A History of Sanskrit Literature c11.s6.7

c11.s6.7

With this ends the poem in many manuscripts; others add ten cantos. Of these Canto viii describes, according to the principles of the Kāmaçāstra, the joys of the wedded pair; doubtless such frankness is abhorrent to western taste, but the doubts of its genuineness which have been expressed are clearly groundless; it seems certainly¹ to have been known to Bhāravi, to Kumāradāsa, and to Māgha, and quotations from it occur in the writers on poetics. Nor in poetic skill is it in the least inferior to Kālidāsa’s work. The case² is other with the following cantos. They tell of Agni’s approach, first in dove shape, then in his proper person, to Çiva as he prolongs for centuries the joys of dalliance, begging his aid. From the seed of Çiva, cast in the Ganges and shared by the six Kṛttikās, Pleiades, Kumāra is miraculously born, and grows up delighting his parents by his childish play. But the gods are in terror, the city of the gods is dismayed through Tāraka; Indra comes to demand help; Çiva grants his prayer and assigns Kumāra to the task. The great host of Tāraka is described in Canto xiv, then the portents which warn him not to war (xv). Blinded by pride he refuses, bids his young opponent go back to his father and mother rather than fight, assails him with his whirlwinds and magic fire, until pierced to the heart he falls dead. The poem thus goes far beyond the birth of Kumāra as its title promises, and the inferiority of the new cantos is obvious on every ground. The metre is carelessly handled; in five cases caesura is neglected at the end of the first and third verses of the Çloka, a negligence quite foreign to Kālidāsa; the same carelessness is seen six times in Upajāti stanzas, where too weak caesuras—at the end of a compound, not of a word—are used far more often than by Kālidāsa. In order to manage his metres the poet has to resort to versefillers, abhorred of really good writers; *su* is repeatedly thus used, as well as *sadyaḥ* and *alam*; the constant use of periphrasis is doubtless due to the same cause: the writer expends much ingenuity in coining new designations for his characters, and is so fond of the superfluous *anta* at the end of compounds—which we have seen in Vatsabhaṭṭi—that Jacobi has conjectured that he was a Marāṭha, in view of the Marāṭhī locative *ānt*. In the later manner is the free use of prepositional compounds and the impersonal passive with subject in the instrumental; the former use just appears in Kālidāsa, the latter is common from Bhāravi onwards. Moreover, save occasionally, as in the battle scene, the poetical value of the cantos is small, and in confirmation of the internal evidence it may be added that neither commentators nor writers on poetics cite them nor are imitations found in later poets.