Dandin’s work as a novelist, poet and pioneering theorist of literary style has secured for him an important place in classical Sanskrit literature. He lived in Kanchi, near present-day Chennai, in the period c. AD 650—750, during the Pallava rule.
The Dasa Kumara Charitam is a prose romance recounting the exploits of Prince Rajavahana and his nine companions. Its colourful tales of adventure are notable for their ironic humour, amoral outlook and uninhibited descriptions of contemporary life and manners. A remarkable feature of the stories is the geographical sweep of their action, ranging from present-day Punjab to Kerala, Gujarat to Assam and all the way to the islands of the Indian Ocean. Also remarkable is the rich variety of characters and situations. Dandin vivifies each personage, major and minor, and provides lively accounts of assassinations, executions, seductions, dance festivals and royal assemblies, and describes at length the training of a courtesan and even the tools for burgling a house. Even though Tales of the Ten Princes can be enjoyed for its absorbing stories alone, it is also a wonderfully detailed sociological account of an important age in ancient India.
DANIN was born to Viradatta and Gauri in a family of priestly scholars about 1300 years ago. 1-le lived in Kanchi, near modern Chennai, during the reigns of the Pallava kings Paramevara Varman I and Narasimha Varman II in the period c. 650—750 CE.
Dandin has been a celebrated name in classical Sanskrit literature as a novelist, poet and pioneering literary theorist. His work was known as far apart as ninth-century Kashmir to tenth-century Sri Lanka and thirteenth-century Tibet. Apart from Daáa Kumãra Charitam, he authored Kavyadaráa, an epic poem now known only through quotation.
ADITYA NARAYAN DHAIRYASHEEL HAKSAR was born in Gwalior and educated at the Doon School and the universities of Allahabad and Oxford. A well-known translator of Sanskrit classics, he has also had a distinguished career as a diplomat, serving as Indian high commissioner to Kenya and the Seychelles, minister to the United States, and ambassador to Portugal and Yugoslavia. Haksar’s translations from the Sanskrit include Hitopadesa, Simhasana Dvatrimsika, The Shattered Thigh and Other Plays and Subhashitavali, all published as Penguin Classics. He has also compiled A Treasury of Sanskrit Poetry.
The spouse of Vedhas, the God of Creation, is Sarasvati, the Goddess of Speech. The verse translated above is by the fourteenth century Sanskrit poetess, Ganga Devi. Dandin had been a celebrated name in the literature of this classical language of India since much earlier. A thousand years ago, he figured in the critic Rajasekhara’s list of writers who had mastered Sarasvati. References to him and his work are widespread, from ninth- century Kashmir to tenth-century Sri Lanka and thirteenth-century Tibet. While they pertain mostly to his famous treatise on poetics, a well-known verse on literary excellence also cites ‘the similes of Kãlidãsa, the majestic sense of Bhãravi, and the fine phrases of Dandin…. Another lauds him as the peer of the legendary composers of the Ramayan and the Mahabharata epics. There is no doubt, says yet another, that Dandin is the poet. Such has been the reputation of the author of the Dasa Kumara Charitam.
Modern scholarship places Dandin in the period c. AD 650—750. He lived in Kanchi, the capital of the south Indian Pallava empire, during the reigns of Paramesvara Varman I and his son Narasimha Varman II. Kanchi, a great centre of commerce and culture at that time, is also remembered in tradition as one of the seven sacred cities of ancient India. It stood at the site of the present town of Kanchipuram near Madras, which is best-known now for its many temples and its hand-woven silks.
Some autobiographical details have come down in Dandin’s writings. He was descended from a family of Brahmin scholars of the Kausika gotra or clan. His great-grandfather, Damodara, was born in Achalapura near modern Nasik in Maharashtra, but migrated southwards, settling eventually at the Pallava capital where he composed various learned works under the patronage of King Simhavishnu Varman. His son Manoratha, and grandson, Viradatta, continued the scholarly family tradition.
Dandin was born to Viradatta and his wife Gauri after several daughters. His formal education commenced when he was seven, and his father died soon thereafter. Then the Pallava lands were invaded, there was famine and pestilence, and Dandin was obliged to leave the capital. The invasion was perhaps that of the neighbouring Chalukya king Vikramaditya I who is known from separate records to have captured Kanchi in AD 674. He was driven away by Paramesvara Varman I who ushered in a period of tranquillity in the empire.
During his exile, Dandin wandered in other parts of the country, staying and studying at different gurukulas or hermitage schools. He returned to Kanchi after peace had been restored, and probably did much of his writing there. He must also have taught, considering the honorific acharya, or preceptor, often used with his name, Little else is known of his life except for an excursion he made to nearby Mamallapuram to inspect repairs at a seaside temple there. From that account he appears to have moved in cultivated society and had courtly connections. The architect who invited him to visit the temple was also a writer of repute in Tamil. Other friends associated with the visit included a general’s son and two scholars of the time.
The name Dandin means, literally, a staff bearer. As this term is also used for certain orders of Indian ascetics, it has been conjectured that Dandin too was one, and the figure of a staff- bearing monk in a Tibetan xylograph has been mentioned in one academic work as his likeness. Other scholars doubt if it can be connected with him merely on the basis of the name’s literal meaning. Neither can such a connection be supported by what is revealed of Dandin’s personality in the work presented here. He was obviously a man of vast and variegated learning which covered sacred and secular literature, law and government, the fine arts and erotics and a host of other subjects. He appears also to have observed at first hand a tremendous variety of contemporary life, from palaces and hermitages to whorehouses and gambling dens, from roadside cockfights to military operations, and from staid domestic routines to sinister occult rituals. The personality which comes through is one of an erudite and orthodox, but experienced and cynical man of the world who views life with a measure of humour and irony, occasionally with tenderness and faith, but practically never with any monastic or ascetic conviction.
Räjasekhara is also quoted as saying that there are three famous works by Dandin.9 Though this tenth-century critic and dramatist does not name them, it is acknowledged by modern scholars that one of these works is the well-known dissertation on poetics entitled Kavyadarasa or Kavyalaksana. It is an important work of its kind. Apart from having been a respected text for literary studies in the medieval period, it is also regarded as having influenced similar works in other Indian languages like Kannada, Tamil and Hindi. Studied and paraphrased as far away as Sri Lanka, Burma and Tibet, within India it has been the subject of learned comment from the middle ages right up to the present century.
The Kavyadarsa consists of four sections, of which all but the last are extant. The first gives definitions and classifications of various literary forms, and describes the ornate eastern Gaudi and the simpler southern Vaidarbhi styles of classical Sanskrit writing, together with intermediate variations. It also specifies the gunas or virtues of poetic expression. The second section explains and illustrates thirty-five alañkaras or figures of speech which embellish literary language. The third further discusses the yamaka, another embellishment which consists of alliterative repetition of syllables, and goes on to deal with chitrabandhas or unusual literary techniques, and also discourses on the doshas or blemishes of expression.
With his detailed discussion of the virtues and embellishments of language, Dandin is considered a pioneering exponent of the school of poetics which emphasized riti or style as the hallmark of literature. The priorities of this school may have led to the mannered and artificial composition which became the bane of later Sanskrit; they were also contested by other schools which emphasized dhvani or the quality of suggestion. In the history of Sanskrit literary theory and criticism Dandin nevertheless remains a major figure, coming chronologically after Bhamah in a distinguished line of critics and scholars which stretches after him, through Vamana, Rãjasekhara and Ananda Vardhana, to Bhoja at the turn of the millennium.
It is Bhoja’s eleventh-century critique, Sringaraprakasa, that gives information about another work by Dandin, the Dvisandhana. Here Dandin is seen as a stylist himself, rather than a theorist of style. The work is said to narrate simultaneously the epic stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata by the use of double entendre words throughout the verse composition. Such feats are not uncommon in later Sanskrit literature, given the language’s wealth of words and expressions having several meanings, and the possibilities provided by the rules of liaison. Bhoja names the work and the author. He also quotes from it a stanza describing in the same words both Rãma and Yudhishhira, the respective heroes of the two epics. The paronomasia is accomplished by using a compound word which means both ‘elder brother’ and ‘descendant’ of Bharata, the appellation in one case of Rãma and of the Mahabharata character in the other. But this tantalizing glimpse is all that is available at present of this work: its text has been lost over the course of time.
Dasa Kumara Charitam, here presented in translation, is the third recognized work of Dandin. A romance in prose, it is the first work of its type presently available in Sanskrit literature. The other two prose romances of the period, the Vasavadatta of Subandhu and the Kadambari of Bãna, are essentially different in their preoccupation with style and embellishment to an extent that it overshadows the narrative. Dandin’s work gives preeminence to story and characters, a tradition continued in later works like the verse romance, Kathasaritsagara.
Known under its present name for at least six hundred years, the Dasa Kumara Charitam’s colourful tales of adventure with vivid accounts of life and manners in ancient India attracted the early attention of Western scholars, and it first appeared in an English version in 1846, in French in 1862, and in German in 1902. The publication of its text in the Bombay Sanskrit Series at the start of the last century initiated a considerable academic, debate17 about the contents and the ascription which has since been settled to a large extent after the discovery of certain other manuscripts in Kerala.
The present consensus of scholars is that the Dasa, to abbreviate the name for convenience, is part of a longer novel by Dandin, now lost. The opening portion of the latter was recovered in Kerala, as indicated above, under the title Avantisundari Katha, but there remains a considerable unfilled gap in the narrative between that portion and the Dasa. The further portion of the longer work, which would take the story beyond the Dasa, is also missing. On the basis of the two available but separate parts, and an incomplete verse paraphrase also found in Kerala, some inconclusive attempts have been made to reconstruct the fuller story of the original novel, also called the Avantisundari. The final outcomes of such efforts much clearly await the coming to light of more material.
The Dasa itself, in its present form, consists of three parts. The central part is designated by this title, and has eight chapters. It is preceded by a Purva-pithikd or earlier part of five chapters, and followed by a single- chapter later part called the Uttarapithika. There is another scholarly opinion that only the central part comprising eight chapters is the original work of Dandin, and the two adjuncts before and after it are later additions made to provide a beginning and an end for the story in replacement of the lost longer novel. This conclusion is partly based on the less than smooth transition from the fifth to the next chapter, as well as the somewhat summary nature of the last portion. There are also some discrepancies in the descriptions of characters and incidents mentioned in the two adjuncts, as compared to the central portion.
The discrepancies would be apparent to anyone who follows the narrative with care. In the present translation they have also been mentioned in the accompanying notes. No such indication is needed for the abrupt ending of the story so evident in the Uttara-pithika. Its summary style is a contrast to the preceding chapters. The stylistic argument is not equally easy to sustain for the Purva-pithikã whose opening invocatory verse, moreover, is reproduced in and attributed to Dandin in independent anthologies. One view concedes that this may be an original verse. It has also been speculated that all or part of the Purva-pithika may be a Sanskrit readaptation of the lost original’s Telugu translation done by the thirteenth-century poet Ketana, who was also known as the new Dandin.
The paucity of conclusive evidence is one of the characteristics of ancient Indian historiography. It may not be easy to determine when and how the Dasa came into a separate existence and circulation apart from the Avantisundari. The latter is named in the tenth-century critic Vadijanghala’s commentary on Dandin’s Kavyadarsa. The thirteenth-century commentary of Taruna Vachaspati on the same work refers to the Dasa. It can be surmised that during the intervening period, the longer work gradually disappeared, and the Dasa resurfaced under its present name with the two Pithikas joined to it in further course of time.
The importance of Avantisundari, the recovered part of which also gives Dandin’s biographical details already mentioned, is not to be discounted. But, awaiting further research and discovery, it still remains mainly in the academic domain. The Dasa Kumara Charitam on the other hand, has acquired over seven centuries its own reputation as a well-known romance in classic prose by a writer and scholar of high repute. In view of this identity, as also its style and content, social comment and historical interest, it has continued to he read and relished as an independent work.
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