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Study of Civakacintamani
Civakan after saving Kuṇamālai from the intoxicated state elephant, goes to the garden. There, out of love. he draws the portrait of Kupamalai and admires her beauty in the picture. In the meantime his first wife Kantaruvatattai comes there and looks at the portrait. She gets angry and leaves the place, in spite of the pleadings and explanations of Civakan,1
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In the Ratnavali there is a similar incident. King Vatsa falls in love with Sagarika, the disguised Simhala princess. Sagarika draws the portrait of the king on a drawing board and her friend draws the portrait of Sagarika next to him on the drawing board. Because of a commotion created by a monkey which has escaped from its cage, they both leave the drawing board and run away. This board happens to be seen by the king and his friend Vasantaka, and while they are admiring the portraits, the king's wife Vasavadatta comes there. Though Vasantaka tries to hide the drawing board, the queen sees it. She realises the situation and gets angry and leaves the place in spite of all the pleadings and requests of King Vatsa.9
Incidents of this kind are often narrated in the famous Udayana tales, the Malavikagnimitra, etc. These tales have almost the same story; i.e. the lov: intrigue of a king with a disguised princess, the jealousy of the chief queea, and the final accep tance of the young princess.
There are grounds to thinks that Tēvar was indebted to some of the episodes and incidents which might have occurred in the Sanskrit prose romance, based on the Brhatkatha. We are unable to say anything more conclusively about this interesting point since the original Paiśaci version of the Bṛhatkatha written by Gunadhya is not available now. But there are three well known Sanskrit versions of the same. They are Kṣemendra's Bṛhatkathamañjari (11th century A.D.), Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara (12th century A.D.) and Buddhaswamin's Bṛhatkatha-slokasangraha. Somadeva says that he is faithful to the original, adding or changing only for needs of clarity and minimum poetic embellishment and that his version is original itself, but in a different language. Kşemendra's version is an abridged form of the same story. Buddhaswamin's version has been considered by Lacote and others as being perhaps true to the original while they think the other two might have followed an inflated Kashmirian Paiśāci version. Whatever the truth of these theories may be, the present uncertainties regarding the contents of the Brhatkatha have made us limit our attention only to the similarities between the several motifs found in Somadeva's Kathasaritsägara and the motifs of the story of the Cc. The Tamil Perunkatai which is supposed to have followed the Sanskrit translation of Brhatkatha written by King Durvinita (6th century AD.) which is not available now, deals only with the Udayana stories of the Brhatkatha. This does not show striking similarities to any portion of the Cc.
1 Cc. vv. 1014-1019.
3 V. Raghavan, Bhoja's Śrigira prakāśa, Madras, 1963, pp. 816 ff.
2 Sriharṣa, Ratnavali, Act. II.
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