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NAGARAJAIAH: PAMPA-APOGEE OF KANNADA LITERATURE
The days of his childhood, spent on the banks of river Varada, the bounty nature in all its splendour of the Banavāsi region is kept alive in the poet's memory which finds expression in Pampa-Bhārata, the greatest epic in Kannada language and a work of great aspiration. Thus when he describes Hastinapura the poet's eye captures the grandeur of Banavāsi and Pampa does not forget to make Arjuna alias Arikeśarī include Banavāsi in his itinerary. When the hero Arjuna was finally crowned on the throne, the poet does not forget to sprinkle the holy water of Varada, the river where the author bathed in his bālya; similarly few authentic details of Pampa's life are forthcoming in the kavya.
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Though Pampa, with all his humility states that he follows in the wake of the great sage Vyasa, still his work is no direct translation or adaptation of the Sanskrit original, even though Vyasa-Bhāratam is the main source, and the poet admits that he is not equal to Vyāsa. With the touch of his magic wand Pampa imports into his narration the colour and tone of his time and region.
Arikeśari-II (930-55) of Vemulavāḍa branch of Calukya dynasty, a feudatory of Rāṣṭrakūta king Kriṣṇa-III (935-65), had the honour of two of the contemporary luminaries being the court-poets; the illustrious Kannada poet Pampa as the senior writer adorned the court of Arikeśari-II alias Ariga and the celebrated Somadevasūri (950-83), the author of Yasastilaka and Nitiväkyāmṛta, a junior to Pampa, adorned the court of Arikeśari-III, the grand-son of Arikeśari-II. A moving, though out spoken, portrayal of the pleasures and adventures of love, of travel, of penance, of struggle and the great war of Arjuna are properly attributed to the patron Arikesari.
Referring to the happening of Veņisamhāra, Pampa's supremacy is seen in dramatizing the situation and focussing Bhima :
The vengeance Draupadi wreaks for the indescribable humiliation she has suffered evokes from Bhima this tribute 'Earth-shaking is the impact of your hair unbound. An empire extending to the ten quarters of the sky and shielded with the whole umbrellas of countless vassal kings has had its most violent shake-up. The entire line of the Kurus had sunk without a trace in it. It had added fresh vigour to my valour. The whole of Mahabharata has its true origin here, in the unbinding of your hair [K. Narasimha Murthi, - in 'the image of woman in Indian literature' ed. Yasoda Bhat; 1993-68].
In the entire history of Kannada literature, whether it is ancient or modern, much better known and of greater literary merit is Pampa's
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