AS the Gïta-govinda, a work on the border-line of lyric poetry and drama, led us to speak of the drama, so the Indian drama, which is essentially lyric and narrative, leads us on to the form for which the Indian spirit has shown the greatest aptitude, narrative literature. We have seen the heroes of the Mahābhārata diverting themselves in their distress by listening to fables and stories. In discussing Buddhist literature I have mentioned the avadānas and the "Garland of Jatakas". Let us remember that at an early date India possessed the largest collection of stories in existence, the Jātakas.
The Jātakas were written in prose, often interspersed with stanzas (gāthā). The Pali of this verse is older than that of the prose, which seems to serve as an explanation. Sometimes, however, there is no connection between the verse and the story. Only the verse stanzas were admitted into the Buddhist canon. The prose is merely a commentary added later, after the constitution of the canon.
The collection, containing over five hundred tales, was translated from Pali into Cingalese at an uncertain date, no doubt shortly after Buddhism had spread to Ceylon. The gāthās were not translated, and we still have them in the old original Pali. In the fifth century, or somewhat later, the stories were translated back from Cingalese into Pali, and this is the Jātaka which we know to-day.1
They are popular literature—if not created, at least adopted by the people. But some of the stories bear the mark of conscious literary workmanship. They have descended into the popular domain, like the Mediæval romance, which was originally intended for the upper classes. Thus the Jātakas are hybrid works in their evolution and hybrid also in their foundation, for they consist of two chief elements, tales and fables.
The origin of fables has long been discussed. Some scholars said that they had their birth in Greece; others, perhaps with more effective arguments, attributed them to India. Reciprocal influences and exchanges occurred. India seems to have given more than it took. Theodor Benfey, whose translation of the Pañchatantra1 was the foundation of comparative literature, maintained that the tale and the anecdote were purely Indian, whereas the fable came from Greece. He also recognized the part played by the Buddhists in propagating this literature. To-day discussion would be idle, for no one any longer seeks to find the birth-place of all tales and fables in one country.2 Only there are peoples with greater inventive faculty, while others are more expert in literature. The lively imagination of the Indian, fostered by an inactive life and a climate which encouraged rest and meditation, the hordes of pilgrims, ascetics, and beggars who attracted custom by telling marvellous or amusing stories, and lastly the belief, fundamental in India while fairly common elsewhere, that the beasts are not a different world from ourselves, all prepared a soil in which both tales and fables sprang up in abundance. The Pañchatantra, the "Five Threads" or "Books" on politics and the art of government, has not come down to us in its original form. It is composed of remnants of a Tantrākhyāyika, or "Collection of Little Tales", and various other elements, traces of which are preserved in the Kashmiri, Nepalese, and Southern Indian versions. The Pañchatantra which Europe knows in editions3 and translations is a late work, reconstructed on the lost ancient original and probably a good deal different from it. The researches of Johannes Hertel1 and the attempt of F. Edgerton to construct the original text justify one in concluding that it was a hand-book of politics (nīti-śāstra) for the teaching of young princes.
The Tantrākhyāyika seems to belong to the age of the Guptas2 and to have come originally from Kashmir, which is supposed, according to R. O. Franke,3 to be the birthplace of Sanskrit itself. The unknown author of the collection had not only the language but the style of the kāvya, but, being a man of taste, he did not consider it suited to the little stories which he told quite simply, but not without wit and delicate irony. He used old and in part popular materials, but by polishing and transforming them he gave them the air of a personal creation. One cannot say whether the fashion in which the tales are boxed one within another is his invention; we find the same thing in the Arabian Nights, a work which betrays Indian influence, if not origin. In the course of conversation, a speaker quotes a proverb in verse ill this way: "If you did thus, you would be like the ass in the barley-field." "How so?" asks the other. "Hear then," says the first, and he tells his story. Very often a character in that story does the same thing, and another story is started. Gradually they get back to the first.
There are stories showing how one should acquire friends, for even the weak are strong when united, and how war is waged, and how one can deceive or be deceived, and how it is a mistake to judge hastily.
A story added later, but full of humour, is that of Vishnu and the weaver.
A poor weaver saw a princess and fell sick of love. His friend the cartwright made him a Garuda of wood, the Garuda being the mythical eagle on which Vishnu rides. The weaver went up on his wooden eagle, wearing the attributes of Vishnu, and entered the girl's apartments. She fully believed that it was Vishnu, and, yielding to his entreaties, she made a Gandharva marriage with him. To her parents, at first furious and then marvelling, she announced that they had Vishnu for a son-in-law. At night they saw him come down from the sky on his eagle, bearing the disk, the conch, and the other signs of his power, but they dared not speak to him, for a god does not suffer the approach of mortals. Proud of such a son-in-law, the King provoked his neighbours to war. Presently his capital was besieged, and disaster stared him in the face. The supposed Vishnu calmed the fears of the princess and prepared to fling himself into the fray next morning, for he had no longer anything to lose and it was better to die as a hero. Now the real Vishnu was embarrassed; either men would see the god vanquished or he must aid the impostor. He chose the latter course, and the weaver was victorious.
One cannot quote even the most amusing stories. There is the little hare who outwitted the lion or the elephant. There is the mouse who was turned into a maiden and had to choose a husband; in every one she found some drawback—in the sun, in the cloud, in the wind, and in the mountain—the rat alone seemed perfect, and him she chose. Everything that irony and malice can invent is in them.
The ideal of the Tantrākhyāyika and the Pañchatantra is the average man, a good householder and a good father. Hospitality and loyalty to his friends are his chief virtues. The duties of a king are very clear—he must fight bravely and give up his life for his subjects. At all times he must protect the innocent and rule the land with the help of wise ministers.
At a very early date the Pañchatantra made its way into the literature of the world. A north-western version was translated into Pehlevi1 in the sixth century by a Persian physican named Burzoë at the order of his master, King Chosroes Anushirvan. From this translation, the text of which is lost, a new translation was made into Syriac about 570 under the title of Kalīlag and Damnag, from the names of two jackals, Karataka and Damanaka. An Arabic version, amplified, was made in the eighth century under the title of Kalīla and Dimna, and it was this that served as the basis of the European and other translations. In 1816 Silvestre de Sacy translated it into French.2
But this work was known to Europe much earlier. In the eleventh century it appeared in Greek and was translated from that into Latin, Italian, German, and other languages. In the twelfth century there was a good version in Hebrew, which was translated into Latin in the thirteenth as Liber Kalilae et Dimnae, directorium vitae humanae,1 for it was generally regarded as the most perfect manual of practical morality and wisdom. Another Hebrew version of the thirteenth century was translated into French in 1644 by David Sahid and Gaulmin as Livre des lumières, ou la conduite des roys, and a Turkish translation of the Persian work, dedicated to the Sultan Soliman I (sixteenth century), was translated into French by Galland and Cardonne at the beginning of the eighteenth century. From French it has been translated into Malay.
La Fontaine says in an introduction to the second edition of his Fables, in 1678, that he owes several of them to the "Indian sage" Pilpay, but by his time almost all the subjects already bore the stamp of the European mind.
At this day the fables and tales of the ancient Tantrākhyāyika have sunk so deep into Western literature that only an expert can identify them in the fabliaux or in the Gesta Romanorum. A curious instance of the way in which an Indian story may be disguised in an European folk-legend is given by Winternitz,2 who has shown, beneath the Welsh story of Gelert, the Indian fable of the faithful mongoose killed in error. The Gipsies, who came from India and spread over Europe, may have carried tales to very distant regions. The Mongols, in their advance on Russia and Poland, may have brought some Buddhist stories with them, although their raids in Central Europe were of short duration. Lastly, Arab and Greek merchants, and above all Byzantine popular literature, carried ideas from East to West and from West to East. Persia has always played a very great part in the propagation of ideas; without it we should never have known the Pañchatantra.
On the north-western version of the Pañchatantra is based the collection entitled Hitopadeśa, Useful Teaching,3 which has the same didactic object. Its author, Narayana, probably a Bengali, was initiated into the Tantric cult. In one of the first stories we read that young girls had to be offered in sacrifice to the goddess Gauri (cf. Mālatī-Mādhava, above, p. 318). Sacrifices of this kind are never mentioned in the ancient texts. Therefore this story, if not the whole Hitopadeśa, is of the time when the Tantra sect had spread to Bengal and had already acquired some importance. We have a manuscript of this work dating from the fourteenth century.
The great epics were the two chief reservoirs on which writers never wearied of drawing. But there were others of less importance. One was the cycle of King Udayana, narrated by Gunadhya.
When did he live? We cannot say. A verse in the Meghadūta (see above) says that the old men of the city of Avanti loved to tell the story of King Udayana. The commentators suppose that this remark refers to the Bṛihat-kathā, the "Great Romance" of Gunadhya about the King. In that case the author would be much earlier than Kalidasa. If, too, as is probable, Bhasa (see above, p. 802) took the theme of his play Svapna-Vāsavadatta from the Bṛihat-kathā, the "Great Romance" would be earlier than the third century. A fairly late tradition, only mentioned in the eleventh century, makes this mysterious Gunadhya, of whom the romance-writers Dandin, Subandhu, and Bana speak with such respect, the minister of a King Satavahana. But there was a whole dynasty of Satavahanas; we know of one of them, Hala, who wrote the Sattasai. It is therefore useless to try to place Gunadhya in the Andhra country in order to have more exact information. The geography of his work, if it has any, rather suggests a northern district.
To crown our misfortune, the work itself is lost. We only have minute fragments, a few verses inserted in the Prakrit grammar of Hemachandra. We only know that it was written in the Paisachi language, the language of the demons according to the theorist Dandin; more probably in some Prakrit dialect not known from other works of literature, perhaps of the Vindhya region, according to A. B. Keith,1 or of Kashmir, according to Grierson.2 We have already seen that the period about the beginning of our era was marked by great activity in the Prakrit tongues, and Sylvain Lévi tells us3 that an inscription (unfortunately of the ninth century) calls Gunadhya the friend of the Prakrit language. In any case, what we know of the Bṛihat-kathā shows clearly that it was intended for the cultured few.
Three principal works, not to mention the less important, owe their origin to Gunadhya and are transformations of his Paisachi work into Sanskrit.
Of the Nepalese recension of the Bṛihat-kathā there is an abridgement in verse, the Bṛihat-kathā-śloka-saṃgraha4 of Buddhasvamin, who is supposed to have lived in the eighth or ninth century. The fifth book (sarga) of the Śloka-saṃgraha mentions the Greeks as clever craftsmen and artists, gives scenes of their life, and speaks of flying-machines made by the Ionians. Is this a reflection of the artistic age of Gandhara?5 It is a further proof that the original of the Bṛihat-kathā belonged to the north-west and to the first centuries after Christ, the place and age in which Hellenic art and culture made their influence keenly felt in India. The scenes of the life of the hetairai and the descriptions of their quarter and of the palace of the fair Kalingasena in the tenth book find an echo in the Little Clay Cart (see p. 305) and the Śringāra-bhūshana.
The Kashmir version of the Bṛihat-kathā was used by Kshemendra and Somadeva, both of the eleventh century. The former has left a work in verse which his mannered style and extreme concision make extremely hard to read, Bṛihat-kathā-mañnjarī, the "Bouquet of the Great Romance", full of erotic passages. The latter, whose style is simple and elegant, has written what is almost a masterpiece, the Kathā-sarit-sāgara.1
It is indeed an "Ocean of Rivers of Tales", with its three hundred and fifty episodic narratives very loosely connected to the main story which forms their framework. One finds everything in it. Tales of marvels, novelettes, stories of sailors, brigands, and thieves, picaresque novels, love-stories, myths, and legends, a great part of the Pañchatantra, and an independent series of "Tales of the Vampire" are jumbled together and between them make a huge novel of manners which gives us a view of the real life of India. But of what period? Of two or three different periods—that of Gunadhya, the earliest, then the very long period during which his work was swelled by additions, and lastly a time not far from that of the composition of the Kathā-sarit-sāgara.
The narrative which forms the framework, or rather fails to do so, for it is lost in the mass of stories piled on to it, begins by having for its hero Udayana, King of the Vatsas in Northern India.
He marries Vasavadatta, and afterwards Padmavati, as we know from Bhasa's drama. The two marriages are described as an introduction to the story of Maravahanadatta, Udayana's son. He is born with the thirty-two auspicious marks of the chakravartin; this means that if he leaves the world he will become a Buddha, and if he adheres to the secular life he will be an emperor. After a life of adventure, in the course of which he loses his beloved and wins her back, he becomes King of the Vidyadharas, the semi-divine inhabitants of the Himalaya.
His adventures with his betrothed (the fourteenth book of the Kathā-sarit-sāgara) recall the abduction of Sita in the Rāmāyaṇa. The minister needed to bring things to a happy conclusion is here called Gomukha, and he displays the qualities which Bhasa, borrowing from the Bṛihat-kathā, gave to Yaugandharayana. The heroine has her counterpart in the Vasantasena of the Little Clay Cart, being a courtesan (in this case only a prospective one) who wishes to emancipate herself from her trade.
The whole story is divided into a hundred and twenty-four "waves" (taraṃga), or, like Gunadhya's work, into eighteen books, fifteen of which are authentic. Of the remaining three, the sixteenth tells of the death of Udayana and his wives, who decide that it is time to go to heaven, and kill themselves. The last two books give some legends. Somadeva is a born story-teller. He shapes the rough stones of popular literature into gems sparkling with gaiety.
Among the people whom he describes are the fool who, being hungry, has eaten seven cakes and wishes that he had started with the seventh; another who, having been told to guard the front door, puts it on his back and goes off to the theatre with it; and the three fastidious persons of whom the first cannot eat rice because he perceives the taste of everything which its roots have drawn from the ground, the second complains that his girl smells of the goat's milk on which she was fed as a baby, and the third cannot sleep because there is a hair under his seven mattresses.
Thieves were always severely punished in India. But their cunning is admired. It is the same with the worthless man who has risen to high office; we laugh at his tricks and jeer at his dupes. Kings and even gods are outwitted by rogues, and their difficulties are a source of fun.
The most amusing anecdotes deal with feminine frailty.
The miraculous elephant of a king has been hurt by a fall. A voice from heaven announces that it will rise again when it is touched by a chaste women. The ladies of the zenana and those of the city, to the number of eighty thousand, pass before the elephant, without producing any effect whatever. At last a poor servant, ugly and dirty, performs the miracle.
Other stories are in honour of the tender, faithful wife. An old couple recall their past lives and see themselves always united—an Indian Philemon and Baucis. But as a rule the woman and the ascetic are objects of satire.
While Gunadhya sometimes follows Buddhism, Somadeva is decidedly a Sivaite and a worshipper of Durga. He describes the bloody orgies performed in her honour. The half-savage Bhils conduct man-hunts in order to supply their goddess with regular victims, and magical rites are performed with blood and entrails. The cult of the "Mothers" and the activities of witches are painted in lively colours. We see women and girls praying in the temple of the phallus (linga).1 Siva floats above all, and the author even makes him receive worship from a bodhisattva, Jimutavahana. Harsha (see above, p. 313) does the same thing in his Nāgānanda. For the life of the middle classes the Kathā-sarit-sāgara is an invaluable source of information.
Within this collection is a smaller collection entitled the Vetāla-pañchaviṃśatikā, the "Twenty-five Tales of the Vampire", by an unknown author of unknown date. The versification is simple, the foundation is Tantric, and the whole seems to be intended as an exercise in posing riddles.
Every day a Yogi brought to King Vikramasena a fruit, which, according to the custom, the King handed to his treasurer. But one day the tame monkey bit the fruit, and out fell a priceless jewel. Honour obliged the King to return the Yogi an equal service. He therefore agreed to go by night to the burning-ground, and at the bidding of the Yogi—it is a very striking scene—he brought him the body of a hanged man, which he had to seek at a certain place and in a certain manner. According to Brahmanie ideas, to touch a corpse was the worst defilement, and burning-grounds were the scene of demoniacal orgies. The King, true to his promise, took the corpse over his shoulder. Then the vampire which dwelt in the body said, "O King, the road is long. To beguile the way, hear this story"—and so the first story begins. It ends with a point of casuistry which the King must settle under pain of a curse. Hardly has he given his opinion, when the corpse is again hanging on its tree, the King must again detach it and place it on his shoulder amid the fiendish laughter of the bhūtas, and again the vampire says, "O King, the road is long," and so on.
Some of these tales are cruel and relentless in their painting of human perfidy, others are amusing and witty.
For example, the daughter of a Brahman was asked in marriage by three suitors. While her father was puzzled which to choose, she stepped on a black snake and fell dead. Witch-doctors came to revive her and, after many incantations, declared that, having been bitten by a black snake, she was indeed dead. Her funeral ceremonies (saṃskāra) were performed, and of the three lovers one climbed on to the pyre by her side, another established himself as a Yogi on the place where her ashes were, and the third took to wandering as a mendicant monk (parivrājaka). He happened to go into the house of a Brahman, and was horrified to see the mother, angry with her child, which would not leave her in peace to do her cooking, throw it into the fire. He refused to take food in the house, but the Brahman calmed his scruples by taking a book and reading a mantra, or spell, whereupon the child rose, rested as if he had slept. At night the young monk stole the book and ran to the burning-ground. He read the spell, and his beloved rose, living, and with her the suitor who had been burned with her. The Yogi was there too, and there they were, all three, again claiming the lady. Who should have her?
The King answered: " The man who reanimated her is her father, because he gave her life. He who was reborn with her is thereby her brother. Only the man who did nothing at all, the Yogi, can be her husband.
A problem which the King cannot solve is that of the relationship between the children and grandchildren of a mother married by her son and of her daughter married by her father.
But the vampire, who is Siva himself, satisfied with the King's constancy, reveals to him the evil intentions of the Yogi, who wishes to kill the King with the aid of the demons and, by doing magic with his body, to obtain occult power. The King slays the Yogi and gets the magic power for himself, and the "Tales of the Vampire" end.
Many of the stories in this work appear in other literatures, without it being possible to determine their origin or line of descent. Western motives are to be found in it. One such is the story of the Trojan Horse, which occurs three times in Indian literature, in plays or tales, with the local difference that the animal is an elephant.
Needless to say, the Kathā-sarit-sāgara was likewise much imitated. The manner in which the stories in it are boxed one in another is simpler, but less natural, than in the Pañchatantra, in which they are introduced according to the sense and serve to prove an argument.
The "Seventy Tales of the Parrot", Śuka-saptati,1 is a work of the same type, but not of the same value, as the Kathā-sarit-sāgara.
A young merchant, being obliged to go on a business journey, leaves his wife in the keeping of two parrots, which are really two Gandharvas which have been compelled to live in this form among men for a certain time. On the first day the young wife mourns her absent husband; on the second she is bored; and on the third she complains to her friends. On their advice she accepts an assignation, and adorns herself to go to it. The hen parrot reproaches her, and nearly has her neck wrung for it. The cock, on the other hand, approves of the woman's purpose, but warns her that if she is caught she will have to extricate herself like a certain woman, whose story he proceeds to relate. It is an intensely exciting story, and the wife puts off her meeting till the next day in order to hear the end. But the parrot does not tell the end until the following evening, and at once begins another story. The assignation is put off from evening to evening, and after seventy evenings have been spent in hearing stories of the faithlessness of women, which is reprehensible, of that of men, which is pardonable, of harlots, thieves, bogus ascetics, and other kinds of rogue, the husband returns from his journey and all is well.
Pornographic and obscene stories are found side by side with others, subtle and ironic, which, it is true, are considerably fewer. On the whole, it is "a very mediocre collection, interesting only for the great extent to which it spread outside India".1 For this work, the author of which is unknown, is one of those which has been most widely read and translated. It was through Persian translations, the first of which, the Tūtīnāma, is of the fourteenth century, that the "Tales of the Parrot" entered the literature of the world. Europe was particularly taken by one story of an ordeal by fire imposed on a young woman, the theme of Tristram and Yseult.
We shall never be able to say how much India gave and how much it took. The story of Sindbad the Sailor seems, on the evidence of the Arab historian Mas'udi (tenth century), to be of Indian origin. It begins just like the Pañchatantra. A king entrusts his sons to a wise man, who promises to make them learned at the end of six months. Who knows how many Indian elements there are in the Story of the Seven Sages (Viziers)? The construction of the Arabian Nights is entirely Indian. It is said that the prototype of the containing narrative is to be found in a Jain commentary,2 and that the chief elements in the collection are Indian subjects.3
We should also mention the "Thirty-two Tales of the Throne", the "Thirty-two Tales of Mendicant Monks", and the "Ocean of Tales". They differ greatly in age, and also in value. The period round about the fourteenth century was favourable to the output of such works, which were produced to satiety. India, adapted to Mussulman rule and divided into small states, lived shorn of her ancient glory. The great men of her history were made the subject of tales without a shade of truth. Writers found a cantankerous pleasure in telling the great ones of the earth what they thought about them.
In the Purusha-parīkshā, the "Test of Men," a thief condemned to death (theft being very cruelly punished because it was very difficult to detect the author) says that he has the secret of growing gold and making it bear fruit. The King leaps at the chance of making himself rich, and calls the thief to him. The latter prepares the ground for sowing, and then says that a sower must come to do his part. A thief, he says, cannot sow gold, for his trade is to steal it; so a man who has never stolen is needed. Such a man is not to be found, the King himself is not blameless, and the thief is pardoned.
Except that they are written in prose, the Indian romances have the qualities and defects of the poetry of the Kāvyas. There is the same superabundance of descriptions, farfetched images, unexpected similes, puns, and long compound words which demand sustained attention from the reader and, when the sentence ends, give him the pleasure of having solved a problem. The subject is usually taken from folktales, fairy-tales, and other works of imagination. This nucleus of fiction is wrapped in amass of details taken from life. So, although the plot is improbable, the romance brings before our eyes scenes which are at once picturesque and real. What distinguishes it from the tale is its finished form. The construction is the same as that of the collections of tales—episodic stories contained in a connecting narrative.
The most famous romance-writer of India is Dandin (seventh century), the learned exponent of poetic theory and author of the Kāvyā-darśa, the "Mirror of the Art of Poetry". Maintaining that verse is not a necessary attribute of poetry and that it sometimes clothes the prosiest ideas, he uses prose in his poetic work, the Daśakumāra-charita,1 the "Adventures of Ten Princes", written in the "style of Vidarbha" (Berar). In Dandin's time different regions had their own poetic style. That of Yidarbha aimed at the ten chief conditions of beauty, which include the use of compounds, but also clarity, rhythm, sweetness of sound, and pleasantly surprising metaphors. The style of Gauda in Bengal was suited to lofty subjects, and set out to render their majesty by complicated turns of phrase and very long compounds. Dandin avoids this style; that of Vidarbha, embellished with ornaments (alaṃkāra), suits the easy narrative of his picaresque romances. The adventure of each of the ten princes is a romance, full of ruses, an Indian Gil Blas. As a romance of manners, the Daśakumāra-charita is of the highest interest. We witness the daily life of a king, with its duties and its advantages. The latter are comparatively few; boredom and fear seem to be royal prerogatives. A princess plays at ball in honour of the goddess, and the game is a prelude to the choice of a husband. This trace of an old non-Aryan custom is of great importance to folklore. Popular festivities are given in detail. Drama and farce have sometimes taken scenes from Dandin (e.g. the Little Clay Cart). Never has the underworld of a city been better painted.
Dandin is an enemy of all hypocrisy. The frankness of his heroes always borders on cynicism, if not on lack of conscience, fundamental non-morality. One of them orders a town to be looted. It is full of old skinflints, he says, who are too fond of their money, and they must be shown that the goods of this world are perishable. Besides, the proceeds of the pillage will enable him to restore the fortunes of a poor man who has been ruined by a courtesan.
Another commends an adultery by which poor parents have been rescued from poverty. What is called crime may have the religious merit of a good deed. Love-scenes are especial favourites with the author. The incident of Prince Pramati falling asleep in the forest and transported to the bed of Princess Navamalika is of great delicacy. On another occasion Dandin creates for himself extreme difficulties of language, as we have already seen, for a lover whom his girl has bitten on the lips cannot pronounce labials, and the author performs the most remarkable tours de force to avoid them. As a master of Sanskrit he is incomparable. The sweetness and musical harmony of his style have never been equalled.
While Dandin's painting of reality is intensely interesting, the adventures of his heroes leave us cold. There are too many marvels. The gods take charge of the heroes as soon as real danger threatens them, and fate (karman) has predetermined everything. We know that all will end well, and are merely amused where we should like to be moved.
The work is divided into chapters entitled "Sighs" or "Breaths" (uchchhvāsa). It was left unfinished, or else it has been mutilated, more probably the former. Instead of ten romances we have seven, and the beginning is by another hand.1 In this respect Dandin's work has been as unfortunate as the Kumāra-sambhava, the Raghu-vaṃśa, and other works.
Subandhu, the author of a much admired romance, Vāsavadattā, gives us talking birds, enchanted horses, and such like, and plunges us into the Gauda style, with its interminable compounds, puns piled on puns, and too clever similes. His work is untranslatable and barely readable. One must be very well up in the philosophic and religious controversies of the seventh and eighth centuries, in the various Śāstras, and in alaṃkāra, to have an idea of the pleasure which a learned and cultivated Hindu derives from this laborious reading.
The subject of the book is as follows:—
A prince sees an unknown princess in a dream and falls in love with her. She does likewise. The conversation of two parrots which the prince overhears one night tells him of her love. With the aid of the kindly birds the lovers are able to meet, and on the night before the princess is to marry the ruler of the Vidyadharas at the King's command they flee on a magical horse. After various adventures, Vasavadatta is turned into stone, but the touch of the prince restores her to life, as in the Vikramorvaśī.
The interest lies in the descriptions—those of the beauty of the princess, which are too frank for our taste or too complicated (she is raktapāda like a grammar-book, her feet being painted with red lacquer as the sections of the grammar are marked with fed lines); and those of nature, such as that in which the lion of the dawn has clawed the elephant of night so that the rising sun is blood-coloured.
There are yet two other works of the seventh century which are still famous, the Harsha-charita and Kādambarī.
Harsha has already been mentioned in connection with his plays. His court poet, Bana, wrote a romantic biography of his sovereign, the Harsha-charita, which is a panegyric in prose with occasional passages in verse. Religious ceremonies take up a considerable place, and Bana, a pious Brahman, does not lack opportunity to describe them in detail. Yet another quality makes him useful; he likes to talk about himself, and so we can reconstruct the life of a man of letters of the time.
The extravagant praise of the King, of his outward man and his talents, hardly interests us, except that it is written in a choice and careful style. Bana, who is more of a poet than Subandhu, writes in a less complicated style, although strings of adjectives and participles make him monotonous to read. When he describes the death of King Prabhakara-vardhana, Harsha's father, he achieves a dramatic note. One of the physicians, a youth of eighteen, fanatically attached to his sovereign, kills himself on a pyre. The Queens, including Harsha's mother, resolve not to survive, and bid touching farewells to all around them, even to the flowers in the garden.1
Another romance of Bana is Kādambarī, which was left unfinished by the author but was continued by his son Bhashna Bana. Its subject is taken from the Kathā-sarit-sāgara, and it too consists of a series of stories one within another. A young Chandala girl2 brings a parrot to King Sudraka. The bird, which has lost its mother and has been piously brought up by a devoted father, as Bana was himself, tells its own story and then repeats the story which it has been told by the sage Jabali, whose eye sees past existences through the present. The story is very involved. Two pairs of lovers aspire to reunion and reach it only after long and cruel waiting. But death itself is the moment of rebirth, and the tears of grief are tears of joy—in another life.
The text is very hard to read, even for one who knows Sanskrit thoroughly. But Indian critics have admired this work, with all its difficulties. They have above all esteemed its power of suggestion (dhvani), which causes the reader to live in a dream-world. For us there are too many assonances, as in Subandhu, and the abundance of mythological allusions sometimes makes it hard to follow the story, which is already complicated enough.
Bana was severely criticized fiity years ago by A. Weber.3 Weber likens his prose to a rank jungle in which one has to cut down the undergrowth before one can penetrate it, and difficult and unknown words lie in wait for the reader as wild beasts watch for the traveller. But one should recognize Bana's gift of description, his art of using contrast (e.g. the peace of the hermitage and the bustle of the King's court), and above all his love of colour. Long after one has read him, when one has triumphed over sentences a page and a half in length, one's eyes are still dazzled.
1Translated under the direction of E. B. Cowell, Cambridge, 1895-1905, and into German by Julius Dutoit, Leipzig, 1920. For French translations, see Léon Feer's articles on the Jatakas in Journ. Asiatique, 1875, 1895, 1897. The fundamental edition is V. Fausböll, The Jâtaka together with its Commentary, being Tales of the Anterior Births of Gotama Buddha, i-vii (index by Dines Andersen), London, 1877-1897.
1Leipzig, 1859.
2E. Cosquin, Etudes folkloriques. Recherches sur les migrations des contes populaires et leur point de départ, Paris, 1922.
3Ed. by F. Kielhorn and G. Bühler, Bombay, Sanskrit Series, i, iii, v.
1Tantrâkhyâyika, translated into German with introduction and notes by Hertel, Leipzig and Berlin, 1909; ed. by J. Hertel, Berlin, 1910; the Pañchatantra translated into English, Trichinopoli, 1887.
2CCLXXXVI, p. 105, London, 1927.
3Pali und Sanskrit, Berlin, 1902.
1A language which may be called Middle Persian, in relation to Old Persian and Avestic on the one side and modern Persian on the other.
2English translation of Kalīla and Dimna, by Keith-Falconer, Cambridge, 1885.
1The Hebrew and Latin translations were translated into French by J. Derenbourg in 1881.
2CCLXXXVIH, iii, p. 305.
3Translated into French by L. Langlès, Paris, 1790; into English by Pincott, 1880.
1Félix Lacote, Essai sur Gunâdhya el la Brhatkathâ, Paris, 1908; Leo v. Mankowski, Der Auszug aus dem Pancatantra in Ksemendras Brhatkathâmanjarî, introd., text, trans., and notes, Leipzig, 1892; Y. S. Speyer, Studies about the Kathâsaritsâgara.
1CCLXXXVI, 2nd ed., p. 90.
2A. Grierson, in Indian Antiquary, 1901.
3In XV, 1885.
4Cf. Lévi, in C. R. de l'Acad. des Inscr. el Belles-Lettres, 1899.
5On the Græco-Indian art of Gandhara, of. A. Foucher, L'Art grécobouddhique du Gandhâra, Paris, 1905, and below, part iv.
1English translation by Tawney, 2 vols., Calcutta, 1880, 1884; new ed., pr. pr., 1924-8.
1There is nothing obscene about this cult. See A. Barth, Religions de l'Inde in III, vol. ii, Paris, 1914.
1Richard Schmidt, Sukasaptatî, textus simplicior, ed. and trans., Kiel, 1894; textus ornatior, ed. and trans., Stuttgart, 1899.
1III, vol. iii, p. 410.
2Jarl Charpentier, Paccekabuddhageschichten, Upsala, 1908,
3E. Cosquin, "Le Prologue cadre des Mille et Une Nuits," in Revue biblique, Paris, 1908.
1Translated into German by J. J. Meyer, Leipzig, 1902.
1A. Gawronski, Sprachliche Untersuchungen über die Mrcchakatikâ und das Daçakumâracarita, Leipzig, 1907.
1An abridgement of the subject is given by F, Lacote in Mélanges S. Lévi, Paris, 1905; English translation by Cowell and Thomas, London, 1897.
2The Chandalas are a mixed and despised caste, born of the marriage of a Śūdra man and a Brahman woman. Kādambarī is translated by Ridding, London, 1896.
3In Indische Streifen, i.