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CRITICAL TIMES
265
Among the Jaina kings of Karnāṭaka who have left evidence of their literary works, we may mention the followingthe Gana kings Durvinīta and Sivamāra I. The former was the author of the prominent works in Sanskrit which we have already discussed in the previous pages. The Răştrakūṭa monarch Nṛpatunga in his well known work Kavirājamārga refers to king Durvinīta as a Kannada poet.1 King Sivamāra I was the author of the Kannada Gajaśāstra or science of elephants.2
Unique is the name of Adipampa, better known as Pampa, the author of Adipurana and Bharata (or Vikramārjunavijaya) (A.D. 941). As the author of these two Kannada masterpieces in the campu style, Pampa's services for the cause of Indian culture can hardly be over-estimated. Born in the Vengimaṇḍala, it was Pampa, as we have just now said, who was primarily responsible for Nannaya Bhatta's great work Bharata. That a Telugu scholar, the son of a Telugu Brahman (Abhiramadevaraya), who had espoused the cause of Jainism, and who was born in one of the agrahāras of Vengimaṇḍala, but who was the protégé of the Western Cälukyan tuler Arikesari of Puligere, should have produced a Kannada masterpiece which had won for itself unvarnished celebrity in the Andhradeśa for about a century, was sufficient humiliation to the proud Andhras, whose great poet Nannaya produced in about A.D. 1053 the Telugu counterpart of Pampa's magnificent work in Pampa's own style, at the instance of the Rajahmundry king Rājarāja Narendra.3
1. Kavicarite, I. p. 13.
2. Ibid. I, p. 17; Rice, My. & Coorg, p. 198.
3. Seshagiri Rao. op. cit., pp. 19, 100-128. Nannaya's great work corresponds to Pampa's work only in regard to three parvas. Ibid., p. 103.
