Setubandha

Author(s): Krishnakant Handiqui
Publisher: Prakrit Text Society Ahmedabad

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INTRODUCTION
Setubandha lies in the fact that it is the only extant Mahakavya written in Prakrit, Bhoja in his Śrågäraprakāśa and Hemacandra in his Kavyānušāsana speak of three Prakrit Mahākāvyas current in their time : Harivijaya, Rāvanavijaya and Setubandha. Of these the first two appear to be completely lost. Very little is known about the Rāvanavijaya, but tha Harivijaya of Sarvasena is appreciated by Sanskrit writers on poetics like Anandavardhana, Kuntaka and Bhoja. Dandin mentions the Harivijaya in a mutilated verse at the beginning of his Avantisundari, and refers to Sarvasena as a king, probably identical with Sarvasena, the founder of the younger branch of the Vākāțakas. If so, the Harivijaya was composed in the first half of the fourth century A.D., about a hundred years earlier than the Setubandha. The reason why the Rāvanavijaya and the Harivijaya went out of vogue was probably that they failed to hold their own in a branch of literature dominated by the works of Kālidāsa, Bhāravi and Māgba. The Setubandha, on the other hand, was extolled by Daņdin and Bāņa two centuries before the Harivijaya was appreciated by Anandavardhana; and it was evidently regarded as the best of the Mahakāvyas written in Prakrit. As we have seen, it was wellknown in literary circles in Cambodia in the ninth century A.D. The different recensions of the poem and the numerous commentaries written in Sanskrit show that the Setubandha was studied in almost all parts of India, and occupied an important place in the literary curriculum of a bygone age.
There is an interesting reference to 'the five Mahakavyas' in Svayambhū's Apabhramśa poem Païmacariü 1.3.7.2 According to the old gloss, the poems included in the reference are Kumarasambhava, Raghuvamia, Meghadūta and the two poems of
i See below. Cf. Raghavan, Bhoja's Grigaraprakāsa, p. 824. Madras, 1963, 2 Ed. Bhayani. Singhi Jain Series,