A History of Indian Literature v3.c35.s7.73

v3.c35.s7.73

The historical epics are not always dedicated to rulers or ministers. Such one is the Jagaḍūcarita of Sarvānanda, the biography of a simple merchant who did much for his native town in Gujarat when he got the walls of the city built anew and during the terrible famine of the years 1256-1258 he worked much for mitigation of the trouble. Although the work has only seven cantos, it is called a "great epic" (mahākāvya) and shows the same deficiency in the matter of language, poetics and metrics, as other Sanskrit poems of Jaina monks of later centuries do. The author may have lived 80 to 100 years after the events of the second half of the 14th century described by him. The wealthy merchant Jagaḍū is above all an ideal Jaina layman and is extolled as such. In the history of this merchant wonderful stories and legends have been interlaced exactly in the same manner as would have been done with respect to some king or saint. In any case, however, we find in the work a nucleus of history, as has been shown by Bühler³.