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Some Prakrit Poets
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21. Adhyaraja's literary compositions which Bana has so highly admired have been referred to by him as 'Utsaha-s.' The term Utsaha' has intrigued the scholars and they have made various conjectures42 about its meaning. But Utsäha here is not a general designation for the chapter-divisions of an Akhyāyikā like Āśvāsa, etc. The commentator Sankara has recorded two earlier interpretations as he himself had no idea as to what was exactly meant by Utsäha. According to one view it was primarily the name of a particular type of Tala in dance, and secondarily it applied to poems which were used as song-text to accompany the dance.43 According to another view it was a prose-cum-verse composition with a definite pattern: The introductory stanza presented the theme in substance, which was further enlarged upon in prose interspersed with verse, and the whole formed a self-contained
unit.44
22. Prakrit prosody enlightens us on this point and it supports in substance the first of the above two interpretations. Utsäha was a well-known Prakrit metre. Both the leading Prakrit prosodists, Svayambhu and Hemacandra, have defined it.45 In their scheme of treatment the Utsaha metre headed the first sub-section of the Apabhramsa section and hence that sub-section was usually called Utsahādiprakaraṇa.46 Utsaha was a metre of 24 Mātrās, made up of 6 Caturmatras, the third and fifth Caturmatra having the form u-u or u, uuu. The fact that Utsäha is treated as an Apabhramsa metre does not mean that it could not be employed in Prakrit compositions. As pointed out earlier, the prosodists have explictly stated that the metres treated under the Apabhramśa section are generally but not exclusively47 used in Apabhramśa poems. Conversely several metres of the Khañjaka category, described under the Prakrit section are found in actual practice to have been used in Apabhramsa poems.
Further the Prakrit prosodists tell us that the Utsäha metre was also used to compose certain types of songs called Dhavala, Mangala and Phullataka which were mostly in Apabhramsa.48 gather about the Utsäha metre
Thus from the information
we
