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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
LITERARY HISTORY rising up to heaven where Indra stays. This idea of the ascent of fame to the other world has persisted in Sanskrit poetry even in modern times, and the motive for this ascent is as varied as the mode of expression bombastic. Perhaps the best example of this kind is furnished by the verse of Amṛitadatta, describing the glory of the Kashmir Sultan Shāhābuddīn (1352-70 A.D.) which has been quoted by Bühler himself.1 It runs thus: .................Kīrtis=tē jāta-jāḍy=ēva chatur-ambudhi-majjanāt / âThy Fame, Oh lord of the earth, which was, as it were benumbed with cold through its bathing in the four oceans, went up to the sphere of the Sun, in order to warm itself.â The prose passage is immediately followed by a stanza which is not only the ninth and the last verse of Harishēṇa’s panegyric, but forms also its conclusion. It may be translated as follows: “Whose fame (yaśas),2 upraised in ever higher and higher masses, and travelling by many paths, (namely) through liberality, prowess of arm, self-restraint and out-pouring of scientific utterances, purifies the three worlds, like the yellowish white water of the Ganges, dashing forth quickly when liberated from confinement in the inner hollow of the matted hair of Paśupati (which rises up in ever higher and higher masses and flows through many paths).” Bühler is right in remarking that the phrase anēka-mārgaṁ and upary-upari-saṁchay-ōchchhrita refer both of Fame and the Ganges. Samudragupta’s Fame was anēka-mārga, that is, followed different paths, because it sprung up from different causes, such as liberality, prowess of arm, self-restraint and so forth, which formed layers one upon another till the Fame towered itself into a high eminence (upary-upari-saṁchay-ōchchhrita). Bühler is, however, wrong in his application of these phrases to the Ganges. “As applied to the Gaṅgā,” says he, “the adjective alludes to the Indian belief that this river is first visible in the heavens as the milk-path, then dashing through the mid-region, it falls upon the Kailāsa, and, lastly, it rushes downwards to the plains. Thus, to the looker-on, standing on the plains and looking upwards, the water of the Gaṅgā would appear to be towering in ever-rising layers.” It is, however, worthy of note that Harishēṇa has compared the Fame of Samudragupta, not to the Ganges as a whole, as Bühler apparently thinks, but rather to that part of the Ganges which dashes forth from the matted hair of Śiva, that is, to this river at its very source. There the Ganges flows not in one uniform mass, but in manifold channels (anēka-mārga); and as her waters in these channels rush down in stupendous masses and in steep perpendiculars through the crevices and clefts of the Himālayas, they are dashed up to the skies in ever-accumulating layers which tower to a phenomenal height.
âApart from the use of long compounds in the prose parts”, says Bühler, “there is nothing
very artificial in Harishēṇa’s language.” By ‘artificial’ Bühler obviously means the frequent
employment of Alaṁkāras. What he, in other words, means is that Harishēṇa does not much
indulge in Figures of Speech. Nothing, however, is more erroneous. “Of the Śabdālaṁkāras,”
Bühler proceeds, “he (Harishēṇa) uses only the simplest kind of alliteration, the Varṇānuprāsa,
and even this occurs principally in the prose-parts and that, too, not many times.” In the 1 Ind. Ant., Vol. XLIII, p. 174.
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