North Indian Inscriptions

LITERARY HISTORY

now and then in artificial poetry.” In support of his last statement he quotes two verses, one of which is Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṁśa, Canto XII, verse 70 and the other is Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha, Canto III, verse 33. Now, it is true that Vatsabhaṭṭi has represented some houses of Daśapura as ‘having risen up by tearing open the earth.’ But how this statement suggests a comparison with things in the nether world, such as Śēsha or Submarine Fire, as Bühler understands it, is far from clear. We can very well suppose that there was much of uneven, undulating ground such as is found on ancient sites, e.g., in modern Broach, the old name of which is Bharukachchha. When there is a stretch of country presenting a succession of elevations and depressions and also when there are skyscrapers on such elevations, the latter not only appear to have come out by tearing open the bowels of the earth but also seem to be vimānas or gods’ palaces each temporarily perched upon an eminence but ready to sail again in the aerial regions. Far from there being a confusion of comparisons and a consequent defect in imagery, the idea comprised in verse 13 is as much striking as it is novel, unless we suppose that Vatsabhaṭṭi has borrowed it from a master-poet of his or earlier time.

       We may now turn to verse 26 which has already been cited above and animadverted upon. The first three quarters of the same express one sentiment, and, the last, another, which is distinctly raudra. The first sentiment is developed by one type of words and the second by another, which consists of harsh-sounding syllables. On the whole, it is a meritorious performance and constitutes an excellence in his composition.

       It is possible to cite a few more examples of excellence in Vatsabhaṭṭi’s poem. But they, like the ones already pointed out, are not of a high order. We may, thus, conclude that Vatsabhaṭṭi was, on the whole, an excellent and versatile versifier but was not a first-rate poet with new, original ideas. The Mandasōr inscription is rather the exercise of a Pandit who had studied the Kāvyas and Rhetoric of his time than the production of a poet of inborn talent. Vatsabhaṭṭi was not a poet even in the court of Bandhuvarman, the local ruler of Daśapura. If he had deserved and received royal patronage at Daśapura, Ujjayinī or Pāṭaliputra, his performance would have been of a much higher order and would have been comparable to the praśasti of Samudragupta by Harishēṇa. As it is, Vatsabhaṭṭi was a mere Pandit of Daśapura with a modicum of poetic sense. And it is no wonder if he freely drew upon the Kāvya literature extant in his time resulting in a third-rate performance. He is not even a plagiarist who could take and imbibe original ideas of a first-rate poet and couch them in his own language so as to elude detection at the hands of readers not steeped in poetic literature. Nevertheless, the composition of Vatsabhaṭṭi is of great importance historically and in a two-fold manner. First, it enables us to fix the date of Kālidāsa. As he has evidently borrowed one group of ideas occurring in a verse from the Mēghadūta and expressed the same, though discursively, in two consecutive verses of his and further, as he has borrowed similarly another group of ideas contained in two verses of the Ṛitusaṁhāra and presented them, though crudely, in one verse of his composition, the conclusion is irresistible that Kālidāsa flourished before 472 A.D., the date of the Mandasōr inscription. Secondly, there are some verses of Vatsabhaṭṭi which contain striking ideas and give the impression that here also he must have borrowed from some poets who were his contemporaries or lived prior to him. This gives rise to the inference that in his time were current a considerably large number of poetic compositions which he had studied and with which he tried to compete. It is over-evident that when Vatsabhaṭṭi lived and composed his pūrvā, artificial poetry was in full bloom with a history reaching to a remote antiquity.

       The Literary History set forth above takes notice of only two inscriptions of the Gupta period. It may perhaps be thought strange that it is not based upon the works of any poets