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OCTOBER, 1989
The foregoing brief survey would suffice to give an idea of the importance and richness of the sandhi-bandha in Apabhramsa literature.
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The Räsä-Bandha
The second important genre in Apabhramsa literature was the räsä-bandha, which enjoyed the same vogue as the sandhi-bandha. It was probably a sort of lyrical composition of moderate length (reminding us of the Sanskrit khaṇḍa-kävya). In one of its forms it employed one traditionally fixed metre for the general body of the poem and a variety of choice metres for the purpose of variation.
In the face of its popularity as can be gathered from definitions and extolling reference of the earliest Prakrit prosodists (Svayambhu proclaims it as a veritable elixir to the gatherings of the dilettante), it is very strange that not a single name of any of these early rāsakas, let alone their actual specimens or excerpts, is handed down to us. And for the later times too, we have very little to relieve our ignorance about this important class of Apabhramsa poems. It seems that there were even some Prakrit and Sanskrit rāsakas. But none has come to light so far. Having undergone continuous and basic transformation the rāsaka persisted in some of the New Indo-Aryan literatures down to the end of the nineteenth century (and as rāsas, it is even currently a popular poetic form of composition). There are hundreds of rāsas in early Gujarati and Rajasthani, most of the preserved ones being works of the Jaina authors. But for Apabhramsa all we have got is a tenth century reference to one Ambädevaya-rāsa a twelfth century reference to one Manikya-prastarikāpratibaddha-rāsa, a unique thirteenth century poen, Sandeśa-rāsaka from the pen of a Muslim author, and one small didactic Jaina rāsa of the twelfth century devoid of any literary significance.
The Sandesa-rasaka of Abdul Rahaman, is a charming dūta-kāvya of 223 stanzas distributed over three prakramas or sections. But this division rests entirely on the development of the theme. After the prefatory section, we are introduced in the section to a Virahini's chance meeting with a traveller, through whom she sends a message to her husband who has failed to return from abroad at the promised date. In spite of the overworked theme of love-in-separation, the poet has succeeded in importing to it some genuine freshness and a very facile handling of diction and metre gets the lion's share of this credit. In using one metre for the general frame and more than twenty popular metres for variation, the Sandeŝa-rāsaka supplies us a typical and the only preserved
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