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

12 VĀSAVADATTĀ Here the answer must be still more vague.¹ It is obviously impossible that the romance was written at the court of Bhōja, as some manuscripts of the Bhōjaprabandha would imply, for that ruler did not reign at Dhārā until the eleventh century; nor does there seem to have been any Bhōja reigning in the latter part of the sixth century at whose court Subandhu might have been, thus being confusedly located by Ballāla in the train of the famous Bhōja of Dhārā. One might, indeed, by reckless theorising, allege that Subandhu, thus being placed at Dhārā in Mālava, had actually been a courtier either of Dēvagupta of Eastern Mālava or of Śīlāditya of Mo-la-p'o (Western Mālava); but the real reason for this wild statement by the author of the Bhōja- prabandha (or, more probably, by one of his interpolators) was obviously the identification, occasionally made by Sanskrit authors (cf. Weber, Akademische Vorlesungen über indische Literaturgeschichte, 2 ed., pp. 218–219, Berlin, 1876; Rajendralala Mitra, 'Bhoja Rájá of Dhár and his Homonyms,' in JASBe. 32. 93), of Bhōja and Vikramāditya, an equation too absurd to require refutation. To sum up the discussion, we can say with reasonable certainty only that the Vāsavadattā was written by Subandhu at a place unknown, probably between 550 and somewhat after 606 A. D., the terminus a quo being the circumstance that Uddyōtakara cannot have flourished until at least the middle of the sixth century, and the terminus ad quem by the date of composition of the Harṣacarita, early in the seventh century.² ¹ Absolutely no clue is given by the purely conventional geography of the romance, on which see Weber, Indische Streifen, 1. 385, Berlin, 1868. ² Krishnamachariar devotes a long section of his Introduction (pp. 30–48) to a discus- sion of Subandhu's date, which he places after Bāṇa and before Vāmana, the author of the Kāvyālaṁkāravṛtti, whom tradition makes a minister of Jayāpīḍa of Kashmir (779–813; cf. Duff, Chronology of India, pp. 68, 70–71, Westminster, 1899). He rightly argues that the various references in Sanskrit authors to Subandhu and Bāṇa allow of no conclusion as to the priority of the Vāsavadattā; but some of his hypotheses, as that Subandhu's dislike of Buddhism proves him to be later than Bāṇa (p. 45), as well as his general implication that the difference between the two writers is due to degeneration of style (cf. pp. 14–18), are, in my judgment, certainly untenable; nor does he touch with sufficient depth upon what evidence may be drawn from Indian history.