North Indian Inscriptions

LITERARY HISTORY

Divinity’ which we find for the first time to be conjoined with the name of Samudragupta’s grandson Kumāragupta, in his Dāmōdarpur copper plate inscriptions (Nos. 22 and 24 below). How the king gradually came to be identified with Supreme God is a subject of discussion which is germane to Hindu Polity and has been treated in extenso in a separate chapter elsewhere. We shall conclude this survey of the individualistic prose style of Harishēṇa by taking note of the sentence with which the prose passage ends. It runs as follows:

..sarva-pṛithivī-vijaya-janit-ōdaya-vyāpta-nikhil-āvanitalāṁ Kīrttim=itas= tridaśapati- bhavana-
gaman-āvāpta-laḷita-sukha-vicharaṇām=āchakshāṇa iva bhuvō bāhur= ayam= uchchhritaḥ stambhaḥ

“this lofty column is the raised arm of Earth, proclaiming, as it were, that (Samudragupta’s) Fame, having pervaded the entire surface of the world, with (its) uprise caused by the conquest of the whole earth, has acquired an easy and graceful movement in that it has repaired from here (i.e., from this world) to the abode of (Indra), the lord of the gods.” What this concluding part of the prose passage tells us is that Samudragupta’s Fame, which is personified as a female by Sanskrit poets, occupied the whole earth and that when she found it impossible to spread further, she went up to the palace of Indra where she roamed easily and happily. This is the first Sanskrit composition where the ascent of Fame to the higher regions or rather to the abode of Indra is spoken of. We find the following in Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṁśa (VI. 77).

.........Ārūḍham=adrīn=udadhīn vitīrṇaṁ bhujaṅgamānāṁ vasatiṁ pravishṭam /
.........ūrdhvaṁ gataṁ yasya na ch=ānubandhi yaśaḥ parichchhēttum= iyattay=ālam //

       â€œHis fame, which has ascended to the mountains, has crossed the seas, entered the abode of serpents, and has gone high up, being ever-pervading, is not capable of being defined by measurement.”

       Here the motive attributed to the Fame of Raghu is the same as that of the Fame of Samudragupta, namely, the sense of over-congestion caused by rigid confinement to earth and the consequent rising up to higher regions and the sense of joy produced by free and easy movement there. But in the case of Raghu the conception is further developed, because his fame is represented not only to have spread over the whole of the earth from the lowest level of the seas to the highest altitude of the mountains but also to the nether regions inhabited by the serpents and to heaven which I suppose is to be understood by the term ūrdhva used in the verse. In fact, Raghu’s fame is to be taken as having extended over the three worlds. Harishēṇa, on the other hand, represents Samudragupta’s Fame to have, in the first instance, occupied the whole of the earth and, then, being cramped for want of space, to have ascended, not to Tridaśapati-bhuvana or heaven, but rather to Tridaśapati-bhavana or Palace of Indra. This is perhaps a somewhat different conception. What is intended by the court poet here is that the Fame of his master was, after his world-conquests, spread all over the earth, but, not being satisfied with this narrow compass, had to ascend to the Palace of Indra where she was the subject of talk in the whole of Indra-sabhā. Kālidāsa’s conception, it will thus be seen, is more complex because he has represented Raghu’s Fame to have spread over not two but three worlds. It is more mechanical, because the original notion of Kīrtti spreading over the worlds is in no wise maintained by Kālidāsa. According to him Raghu’s Fame has travelled mechanically as if she were a mere female globe-trotter. Harishēṇa, on the other hand, has displayed his particularity of expression by preserving the original idea, that Samudragupta’s exploits were a subject of converse not only on earth but also in Indra’s durbar, though like other poets he has personified his master’s Fame and made her travel all over the earth, before