वासवदत्ता (महाकवि सुबन्धु - श्लेष-प्रधान शास्त्रीय गद्यकाव्य सान्वय सटीक)

30 VĀSAVADATTĀ
and transformation. To all these I have sought to give parallels,
especially from modern Indian folk-tales, in footnotes to the
passages in which they occur. There seems to be no parallel,
however, to the story of the Vāsavadattā as a whole, and, as
already stated (p. 2), Subandhu evidently invented the slender
plot of his own romance (cf. also Hall, Introd., pp. 1–6).
Sanskrit ‘Estilo Culto’ Previous to Subandhu, and in Later
Epigraphy. This allusion to comparative literature brings us to
possible quasi-parallels to the style of the Vāsavadattā. The
commingling of prose and verse which is characteristic of the
ākhyāyikā, kathā, and other forms of gadya, or poetical prose (cf.
Regnaud, Rhétorique sanskrite, pp. 74–77, Paris, 1884), was by
no means an innovation of Subandhu. It is found, for instance,
in the Pañcatantra and the Jātakas, as well as in the gāthās of
the Brāhmaṇas and the Northern Buddhists, even though these
latter be more archaic than the prose in which they are set.
Obscure as is the date of the beginning of the kāvya style in
India, a flood of light has been cast on its early history by
Bühler in his ‘Die indischen Inschriften und das Alter der
indischen Kunstpoesie,’ in SWAW. 122, Abhandlung 11. There
he has shown that the eulogy of Vatsabhaṭṭi, preserved in an
inscription in the Temple of the Sun at Maṇḍasōr, and dated
473–474 A.D., contains descriptions of cities, natural phenomena,
and the like, together with compound words of inordinate length,
and the rhetorical devices of anuprāsa, upamā, utprēkṣā, rūpaka,
and (possibly) virōdha, all of which even fulfil the requirements
laid down, for instance, by Daṇḍin in his Kāvyādarśa. The term
kāvya itself occurs at least as early as 375–390 A. D. in Hariṣēṇa’s
panegyric on Samudragupta, inscribed on a pillar at Allāhābād,
which also contains long compounds and the rhetorical figures
of varṇānuprāsa, rūpaka, upamā, and ślēṣa. The kāvya style
is carried back to the early second half of the second century A.D.
by the Girnār inscription of Rudradāman, which has long com-
pounds and numerous anuprāsas, together with two upamās and
one utprēkṣā. It is thus clear that a fairly developed kāvya was
known in India as early as the second century of our era, not