Ancient Indian Literature: Epics, Puranas and Sangam

The Gaha Sattasai (Sanskrit Gatha Saptashati, 'seven hundred gathas'), also called the Gaha Kosha, is a collection of love poems in Maharashtri Prakrit, the Prakrit that was the official language of the Satavahanas and the most widely used in western and southern India. The poems are often frank monologues, usually by a married woman or an unmarried girl, voicing her feelings and longings to a friend, mother, lover or husband, or to herself, and many describe secret meetings or marriages with emotionally distant husbands. It is one of the oldest known texts of the subhashita genre and has been called the 'opposite extreme' of the Kamasutra: the one a theory of love, the other its lived emotions. The collection is attributed to King Hala, but many poems carry names of other authors and scholars doubt that Hala wrote it; the text was revised by later scribes, and its date is debated. Every manuscript has exactly 700 poems, though the poems themselves vary; Albrecht Weber's critical edition of 1881 used seventeen manuscripts and counted 964 poems in all.

The Pathinenkilkanakku is a collection of eighteen poetic works composed mostly in the post-Sangam period, between about 100 and 500 CE. It differs from the earlier Eighteen Greater Texts (Pathinenmelkanakku: the Ettuthokai and Pattuppattu), the oldest surviving Tamil poetry, in that its poems are written in the venpa metre and are relatively short, and most of its books deal with morals and ethics. Statement 1 is correct. Not every work is ethical, however. The Kalavazhi Narpathu, forty poems by the poet Poigaiyar, deals with puram subjects, the 'external' themes of war, politics and wealth; statement 2 is correct. Other members include the Nanmanikkatigai, Inna Narpathu, Iniyavai Narpathu, Kar Narpathu, Tirikatukam, Acharakkovai, Pazhamozhi Nanuru, Elathi and the Tirukkural. Statement 3 is wrong: the Naladiyar is the one true anthology in the collection, sung by some 400 poets, while each of the remaining seventeen works is by a single poet.

The Perunkathai ('great story') takes its name from Gunadhya's Brihatkatha, the lost work in Paishachi, and is believed to draw on it and on a Sanskrit Udayana poem ascribed to the Ganga king Durvinita. Its author, Konguvelir (Konguvel), is described as a prince of the Kongu country who lived at Vijayamankai, in the present Coimbatore region, where there were many Jains; the work is also called the Udayanan Kathai or Konguvel Makkathai. It narrates the life of Udayana, the Vatsa king of Kaushambi, who enjoys every pleasure and success of kingship before turning ascetic, and then his son Naravahanadatta. It runs to about 16,000 lines in the akaval metre and, though it praises Jain moral teaching, it attempts real characterisation rather than mere propaganda. It is noted as the first Tamil classic set in north India and for its detail on music, sports and architecture. It was edited and published by U. V. Swaminatha Iyer in 1924. Its date is disputed, and accounts differ by centuries.

The Kuvalayamala ('garland of blue water lilies') is a Prakrit novel by the Jain monk Uddyotana-suri, also called Dakshinyachihna, written in the champu form of mixed verse and prose. An analysis of the text suggests it was completed on 21 March 779 CE at Jabalipura, the modern Jalore, under the Gurjara-Pratihara king Vatsaraja, also called Ranahastin. It narrates five souls, one of them the princess Kuvalayamala, through several rebirths: each is first misled by one of the five passions, anger, vanity, deceit, greed and infatuation; later, as Jain monks under the preceptor Dharmanandana, they promise to help one another, and in their final births they meet Mahavira and attain liberation. The work thus teaches Jain philosophy through a story. It also includes dialogue in Sanskrit, Apabhramsha and Paishachi, which makes it valuable for the study of languages. Uddyotana's teacher Haribhadra (fl. 750) wrote the didactic Samaraichchakaha, and a later monk of the same line, Siddharshi (fl. 906), wrote the Upamitibhavaprapancha.

Maharashtri was the most widely attested Prakrit, the official language of the Satavahanas, and the Prakrit that the poet Dandin ranked highest. Several major works are in it. The Setubandha, also called Ravanavaho, describes Rama's exploits in Lanka against Ravana and is often credited to the Vakataka king Pravarasena II (c. 420-455), though its Vaishnava theme has made some scholars question this; it is in Maharashtri. The Gaudavaho, 'the slaying of the Gauda king', is the eighth-century epic of Vakpatiraja, court poet of Yashovarman of Kanauj, in a little over 1,200 verses; it too is Maharashtri. The Paumachariya of Vimalasuri, the earliest known Jain version of the Ramayana, is described as the oldest literary work in Maharashtri. The Brihatkatha of Gunadhya, by contrast, was written in Paishachi, a little- understood literary language that grammarians did not treat as a spoken Prakrit and that Dandin calls bhutabhasha; the original is lost. So three of the four are Maharashtri works.

Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya ('of the kirata and Arjuna') has eighteen cantos and expands a minor episode of the Vana Parva of the Mahabharata: during the Pandavas' exile, Arjuna, on Indra's instruction, performs penance, and Shiva, pleased, tests him in the guise of a kirata, a mountain-dwelling hunter. The dominant mood is vira, valour, and one canto is set aside for verbal feats. Statement 1 is correct. For its date, grant inscriptions of the Ganga dynasty, such as the Gummareddipura inscription, say that King Durvinita wrote a Kannada commentary on the fifteenth canto; since Durvinita's reign ended about 580 CE, Bharavi lived around or before then. Statement 2 is correct. Statement 3 reverses a famous verse: 'upama Kalidasasya, Bharaver arthagauravam, Dandinah padalalityam, Maghe santi trayo gunah', similes are Kalidasa's, weight of meaning Bharavi's, grace of words Dandin's, and Magha has all three. Magha, of the seventh century, wrote the Shishupalavadha in twenty cantos at the court of a king at Shrimala, and is often compared with Bharavi.

The Brihatkatha, 'the great narrative', is said to have been written by Gunadhya in Paishachi, a poorly understood literary language. The work no longer exists, and its loss is called one of the greatest in Indian literature. It is known through later adaptations: in Sanskrit, the Brihatkathashlokasamgraha of Budhasvamin and the two Kashmiri recensions, the Brihatkathamanjari of Kshemendra and the Kathasaritsagara of Somadeva; and in other languages, the Tamil Perunkathai and the Vasudevahindi. Statement 1 is correct. The earliest extant Kannada work on grammar and poetics, the Kavirajamarga of Nripatunga (c. 850), mentions a lost Sanskrit version by Durvinita, the Ganga king also known for his commentary on Bharavi; statement 2 is correct. Statement 3 is wrong on both counts: the language was Paishachi, not Sanskrit, and Gunadhya is linked with a Satavahana king of Pratishthana, probably between the first century BCE and the third century CE, while Dandin, Subandhu and Bana already knew the work by the sixth or seventh century. A Cambodian inscription of about 875 also mentions Gunadhya.

The Mahabhashya, the 'great commentary', is firmly dated to the mid-second century BCE by both Western and Indian scholars. It is a commentary on the Ashtadhyayi of Panini that embeds and discusses the somewhat earlier varttikas of Katyayana; Patanjali often defends Panini's positions where Katyayana had read them differently. Statement 1 is correct. Whether the grammarian also wrote the Yoga Sutras is an old question. The two works differ completely in subject, and Louis Renou showed significant differences in their language, grammar and vocabulary, so most Western scholars now regard them as different authors; statement 2 is correct. Statement 3 is wrong: no known text before the eleventh-century king Bhoja conflates the two. Bhoja's verse at the start of his Yoga Sutra commentary, the Rajamartanda, honours a single Patanjali for grammar, medicine and yoga; the well-known verse saluting the sage who removed the impurities of mind by yoga, of speech by grammar and of body by medicine is found in an eighteenth-century text, and the view became an 'article of faith' in traditional circles. So the identification is late, not Gupta.