The Authorship of the Nalodaya

Nalōdaya , the short alliterative literary curio of four chapters, which is “ confessedly a difficult work as much so as Persius is in Latin and Pindar in Greek ”, and which is a superb example of the ingenuity displayed “ in the manipulation of varied forms of alliteration and elaborate tricks of style ”, was for a long time considered to be the work of that prince of Sanskrit poets, Kālidāsa, not because that there were any colophonian clues in the poem itself that could countenance such an attribution, but that the uncritical pandits of the orthodox set had opined that Kālidāsa alone could have been capable of the difficult feats of verbal gymnastics exhibited in every line of the kāvya , and had, as a salve to the literary conscience that perceived the incompatibility of such an artificial poem as the Nalōdaya emanating from the same hand as wrote the Raghuvaṃśa and the Śākuntala , invented the story that the poet was goaded on to its composition by the mischievous scepticism expressed by his friends as to his alliterative capacity. But since the discovery by Professor Peterson of a manuscript of the Nalōdaya whose commentator, Rāmarṣi ( c. A.D. 1600), had attributed the work to one Ravidēva, scholars have been entertaining the view that this kāvya was the production of a certain Ravidēva, about whom no other biographical details were, however, available. I shall here examine the question of the real authorship of the poem in the light of the information furnished by another commentary on the same work, which is available in manuscript in the Palace Library of H.H. the Maharaja of Travancore

Alliteration · Art · Composition (language) · Ingenuity · Literature · Poetry · Rhyme · Sanskrit · Skepticism · Style (visual arts) · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy