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28
INTRODUCTION
does not seem to have been so at his time. Virahānka defines the Mātrā and its four varieties, but he treats the Dohaka as a Dvipadi metre of two lines, and not as an Ardhasama Catuşpadi one as the later writers a7 do. Svayambhū and Hemacandra define all the five varieties of the Mātrā and all the metres derived from the Dohaka, Hemacandra's treatment being of course, more systematic and complete than that of Svayambhū. Kavidarpana, who follows Hemacandra after a hundred years or so, defines the Dohaka and its derivatives, but of the Matrā he gives only a single variety, remarking however, that it was of many kinds.28 All this shows that the Jānāśrayī belongs to a very early period of Prākrit poetry and prosody, when the Apabhramba bards had not yet made their appearance on the literary horizen. Of the two metres again, Mātrā is surely the earlier one and was widely employed for stray poetry, until it lost its importance and glamour... after the rise of longer narrative poems in the Apabhramba language. Dohā, however, still held the field, and the Radda, resulting from the combination of the two, was also often used for the sake of variation and decoration for a long time in the Apabhraíba poems even after the standardisation of the Paddhadikā as their narrative metre by Svayambhū and by Caturmukha before him, as Svayambhū himself tells us. The only triplet called Trikalaya (the name shows the influence of the Prākrit name tikalaa) defined by the Jānāsrayi at 5.59, consisting of an Adhikākṣarā, a Nirdhāyikā and a Gītikā, is known to Virahāňka, who also calls it by another name, Mālā - Sirsaka". It is however, neglected by the prosodists coming after him. The word kalā in the name Trikalaya or Trikalaka deserves to be noted ; like the word pada in the name Dvipadi it signifies a unit, consisting of a whole stanza, in a strophic couplet or triplet.
25. There are two other strophic metres, namely, Dvipadi and Rāsaka, which are defined by both the Jānāsrayi and the Vrttajātisamuccaya, and which are very important from the point of the history of the growth of Prākrit poetry. They both represent an early stage of it when it consisted of stray stanzas and groups of stanzas in different metres held together by the unity of subject matter as also by syntactical unity. Of the two the former refers to the external structure, while the other, namely
27 28 29
See Vșttajātisamuccaya (f. n. 13 ) 4. 27, 29, 30, See Kavidarpana (f. n. 8) 2. 27-28. See Vittajātisamuccaya (f. n. 13 ) 4. 43-45,
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