History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v1.c6.s85.17

v1.c6.s85.17

Burnell (introduction to Vaṁśa Brāhmaṇa p. VII) took Pratāparudradeva to be the king of that name who belonged to the Kākatīya-Gaṇapati dynasty of Warangal and who was carried captive to Delhi in 1322 A. D. But in this he was wrong. It has been shown above that the king connected with the composition of the Sarasvatīvilāsa belonged to the Gajapati dynasty that ruled at Cuttack and not at Warangal. Pratāparudradeva ruled from 1497 to 1539 A. D. Therefore the Sarasvatīvilāsa must have been composed in the first quarter of the 16th century. Foulkes thinks (Intro. p. xx) that the work was composed about 1515 A. D. His argument is that though the commentary of Mādhavācārya was written about two hundred years before the Sarasvatīvilāsa, the latter is entirely silent about it in his work and that the reason of this is to be sought for in the rivalry of the two dynasties of Pratāparudra and Kṛṣṇarāya of Vijayanagara which was set at rest by a marriage alliance about 1516 A. D. Vide Prof. S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar's ‘sources of Vijayanagar History’ (p. 116), where we are told that the daughter of the Orissa king married to Kṛṣṇadevarāja was named Jaganmohinī (according to some) or Tukkā (according to others) and Sewell's ‘A forgotten empire’ p. 320. Another argument advanced by Foulkes for 1515 A. D. as the date of the work is that during the latter part of his reign Pratāparudradeva had come under the influence of the great Vaiṣṇavite saint Caitan ya, who made Purī his residence during the last years of his life and that the Sarasvatīvilāsa has in the beginning an invocation of Śiva. Caitanya was born in śake 1407 Phālguna Full-moon (i. e. in 1486 A. D.); vide Bhandarkar's 'Vaiṣṇavism and Śaivism' (p. 83) and Caitanya is said to have gone to Purī about 1510 A. D. and died in 1533 A. D. (Beames in Ind. Ant. vol. II, p. 1 ff). Both these arguments are not of much weight. As a matter of fact in some mss. there is an invocation of both Viṣṇu (Hayagrīva) and Śiva; *vide* Descriptive Cat. of Government S. mss. at Madras vol. VI, p. 2426 No. 3221. The latest work of certain date that the Sarasvatīvilāsa names is the Smṛticandrikā and it is rather matter for surprise that no work belonging to the 14th and 15th centuries is quoted or named by the Sarasvatīvilāsa. But this circumstance alone is hardly of any worth in face of the positive statement in the work itself that it was composed by Pratāparudradeva Gajapati. Vide JBORS. vol. V, pp. 147-148 and Ind. Ant. for 1929, pp. 28-33 for information about the Empire of Orissa and its emperors, Kapilendra (who died in 1470 A. D.), Puruṣottamadeva (1470-1497) and Pratāparudra-deva.