthusiastically favoured.⁴ The work is regarded as one of the five great Mahākāvyas is Sanskrit; it is undoubtedly the last masterpiece of industry and ingenuity that the Mahākāvya can show, but to class it with the masterpieces of Kālidāsa, Bhāravi and even Māgha is to betray an ignorance of the difference between poetry and its counterfeit. The question of the date and place of activity of Śrīharṣa, who is described as the son of Śrīhīra and Mamalladevī, is not free from difficulty. In one of the four additional verses found at the end of the poem, the genuineness of which, however, is not beyond question, it is said that the poet received honour from the king of Kānyakubja. As this assertion agrees with the story recorded in Jaina Rājaśekhara Sūri's *Prabandha-kośa* (composed in 1348 A.D.), it has been held¹ that Śrīharṣa probably flourished under Vijayacandra and Jayacandra of Kanauj in the second half of the 12th century.² He was probably also a logician and philosopher, and wrote the Vedantic treatise *Khaṇḍana-khaṇḍa-khādya*; for, apart from the mention of the work (vi. 113) and of his labours in the science of logic (x. 137) in two epilogue-stanzas,³ the *Naiṣadha-carita* itself passes in review a number of philosophical doctrines including those of the Buddhists, Jainas and Carvakas.

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³ Ed. Bibl. Ind., Calcutta, vol. i (Pūrva i-xi), with comm. of Premchandra Tarkavagisa, 1836, vol. ii (Uttara xii-xxii), ed. E. Röer, with the comm. of Nārāyaṇa, 1855; ed. Jivananda Vidyasagara with comm. of Mallinātha, 2 vols., Calcutta 1875-76, ed. K. L. V. Sastri and others, with the comm. of Mallinātha, (i-xii only), in two parts, Palghat 1924; ed. Sivadatta and V. L. Panashikar, with comm. of Nārāyaṇa, NSP, Bombay 1894, 6th ed. 1928; ed. Nityasvarup Brahmacari, with comm. of Nārāyaṇa, Bharatamallika and Vaṁśīvadana (i-iii only), Calcutta 1929-30; Eng. trs., with extracts from eight comms. (Vidyādhara, Cāṇḍūpaṇḍita, Īśānadeva, Narahari, Viśveśvara, Jinarāja, Mallinātha and Nārāyaṇa), by K. K. Handiqui, Lahore 1934.

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⁴ The work is extensively quoted in the anthologies and is the subject of more than twenty different commentaries, including those of Mallinātha and Cāritravardhana. But the legend, more witty than authentic, that Mammaṭa thought that this one work was sufficient to illustrate all the faults mentioned in his rhetorical work also indicates that its artificialities did not escape notice.

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¹ G. Bühler in *JBRAS*, X, 1871, p. 31 f.; XI, 1874, p. 279. K. T. Telang (*IA*, II, p. 71f.; III, p. 81f.) and R. P. Chanda (*IA*, XIII, 1913, pp. 83 f, 286 f), however, question the trustworthiness of Rājaśekhara's account, and suggest the 9th or the 10th century as the date of Śrīharṣa.—The attempt to demonstrate (N. K. Bhattacharya in *Sarasvati Bhavana Studies*, Benares 1924, iii, pp. 159-94; see also *Ind. Culture*, II, p. 576 f.) that Śrīharṣa belonged to Bengal is wholly unconvincing; see S. K. De in *New Indian Antiquary*, II, p. 81, note.

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