Gahakoso Part 2

Author(s): Madhav Vasudev Patvardhan, Dalsukh Malvania, H C Bhayani
Publisher: B L Institute of Indology

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etc. Govardhana has obviously composed his work to enulate Hāla's Prākrit anthology.
The text of the Gabākosa as printed in Part I ( Prakrit Text Society, Ahmedabad, 1980 ) contains not exactly 700 stanzas as one expects from st. 2, but only 694 stanzas. The stanzas corresponding to serial numbers 588, 596, 597, 638, 639 and 640 are missing in all the manuscripts cousulted for constituting and editing the text.? Further, the commentary of Bhuvanapāla is available only for the first six centos (i. e. st. 1-600) in the Bhandarkar Institute manuscript and the L. D. Institute (Ahmedabad) manuscript. For the seventh cento, we have only the commentary of Ajada (st. 601-637) and an anonymous commentary (st. 641-700), the intervening three stanzas (638-640) being absent in both these commentaries. As against this we have four additional stanzas at the end of the sixth cento in the Bhandarkar Institute manuscript of Ajada's commentary. These four stanzas with the commentary of Ajada are printed on pp. 294-296 of Part I and their English translation appears on p. 90 of Part II.
II. Author-cum-compiler of Gahakosa :
In st. 2 of the Gähākosa, Hāla is said to have composed (i. e. compiled and edited ) seven hundred stanzas out of a fabulous crore (i. e. ten million)of stanzas. The word
(6) See Aryāsaptasati, introductory stanza 52 :
वाणी प्राकृतसमुचितरसा बलेनेव संस्कृतं नीता। निम्नानुकलनीरा कलिन्दकन्येव गगनतलम् ॥ " As (formerly) Balarāma reversed the current of Kalinda's daughter (i, e. Yamunā) naturally flowing from high to low regions, so have I perforce madə the muse of poetry, naturally prone to find its emotional expression through Prākrit to put on
the garb of Sanskrit." (7) See Part I, Preface pp. 7-8; note on pp. 258-259 and foot-note on p. 254 and foot
note 6 on p. 270. (8) The date of Hāla is generally believed to be the 1st or 2nd Century A. D., since
according to the tradition preserved in the Hindu Purāṇas, he was the 17th in the list of nearly thirty Andhra or Andhrabhrtya kings all of whom were known by the dynastic name Sātavāhana ( or Salivāhana) and who ruled over the Deccan for about six hundred years from the 3rd century B. C. to the 3rd Century A. D. (See Winternitz, History of Indian Literature (in German), Vol. III, pp. 102-103) ]. The reference to Vikramāditya in st. 465 of the Gahakosa must therefore be taken to be to King Vikramāditya I, founder of the Vikrama Samvat era (56 years before the Christian era), and the referenee to Sālāhaņa in st. 468 must be understood to be not to Hāla himself, but to some illustrious and munificent ancestor of his. The occasional echoes in Gāhākosa of ideas in Kālidāsa's poems and dramas (e. g. st. 14, 44, 47, 232, 251, etc.) would lead to the conclusion that Kālidāsa belonged to the 1st century B. C. and enjoyed the patronege of king Vikramāditya I. According to Weber (Winternitz, Vol. III, p. 102 foot-note 5), the name Hāla means a ploughman or peasant (from hala =a plough) and was assumed by the compiler of the anthology as pen-name, as it was in consonance with the predominantly pastoral nature of the themes in the anthology.