A History of Sanskrit Literature c11.s2: 2. Hariṣeṇa and Vatsabhaṭṭi
A History of Sanskrit Literature c11.s2
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2. Hariṣeṇa and Vatsabhaṭṭi
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Fortune has enabled us to obtain an interesting insight into the poetry of the Gupta epoch by the preservation of two Praçastis, separated by about a century in time, the panegyric of Samudragupta inscribed on a pillar at Allahabad and composed by Hariṣeṇa, perhaps in 345,¹ and Vatsabhaṭṭi's inscription in the temple of the sun at Mandasor, written in 473–4. These inscriptions alone would suffice to prove abundantly the existence of a developed Kāvya poetry during the whole period of the Gupta power, and in the first case we actually find a poet of distinct power, though he was foreign minister and general of the king.
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¹ Cf. Gawroński, *Festschrift Windisch*, pp. 170 ff.; *The Digvijaya of Raghu* (1915); Bühler, *Die indischen Inschriften* (1890); Smith, EHI. pp. 298 ff.
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Hariṣeṇa's poem bears expressly the title Kāvya, though it consists both of prose and verse. Its structure is similar to the delineation of kings adopted in the prose romances of Subandhu and Bāṇa, in which all is crowded into a single long sentence, made up of relative clauses and adjectives and appositions heaped upon one another. In this case the whole poem is one sentence, including first eight stanzas of poetry, then a long prose sentence, and finally a concluding stanza. The thought is no less complex than the form, for the poet's ingenuity has been equal to the effort to connect the pillar with the emperor's fame. That, as usual in the Kāvya, is personified as feminine and is regarded as having embraced the whole world so that no more room for it remains on earth. It passes therefore by the way of the pillar up to the abode of the gods. There it appears as the Ganges, and, pure as that stream, it overflows on heaven, atmosphere, and earth. The metre is no less elaborate than the thought; of seven verses preserved there are four metres, Sragdharā, Çārdūlavikrīḍita, Mandākrāntā, and Pṛthvī. The style is markedly and undeniably of the Vaidarbha or southern manner; the verse eschews long compounds while the prose delights in them, one having no less than 120 syllables, though it is but fair to say that on the whole they are not difficult to understand. Of figures of sound alliteration is used, but sparingly; metaphors are most used of the figures of sense, rarely similes and *double entendres* as in Samudragupta's epithet *sādhvasādhūdayapralayahetupuruṣasyācintyasya*, ‘a hero unfathomable, the cause of the elevation of the good and the destruction of the bad (and thus a counterpart of the unfathomable absolute, which is the cause of the origin and the destruction of the world, and in which good and bad have their being)’. But Hariṣeṇa spares us much of this; he shows his skill rather by new turns of ingenious thought, and by the care with which his long compounds are relieved by the interposition of short words to give the reciter time to recover breath and the hearer to understand the sense, and by the cunning arrangement of words in the compounds themselves in order to produce the maximum of metrical effect. His choice of words and care in their arrangement are no less seen in his verses, of which one certainly has the right to be ranked as among the most perfect effects of Indian miniature word pictures, the description of the scene when before his rivals and the court Candragupta in his old age designated Samudragupta as his successor:
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*āryo hīty upaguhya bhāvapiçunair utkarṇitai romabhiḥ*
*sabhyeṣūcchvasiteṣu tulyakulajamlanānanodvīkṣitaḥ*
*snehavyālulitena bāṣpaguruṇā tattvekṣiṇā cakṣuṣā*
*yaḥ pitrābhihito nirīkṣya nikhilām pāhy evam urvīm iti.*
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‘“He is noble”, with these words he embraced him, tremors of joy betraying his emotion; he gazed on him with tear-filled eyes, following his every movement, and weighing his worth—the courtiers sighed in relief and gloomy were the faces of his kinsfolk—and said to him, “ Do thou protect all this earth ”.’
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Very different is the work of Vatsabhaṭṭi,¹ no minister of an emperor but a humble local poet, glad to earn a fee by writing for the guild of silk-weavers of a provincial town. What is interesting in him is his testimony to the prevalence of the Kāvya in his time; the adjective *pūrvā*, above, is used as sufficient description of his poem, the missing *praçasti*, eulogy, being so naturally supplied by those familiar with current verse. He asserts that his work was done with effort or care (*yatnena*), and there is every evidence of the truth. In obedience to the laws of poetics he inserts in his forty-four stanzas descriptions both of Lāṭa and of the town Daçapura, of the seasons, winter and spring, and shows by the use of twelve metres his skill in versification, though the effect is marred by his inability to bring off his results without free use of the weak caesura. His style is the eastern or Gauḍa, as is clearly proved by his love of long compounds in verse, and by the way in which in one stanza he has fitted the sound of the verses to the altering sentiment, advancing from soft harmonious sounds in describing the gentleness of his hero to discords when proclaiming him *dviṭdṛptapakṣakṣapaṇaikadakṣaḥ*, ‘peerless in destroying the proud hosts of the foe’. His alliterations, similes, and metaphors all are of types abundant in the Kāvya, but his skill is small, and his poem is disfigured by tautologies as in *tulyopamānāni*, the use of verse-fillers or needless particles as in *tatas tu*, or prefixes as in *abhivibhāti*, or words as in *samudrānta*, while *spṛçanniva* for the necessary neuter and *nyavasanta* are offences against grammar. But his panegyric is invaluable testimony to the widespread cultivation of Sanskrit poetry and it helps definitely to aid us in determining the date of India’s greatest poet.
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¹ Bühler, *Die indischen Inschriften*, pp. 31 ff.