Jain Journal 1988 10

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 15

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dealing with the story. He practically rushes through it. And in making Rajimati follow Nemi right up to the Raviataka, not unlike an haunted person, he seems to depart from the known sources.
Though lean in numbers, the campu had caught the fancy of the Jaina authors, from quite early times. While Haricandra conceived it as a damsel, stationed at the junction of adolescence and youth ;7 to Mandana, it provided pleasure like a youthful lady with tenderness, rasa and alamkara. Doubtless, by its very nature the campu opens up wider vistas for the muse of the author to unfold itself in both prose and poetry. Though a mix of both, prose in campu steals thunder over poetry, with the result the campu adds up more as the source of ornate prose, couched with the gimmicks prescribed by the poeticians.
Mandana embarked upon his campu with the decided objective to project himself as a prose-writer of some order. He had deeply imbibed the kavya tradition including the campu form, handed down to him by earlier stalwarts. While his equipment as a poet is evidenced by his poetic works, especially the Kavyamaṇḍana, the campū is intended to establish him as a prose author. That alone seem to be the rationale for over-abundance of prose therein, with poetry playing the proverbial second fiddle to it. But Mandana had a clear vission of the type of prose, he wanted to foster. It is to his credit that he did not mean to overawe the reader with sesquipedalian prose, tarnished by inverted construction, with compounds heaped upon compounds and replete with subtle sastric allusions, in order to emerge as a rival to Bana. He aimed to spin the narrative in simple and lucid phraseology, marked with such literary devices as had established themselves as inseparable ingredients of literary prose.
JAIN JOURNAL
It hardly brooks repetition that the CM is a mass of prose-pieces, spun out to draw sketches that form the warp and wrop of the poem. With his keen observation, equipment in literary devices and facile pen, Manadana is at home in drawing the side spectrum of descriptions. Be it Samudravijaya's metropolis or Nemi's sports, sunrise or moonshine, the Acarya or summer, Siva's pregnancy or Dwarika's grandeur, all his
⚫ agamadanu ca nemim samaranti ca citte/dyutiriva nalinisam prasthitam pascimayam, verse 6, p. 32.
balyatarunyavativa kanta, Jivandhara Campu, I, 9.
8 komala padavinyasarasalamkarasalini karoti kasya nahladam campusca pramada sada, CM, verse 2, p. 2.
For the Critique on Kavyamandana see my book, Jaina Sanskrit Mahakavya (under print), pp. 47-74.
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