Gaudavaho

Author(s): Vakpatiraj, Narhari Govind Suru, P L Vaidya, A N Upadhye, H C Bhayani
Publisher: Prakrit Text Society Ahmedabad

Page 95

(Lxxviii) when huge things topple down, or are pushed upwards and sideways or are burnt up, deluged and destroyed.
Down on the earth, Vākpatirāja had to face a twofold confrontation; the Society of men and women in which he was required to move as a person of distinction in his capacity as a Court-Poet and Nature that presented to him pictures of beauty and loveliness in its urban and rural aspects. In his society he had often to face men in authority, courtiers, nobility, worthless and villainous cycophants. Their behaviour and the treatment he received at their hands had, perhaps, given rise in his mind to bitter feelings of resentment and displeasure and the Poet gives vent to them, of course, in an indirect, oblique way, when he dilates on the ways of the world, on the wickedness of rogues and men in authority, the lot of the meritorious and the meritless, wealth and its possessors, the miserly rich as opposed to the impoverished but saintly men of high merit. In such surroundings Vākpatirāja must have felt ignored and, at times, discarded and even humiliated, all of which has, perhaps, led him to include in this Poem a lengthy lampoon on the society in as many as 150 Gāthās. In the end, dwelling upon the vanity of worldly life, he says to himself in despair : “O heart, find solace somewhere else. How long would you torture yourself in this mood of frustration ?" (954). Eroticism:
The pleasure-seeking propensities of men and women, especially of the royalty, find full scope in this Poem. The element of eroticism, as one of the requirments of a Mahākāvya, gets more than its due share at the hands of Vākptirāja, who devotes 169 Gāthās for the description of the various aspects of this Sentiment.