A History of Sanskrit Literature c11.s2.3

c11.s2.3

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: