A History of Sanskrit Literature c19.s4.4

Language: English

c19.s4.4.1

After this long interlude action is resumed in Book xiii, Pañca, so called because in it the prince wins five more brides, Vidyādhara maidens who are determined to espouse him. The main business, however, of the book is the effort to attain Madanamañcukā. With the aid of Prabhāvatī, a Vidyādhara, the prince penetrates to her place of confinement, using a woman’s form lent by Prabhāvatī; as she, however, has to resume it, suddenly he is discovered and Mānasavega has him tried by the court of the Vidyādharas, but will not accept their decision in his favour. Prabhāvatī takes him in safety away from the Vidyādharas; ultimately he reaches Kauçāmbī, and many Vidyādharas join him for an attack on his foes. After great efforts, he attains Çiva’s favour, and in a great battle slays Gaurīmuṇḍa and Mānasavega in single combat. He prepares to attack his remaining foe Mandaradeva in the north of Kailāsa, and marries the five damsels who seek his love. The next step ought obviously to be the attack on Mandaradeva, as it is in Somadeva, but there now occurs a long series of episodes which doubtless had been inserted here in the Kashmirian *Bṛhatkathā*. In Book xiv he marries Ratnaprabhā, whose name the book bears, and pays an important visit to the land of camphor, returning in a flying machine of the kind which the Yavanas, Greeks, were experts at constructing. In Book xv we have a sort of duplication of this adventure;

c19.s4.4.2

he marries Alaṁkāravatī, and proceeds to an expedition to a White Island or Continent¹ where he worships Nārāyaṇa with an elaborate prayer written in the most finished Kāvya style; the parallel to the famous episode of the *Mahābhārata* in which sages seek the Çvetadvīpa and take part in the worship of a wonderful deity—which has been deemed a reference to actual experience of Nestorian rites or even of Alexandrian Christianity—is complete, and suggests very strongly that the Kashmirian or the original *Bṛhatkathā* borrowed the episode from the epic as we know it. The next book (xvi) is much more banal; it gives the prince another wife, Çaktiyaças, and imparts a number of unimportant episodes. We resume now in Book xvii the lost thread. Before he can attack Mandaradeva, Naravāhanadatta must receive from the sage Vāmadeva on mount Malaya the seven jewels, emblematic of sovereignty. He then reaches the north by passing under a great tunnel, and by his offer of his own head induces the dread Kālarātri, who guards the exit, to permit his passage. Mandaradeva falls, five more maidens are wed—a repetition of the *motif* in Book xiii, and the great consecration, Mahābhiṣeka, whence the book is named, is duly celebrated, the emperor insisting on his father being present. The work is now finished, but very inconveniently a further book (xviii) is necessary;

c19.s4.4.3

under the style Suratamañjarī it tells how, after the death of Pradyota and Udayana, Gopāla and Pālaka resigned their tenure of the kingship of Ujjain, how Avantivardhana wedded the heroine, and how the two were protected against a jealous Vidyādhara by the emperor. The only excuse for this absurd position of the tale is the fact of the existence of Book i with its account of the telling of the tale by Guṇāḍhya. In the original, as the Nepalese version shows, the episode of Suratamañjarī led up to the telling by Naravāhanadatta himself of his adventure, which would have clashed with the version of Book i, and the old exordium was, therefore, relegated to an appendix. This view is confirmed by the fact that Somadeva in his Book vi expressly tells us that Naravāhanadatta is relating his adventures in the third person, an admission that he knew that the tale of Suratamañjarī had originally been placed at the beginning of the work. On this point Kṣemendra is silent in his corresponding Madanamañcukā book (vii), but he reveals the fact in the summary (*upasaṁhāra*) with which he ends his poem, for he tells us, for the first time, that the work is supposed to be set forth by Naravāhanadatta to the sage Kaçyapa on a visit.