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36
CAMDALEHA
it celebrates the heroic career of Hammira (incidentally that of his predecessors) who bravely fought against 'Alau'ddin and died on the battle field in 1301 A. D. Nayacandra is aware of the standard of poetry laid down in Kavyaprakāśa etc.; and he tells how he has tried to make his poem full of matter with flavour: the critics should not mind his faults of expression (for which, if any, he wants to be forgiven) which have not been altogether avoided even by authors like Kalidasa. He composed this poem full of amorous, heroic and marvellous sentiments to silence the court circle of Tomara Virama which asserted that no one at present could compose a Kavya like earlier poets. He claims that his poetry possesses both the lalitya of Amaracandra and vakrimā of Sriharṣa. As to Nayacandra's age, he must have flourished between A. D. 1365, the date of Kumarapalacarita of his grand teacher Jayasimhasūri, and A. D. 1478, the date of the Poona Ms. of Rambha-mañjarī. The exact identification of king Tomara Virama would help us to bring these limits nearer. The editor of the Hammira Kavya has added a remark like this: King Tomara Virama, whoever he was, appears to have lived seventy years before Akbar.'; but no evidence is given. In the list of the Tomara princes of Gwalior,' there is a king Virama; and the dates available for his grandson, Dungarendradeva, are 1440-1453 A. D. Deducting 50 years or so for two generations, we get about 1400 as the date of Virama. So we might assign Nayacandra to the beginning of the 15th century A. D. Nayacandra, as indicated by his spiritual genealogy, is a Jaina monk; but his mangala verses in the Hammira kavya are applicable to both Jaina and Hindu deities, and the nandi of Rambha-mañjarī invokes Vişņu as Varaha. The Rambha-mañjarī of Nayacandra is a Saṭṭaka; so we might analyse its contents and study some of its aspects critically.
I. After the nandi in which Varaha is saluted and Madana is greeted by referring to the amorous glances of grown-up girls, Sutradhara invokes god of love and glorifies Isvara and Parvati. He introduces in elaborate expressions the king Jaitracandra or Jayacamda, alias Pangu, who is the son of Malladeva and Candralekha, who usurped the kingdom of Madanavarman, who defeated Yavanas and who was ruling over Benares; and announces his intention to Nata that they should enact a prabandha in order to entertain the
1 C. M. Duff: The Chronology of India, p. 306, Westminister 1899; D. R. Bhandarkar: A List of Inscriptions of Northern India, p. 404.
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