The State in Ancient India: A Study in the Structure and Practical Working of Political Institutions in North India in Ancient Times c19.111

c19.111

Two other writers who flourished in Kashmir about the same time as Kalhaṇa may be briefly noticed. In the latter half of the eleventh century Vidyāpati Bilhaṇa, author of the play Karṇasundarī, wrote the Vikramāṅkadevacarita in which love, politics and warfare march side by side. The ideal of conquest and universal dominion in the narrow feudal sense of the term is there. The picture of Anantadeva of Kashmir as a model of virtue, generosity, veracity and heroism is interesting.¹ His brother Kṣitipati is not only a scholar himself but a patron of learning and withal a warrior.² The poet is employed as a tutor to the king’s daughter who falls in love with him. The incensed monarch sentences the poet to death but reprieves him afterwards. Bilhaṇa winds up the story of his own life by a solemn exhortation to princes, in view of the fleeting nature of all prosperity, to worship those true poets “who work the salvation of your bodies of glory through the nectar of their verse, and renouncing pride make them your spiritual guides.”³