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Vidyanatha

Court poet of the last Kakatiya king Prataparudra. He wrote the Prataparudriya (Prataparudra-yashobhushana), a Sanskrit book on the theory of poetry whose example verses all praise the king. Its model play, the Prataparudra-kalyana, is one of the few literary sources from the time for the Kakatiya court.

Vidyanatha wrote a Sanskrit book on the theory of poetry in which all the examples are in honour of Prataparudra, the last Kakatiya king.1 Parabrahma Sastry used the book for the Kakatiya royal emblem, the family’s descent and the relationship of Rudramadevi to Ganapatideva and Prataparudra.2

The Prataparudriya

Vidyanatha was the court poet of Prataparudra, the last Kakatiya king, and wrote the Prataparudriya. It is also called Prataparudra-yashobhushana, “the ornament of Prataparudra’s fame”. It is a treatise on alankara-shastra, the theory of poetry.23 P. V. Parabrahma Sastry notes that it is still studied as a standard work on the subject.23

K. P. Trivedi edited it in 1909, with the commentary Ratnapana of Kumarasvamin.4 He reported that it was “even now very popular in southern India”.4 Later writers on poetics quoted it, among them Appayya Dikshita.4 Trivedi knew it as Vidyanatha’s only work.4

Trivedi dated the author from the book itself:1

  • it is named after Prataparudra1
  • it treats the glory of the hero as the chief source of a poem’s greatness1
  • all its examples are in honour of that king1

The literary historians Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao, writing in 1928, also placed the work in Prataparudra’s reign.5 The commentator, Kolachala Kumarasvami, was a son of the famous commentator Mallinatha.2

The play Prataparudra-kalyana

To illustrate the rules of drama, Vidyanatha included a model play, the Prataparudra-kalyana, in the third section of the book. Trivedi summarised its story. In it the god Shiva appears in a dream to “king Rudra”.6 Rudra was the daughter of king Ganapati, but he had given her a male name.6 Her real name, the commentator says, was Rudramba.6

Shiva praises the prince Prataparudra, her grandson, “who had been adopted by him as his son by His command”.6 He tells her to place the kingdom on the prince’s shoulders.6 The prince then sets out to conquer the four quarters.67 He defeats the Kalingas and the Pandyas and drives back the Yadava king.67

The play gives the family tree as:7

  • Ganapati and his queen Soma7
  • their daughter Rudramba7
  • her daughter Mummadamba and Mummadamba’s husband Mahadeva7
  • their son Prataparudra7

Parabrahma Sastry took from the work the statement that Rudramadevi came to the throne under the male name Rudradeva Maharaja.2 The book is also used for the royal emblem, the family’s descent and the relationship of Rudramadevi to Ganapatideva and Prataparudra.2

As a historical source

Vidyanatha calls the Kakatiya capital Ekashila, “the single rock”. He calls the Telugu country Trilinga, after its three famous lingas (stone emblems of Shiva). Trivedi identified them as Srisailam, Kaleshvara and Draksharama.18 He took Kaleshvara for the temple at Kalahasti in the North Arcot district.1 Parabrahma Sastry identified it with Kaleshvaram in the Karimnagar district.8

The commentary explains the family name from Kakati, a form of the goddess Durga worshipped by the family.1 The work names Prataparudra’s parents as Mahadeva and Mummadamba.9 It gives him the title Chalamartiganda and describes a boar on his banner.9

The work refers to the Garuda (a mythical bird) on the Kakatiya banner, until Prataparudra’s time.10 These references led Parabrahma Sastry to suggest that this emblem was originally Jain.10 On the family’s caste, Vidyanatha says that the Kakatiya line surpassed both the solar and the lunar races.11 Parabrahma Sastry set this statement against the claims of other records to a solar Kshatriya descent.11

The book was still known in central India centuries later. An inscription of 1702–03 at Dantewara quotes a verse from it, as its editor Hira Lal noted.12 In this inscription the rajas of Bastar claimed descent from a brother of “Kakati Prataparudra”.12

The name Trilinga

In a verse of the play, the learned citizens bless the king in the name of the gods who dwell at Srisaila, Kaleshvara and Draksharama.13 Through these gods the country is famed as Trilinga.13

Vidyanatha does not say where Kaleshvara is, but Wilson’s catalogue of the Mackenzie manuscripts (1828) put it on the Godavari.14 The same reading is given by these works:15161718

  • Arden’s Telugu grammar (1873)15
  • the Nellore manual of the same year16
  • Siraj ul Hassan’s survey of the castes of the Nizam’s Dominions (1920)17
  • Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao (1928)18

Arden and the Nellore manual call the third temple Bhimeswaram, after the god of Draksharama.1516 The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 names Kalahasti instead.19 The Godavari gazetteer of 1907 reports that the Telaganya community placed its original home in the “Trilingam country” between Srisailam, Kalahasti and Draksharama.20

Henry Morris’s history of the Godavari district (1878) read Ptolemy’s “Triglyphum” or “Trilingum” as an early form of the name.21 A. C. Burnell, in the same year, took Ptolemy’s word for a copyist’s error for “Trikalingon”.22 He doubted that the name had anything to do with lingas.22

Vidyanatha and Agastya

In one verse Vidyanatha compares himself to the sage Agastya. On the strength of this verse, some scholars have held that he was the same person as Agastya. Agastya was a prolific poet of the period, credited with seventy-four works, of which three survive: the Balabharata, the Nalakirtikaumudi and the Krishnacharita. Parabrahma Sastry reported this view without adopting it.3 He noted that Agastya is also said to have been the teacher of Gangadevi, queen of the Vijayanagara prince Kumara Kampana.3

Footnotes

  1. K. P. Trivedi (ed.), The Prataparudrayasobhushana of Vidyanatha (1909), Introduction, p. xii (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), pp. 8–9. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), pp. 293–294. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. K. P. Trivedi (ed.), The Prataparudrayasobhushana of Vidyanatha (1909), Introduction, p. xi (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. P. Chenchiah and Raja M. Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (1928), p. 23 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩

  6. K. P. Trivedi (ed.), The Prataparudrayasobhushana of Vidyanatha (1909), Introduction, p. xiv (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  7. K. P. Trivedi (ed.), The Prataparudrayasobhushana of Vidyanatha (1909), Introduction, p. xvi (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  8. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 282. ↩ ↩2

  9. K. P. Trivedi (ed.), The Prataparudrayasobhushana of Vidyanatha (1909), Introduction, p. xiii (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2

  10. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 272. ↩ ↩2

  11. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), pp. 27–29. ↩ ↩2

  12. Hira Lal, “Dantewara Sanskrit and Hindi Inscriptions of Dikpaladeva; Samvat 1760”, Epigraphia Indica XII (1913–14), p. 243 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2

  13. K. P. Trivedi (ed.), The Prataparudrayasobhushana of Vidyanatha (1909), p. 213, v. 22 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2

  14. H. H. Wilson, The Mackenzie Collection, Vol. I (1828), pp. 272–273 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩

  15. A. H. Arden, A Progressive Grammar of the Telugu Language (1873), p. 1 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  16. J. A. C. Boswell, A Manual of the Nellore District (1873), p. 147 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  17. Syed Siraj ul Hassan, The Castes and Tribes of H.E.H. the Nizam’s Dominions, Vol. I (1920), p. 121 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2

  18. P. Chenchiah and Raja M. Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (1928), p. 14 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2

  19. Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Madras, Vol. I (1908), p. 192 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩

  20. F. R. Hemingway, Madras District Gazetteers: Godavari, Vol. I (1907), p. 52 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩

  21. Henry Morris, A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Godavery District (1878), p. 166 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩

  22. A. C. Burnell, Elements of South-Indian Palaeography (2nd ed., 1878), p. 23, note 1 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩2

References

Sources (12)
  1. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal, Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1978, pp. 8–9, 27–29, 272, 282, 293–294. Cite-only; paraphrased. [All rights reserved (cited, not reproduced)]
  2. Vidyanatha; ed. Kamalashankar Pranashankar Trivedi, The Prataparudrayasobhushana of Vidyanatha, with the commentary Ratnapana of Kumarasvamin (Bombay Sanskrit Series No. LXV) (opens in a new tab), Government Central Book Depot, Bombay, 1909, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, 213. K. P. Trivedi's introduction to his edition, and the text. [Public domain]
  3. P. Chenchiah and Raja M. Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (The Heritage of India Series) (opens in a new tab), Association Press (Y.M.C.A.), Calcutta / Oxford University Press, London, 1928, pp. 14, 23. [Public domain]
  4. H. H. Wilson, The Mackenzie Collection: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Manuscripts of the South of India, Vol. I (opens in a new tab), Asiatic Press, Calcutta, 1828, pp. 272–273. [Public domain]
  5. A. H. Arden, A Progressive Grammar of the Telugu Language, with Copious Examples and Exercises (opens in a new tab), Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Vepery, Madras, 1873, pp. 1. [Public domain]
  6. John A. C. Boswell, A Manual of the Nellore District in the Presidency of Madras (opens in a new tab), Government of Madras, 1873, pp. 147. [Public domain]
  7. Syed Siraj ul Hassan, The Castes and Tribes of H.E.H. the Nizam's Dominions, Vol. I (opens in a new tab), Times Press, Bombay, 1920, pp. 121. [Public domain]
  8. Government of India, Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Madras, Vol. I (opens in a new tab), Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 1908, pp. 192. [Public domain]
  9. F. R. Hemingway, Madras District Gazetteers: Godavari, Vol. I (opens in a new tab), Government Press, Madras, 1907, pp. 52. [Public domain]
  10. Henry Morris, A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Godavery District in the Presidency of Madras (opens in a new tab), Trübner & Co., London, 1878, pp. 166. [Public domain]
  11. A. C. Burnell, Elements of South-Indian Palaeography, from the Fourth to the Seventeenth Century A.D., being an Introduction to the Study of South-Indian Inscriptions and MSS. (2nd ed.) (opens in a new tab), Trübner & Co., London, 1878, pp. 23. [Public domain]
  12. Sten Konow (ed.), Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XII (1913–14) (opens in a new tab), Archaeological Survey of India, 1914, pp. 243. Hira Lal on the Dantewara inscription, which quotes a verse of the Prataparudriya. [Public domain]

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