________________
INTRODUCTION
55
Cintāmaņi presided over by a patronising and benevolent deity; the swing and Aśoka scenes have their purpose served by a singing entertainment. Rājasekhara, as a young court-poet and having his play staged at the instance of his cultured wife Avantisundarī, shows a youthful buoyancy in depicting the amorous sentiment; his descriptions of womanly beauty are frank, and pining plaints of separated lovers are outspoken. Rudradāsa, however, shows a great deal of self-restraint without sacrificing the flow of sentiment: he fully describes his heroine, but she is not half-naked, brought before the king in her bathing dress; he gives fewer opportunities for the king to see and describe the heroine. In fine his amorous sentiment is characterised by a subdued spirit and presented with moderation.
Rudradāsa has his innovations and improvements. The episode of the Sārikā bird, which is placed in the throat of a statue put in the drawing-room of the king and which overhears king's talk to divulge it to the jealous queen, is not found in Km.; but it is well used in Cl. to heighten queen's anger. A similar motif is employed by Rājasekhara in his Bālarāmāyaṇa (V.6). The scene of various feudatories paying respects to the king, introduced in Cl., has nothing dramatic about it; but possibly it is intended to tickle the vanity of Mānaveda who is not an imaginary hero but a ruler contemporary with the author. In Km., the heroine gives all her personal details to the queen, and their relation is clear almost from the beginning : this has forced Rājasekhara, through the mouth of Bhairavānanda, to give non-factual or imaginary names of the parents of Ghanasāramañjari which is only another name of Karpūramañjarī whose parents are already once mentioned, and also to introduce that hide-and-seek scene so hard to manage on a simple stage. Rudradāsa has successfully improved on this. The heroine, when she comes first, is recognised only as noble-born; and her real identity and relation with the queen are disclosed almost at the end. In a way all this can be managed better on the stage.
Rudradāsa makes no reference whatsoever either to Rājasekhara or to his Karpūra-mañjarī as for instance Nayacandra has done. The above observations make it abundantly clear that Cl. is primarily based on Km. and inherits many of its details. But the Candralekhā, it has to be admitted, distinguishes itself mainly on account of its author's individuality which is that of a rigorously trained poet who is endowed with a sober mind, pious temperament amateur skill, uncreative but orderly genius and subdued zeal.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
