And rivers flow upon the earth:
So long will this Rāmāyaṇa
Survive upon the lips of men.
This prophecy has been perhaps even more abundantly fulfilled than the well-known prediction of Horace. No product of Sanskrit literature has enjoyed a greater popularity in India down to the present day than the Rāmāyaṇa. Its story furnishes the subject of many other Sanskrit poems as well as plays, and still delights, from the lips of reciters, the hearts of myriads of the Indian people, as at the great annual Rāma festival held at Benares. It has been translated into many Indian vernaculars. Above all, it inspired the greatest poet of mediæval Hindustan, Tulsī Dās, to compose in Hindī his version of the epic entitled Rām Charit Mānas, which, with its ideal standard of virtue and purity, is a kind of bible to a hundred millions of the people of Northern India.
Chapter XI
Kāvya or Court Epic
(Circa 200 B.C.–1100 A.D.)
The real history of the Kāvya, or artificial epic poetry of India, does not begin till the first half of the seventh century A.D., with the reign of King Harsha-vardhana of Thāneçar and Kanauj (606–648), who ruled over the whole of Northern India, and under whose patronage Bāṇa wrote his historical romance, Harsha-charita, and other works. The date of no Kāvya before this landmark has as yet been fixed with certainty. One work, however, which is dominated by the Kāvya style, the Bṛihatsaṃhitā of the astronomer Varāhamihira, can without hesitation be assigned to the middle of the sixth century. But as to the date of the most famous classical poets, Kālidāsa, Subandhu, Bhāravi, Guṇāḍhya, and others, we have no historical authority. The most definite statement that can be made about them is that their fame was widely diffused by about 600 A.D., as is attested by the way in which their names are mentioned in Bāṇa and in an inscription of 634 A.D. Some of them, moreover, like Guṇāḍhya, to whose work Subandhu repeatedly alludes, must certainly belong to a much earlier time. The scanty materials supplied by the poets themselves, which might help to determine their dates, are difficult to utilise, because the history of India, both political and social, during the first five centuries of our era, is still involved in obscurity.
With regard to the age of court poetry in general, we have the important literary evidence of the quotations in Patanjali’s Mahābhāshya, which show that Kāvya flourished in his day, and must have been developed before the beginning of our era. Several of these quoted verses are composed in the artificial metres of the classical poetry, while the heroic anushṭubh çlokas agree in matter as well as form, not with the popular, but with the court epics.