f
PREFACE xvii
with his genealogy and to work it into his story. It may be added that the effort 1 to find in v. 17 of the Katha. an allusion to kdvyatraya of Kalidasa, thus confirming the denial to him of the Rtusamhara, is wholly impossible and has not even the authority of the editor. It is very difficult to say whether we can derive from the Katha any assurance as to Bharavi's connexion with Visnuvardhana or identify the latter with the prince who became Eastern Calukya king in A.D. 615 and was the brother of that Pulakecin, whose Aihole inscription (a. D. 634) mentions Bharavi's fame, but at least there is no flagrant anachronism, though we know already of one literary forgery 2 which ascribes to Durvi- nlta of Kongani a commentary on Kiratarjuniya xv.
Of Abhinavagupta's important commentary on the Natya Qdstra we have now the beginning of an edition, which, un- happily, is fundamentally uncritical, 3 while a new effort 4 has been made to assign their precise shares in the Kavyaprakaga to its two authors, but without any convincing result ; in cases of this sort it is probably hopeless a priori to expect to find any conclu- sive evidence ; an editor who has to fill out lacunae is certain to adapt the whole more or less to his own style and to render restoration of the original and his additions almost impossible. 5
The curious scepticism which has marked the attitude of Indian and some European scholars towards Bhasa has not been shown in recent work on the Kautillya Arthafdstra, on which I have written in the Patna memorial volume in honour of that great Indian, Sir Asutosh Mookerjee. The only ground of this differentiation of treatment appears to be the sanctity ascribed to the written word : because the work in an obviously brer appended verse assures us it was written by Visnugupta, i. e. Kau- tilya — the reading Kautalya is clearly 6 of no value — therefore it
1 ZII. v. 143.
3 Ep. Cam., iii. 107. It is noteworthy that a Durvinlta appears in the Katha.
» Gaekwad Oriental Series 36, 1926 (i-vii) ; cf. S. K. De IHQ. iii. 859-68.
1 H. R. Divekar, JRAS. 1927, pp. 505-20 ; he assigns all the commentary to Alata as well as the Karikas from that on Pankara.
•The effort of Dr. D6 to ascribe Vallabhadeva's Subh&sitavali to the 1 3th cent, has been discnssed in a note to appear in BSOS. iv. (1928). As regards Kaviraja's date (below, p. 137), Achyutacharan Chaudhuri ascribes him to the 1 ith cent, as prot^gG of a king Kamadeva of Jaintia ; see IHQ. iii. 848 f.
• Cf. P. V. Kane, ABI. vii. 89 ; Jolly, ZII. v. 216-21. Bhandarkai's theory (ABI. vii. 65-84) of a verse original known to Dandin is incapable of demonstration.
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