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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
LITERARY HISTORY prescribe that a Mahākāvya should comprise descriptions of cities, oceans, mountains, seasons and so on. These characteristics, Vatsabhaṭṭi’s pūrvā nicely exhibits, as pointed out by Bühler. This Vatsabhaṭṭi has not forgotten to describe the early home of the Guild, namely, the Lāṭa country in verse 4; but the town of Daśapura where they had permanently settled receives much greater attention and he devotes no less than nine verses, as we have seen above, in giving us a description of its lakes and buildings and showing us that it had thus become the ornament of the earth. Further, the inscription contains two dates, and thus gives Vatsabhaṭṭi an occasion to show off his poetic skill in describing the Seasons, Winter and Spring, during which the dates fall. That Artificial Poetry was in full bloom in the time of Vatsabhaṭṭi may be seen even from the extraneous characteristics of his poem. All the verses of his composition are in ornate metres of the Kāvya style. Setting aside Anushṭubh (verses 34-37 and 44), we have Āryā in verses 4, 13, 21, 33, 38, 39, 41 and 42, Drutavilambita in verse 15, Hariṇī in verse 16, Indravajrā in verse 17, Mālinī in verses 19 and 43, Mandākrāntā in verse 29, Śārdūlavikrīḍita in verses 1-2, Upajāti in verses 10, 12 and 28, Upēndravajrā in verses 7-9 and 24, Vaṁśastha in verse 23, and Vasantatilakā in verses 3, 5, 6, 11, 14, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30-32 and 40. Of these metres Vasantatilakā has been used the greatest number of times, as many as fourteen. This multiplicity of metres is not noticeable in Mahākāvyas and Kāvyas, where generally two metres only are used, the principal one and the second one which last again is found only in the ending verse or verses of a canto. The manifold metres used by Vatsabhaṭṭi in his poem therefore are to be attributed to his eagerness to show that he was a master of Prosody and an expert in versification. Another extraneous characteristic of Artificial Poetry is the clustering of verses in twos, threes, fours and so forth. The Sāhityadarpaṇa has it:1 ..........................dvābhyāṁ Yugmam=iti prōktaṁ
â(A piece of Poetry, complete) in two (stanȥas) is termed Yugma; in three (stanȥas), Viśēshaka; in four, Kalāpaka; and in five, Kulaka.” We find this clustering of verses also in Vatsabhaṭṭi’s composition. Thus, verses 4-5 and 21-22 make Yugmas; verses 23-25 and 26-28 Viśēshakas; and verses 6-10, 31-35 and 36-40, Kulakas. One peculiarity, however, of Vatsabhaṭṭi, that deserves to be mentioned in this connection is that in the clustering of these verses they are of the same metre in the case of the compositions of the other poets, but curiously enough diversity of metres is perceptible in his own composition. Let us now consider the internal characteristic of this composition which brand it as
Artificial Poetry. The first and foremost of these is the Style which obviously conforms to the
Gauḍī Rīti, or the diction of the Eastern School as Bühler has rightly perceived. The chief
peculiarity of the Gauḍī, we have seen above, is the use of long compounds. Vatsabhaṭṭi
employs compounds covering not only a pāda or more, pretty frequently, but also sometimes
the whole of a half-verse as in stanzas 4, 6, 14, 32 and 41, and once even the whole of a verse
as in verse 33. There is another characteristic of the Eastern School to which Bühler refers on
the authority of Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa (I. 47-50), according to which a verse composed in the
Vaidarbhī Rīti maintains samatā or uniformity in all its pādas but that of the Gauḍī style may
have different pādas composed in different types of letters corresponding to the different senti- 1 Parichchhēda VI, verses 314 and 315.
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