History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v1.c6.s96.22

v1.c6.s96.22

The foregoing shows that Bālakṛṣṇa Pāyaguṇḍa was a Deccani Brāhmaṇa, that his father and mother were Vaidyanātha and Lakṣmī, that his maternal grandfather was Mahādeva, also a Deccani Brāhmaṇa surnamed Kheraḍā, that he was the pupil of Nāgojībhaṭṭa and that he was a *paṇḍit* of Colebrooke. Mr. Govinda Das is not right when he identifies (p. 27) Vaidyanātha the commentator of several grammatical works of Nāgojībhaṭṭa with Vaidyanātha the author of several commentaries on Alaṅkāra works (such as the Udāharaṇacandrikā on the Kāvya-prakāśa and the Prabhā on the Kāvyapradīpa). The reasons are two. Vaidyanātha, author of the Udāharaṇacandrikā, was the son of Rāmabhaṭṭa, son of Viṭṭhala Tatsat, while Vaidyanātha the grammarian was a son of Mahādeva and Veṇī. Besides the Udāharaṇacandrikā was composed¹¹⁵⁸ in *saṁvat* 1740 Kārtika śuddha 8, Wednesday (i. e. 17th October 1683). We saw above that Vaidyanātha Pāyaguṇḍa was a pupil of Nāgoji, who flourished towards the end of 17th and the first half of the 18th century. If Vaidyanātha, the writer on poetics, were the same as the commentator of Nāgoji, he could not have composed a work on poetics so early as 1683 A. D. Dr. Belvalkar (Systems of Sanskrit Grammar p. 60) says ‘Lakṣmīdevī, the wife of king Candrasiṁha of Mithilā, was probably his patroness in whose honour he is reported to have composed a commentary on the Vyavahārakāṇḍa of the Mitākṣarā.’ This throws to the winds all chronology. We saw above (pp. 399 and 404) that the Mithilā princess Lakṣmī or Lachimādevī flourished in the first half of the 15th century, while the Bālambhaṭṭī quoting as it does writers and works like Gāgābhaṭṭa and the Kaustubha could not have been composed before 1700 A.D.