A History of Sanskrit Literature c15.s3.1

c15.s3.1

The author of the *Vikramāṅkadevacarita* has left us a much more interesting relic in the shape of the poem often called *Caurapañcāçikā*,¹ perhaps more correctly *Caurīsuratapañcāçikā*, fifty stanzas on a secret love. In two of the versions in which it is found, that of Kashmir² and that of South India,³ it is embedded in a poem styled *Bilhaṇakāvya*, in which, as also by the commentators, the poem is asserted to have been composed to record a secret intrigue with a princess. Discovered by the king, the poet was sentenced to death and led out for this purpose, but his recitation of the glowing verses, in which he called to his memory for the last time the joys of their secret union, induced the king to relent and permit his marriage to the princess. Thus far there is agreement, but the Kashmir version asserts that the princess was Candralekhā, daughter of Vīrasiṅha of Mahilapattana, while the southern version makes her Yāminīpūrṇatilakā, daughter of Madanābhirāma of Pañcāla. The commentator Rāma Tarkavāgīça (1798) insists⁴ that the poem is an appeal to Kālikā by the prince Sundara of Caurapallī when condemned to death by Vīrasiṅha for his intrigue with Vidyā, while the title has been explained as indicating that the poet was Caura, of whom indeed verses are extant. It is quite clear from Bilhaṇa's autobiography in his epic that he made no claim to royal intrigues, and common sense suggests that he portrayed the love of a robber chief and a princess, placing the robber in the delicate situation to which tradition assigned himself. The poem as a matter of fact merely makes it clear that the heroine was a princess; it refers to the poet's hour of death only in a probably spurious stanza, and the two stanzas prefixed to it in the Kashmir recension, even assuming their genuineness, are hard to interpret satisfactorily. The popularity of the text has rendered it most uncertain, but, as the author was a Kashmirian, and lived at a southern court, there is doubtless some reason for accepting as genuine the thirty-four stanzas vouched for by both these recensions. That from northern India agrees with both the others in seven stanzas only.