A History of Sanskrit Literature c21.s8.1.1

c21.s8.1.1

The *Harṣacarita* ranks as an Ākhyāyikā, and in fact it has been adopted as the model of that form by later writers on poetics such as Rājaçekhara. It is divided into Ucchvāsas, contains occasional verses, and if not narrated by the hero, Harṣa, is at least narrated by the sub-hero, Bāṇa himself, whose history takes up the first two and a half chapters. The *Kādambarī*, on the other hand, is a Kathā, and it lacks the distinctive marks of the Ākhyāyikā. In point of fact it has a complex structure of its own, for it consists of a long narrative in which are interwoven other narratives given by characters of the work. In a sense, therefore, if it were worth while seeking to fix terminology in a manner which was unknown to Indian writers, a Kathā might be deemed² a complex Ākhyāyikā, one in which a main narrative was the mode in which sub-narratives came to be set forth in due place. The essence of the form of the *Kādambarī* is the use of these sub-narratives to explain matters which the main narrator could not himself know; he does not gather all his information into a whole and set it out in an ordered fashion, but he allows us to have it as the matters came to the knowledge of his hero during the course of his actual experience. This is a definite and marked plan which makes the *Kādambarī* in point of structure very different from the *Daçakumāracarita* or a text like the *Pañcatantra*, in which sub-narratives are included.