Person · Sanskrit prose poet · India
Banabhatta
Author of the Harshacharita, a Sanskrit prose biography of a reigning emperor that nobody had attempted at that length before, and of the Kadambari, among the first novels in any language. He broke the Harshacharita off after eight chapters, and his son is said to have finished the Kadambari.
- Date
- 620–650
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Pushyabhuti / Vardhana
- Condition
- historical person
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.060, 79.920
Worth knowing
He opens the Harshacharita with an account of his own disreputable youth — the gambling, the company he kept, the snake-charmers and dancers he travelled with — and of arriving at court under suspicion. It is the earliest first-person authorial self-description in Sanskrit literature, and it is unflattering on purpose.
About the place
Placed at Kannauj, Harsha's capital, where he wrote the Harshacharita as court poet. His own birthplace is given in that work as a village on the Son in Bihar.
Connections (2)
- PatronageHarisena
Harisena's Allahabad prashasti for Samudragupta and Bāna's Harshacharita for Harsha are the two great court eulogies of early India and the principal sources for their respective empires — which is a difficulty, because both are poems written to praise. Bāna at least tells you who he is, describing his own village and family, which Sanskrit literature almost never does and which makes the Harshacharita the more usable of the two.
- Court associationHarshavardhana
Banabhatta wrote the life of a reigning emperor in Sanskrit prose, which nobody had attempted at that length before, and broke off after eight chapters. What survives covers Harsha's accession and his search for his abducted sister, and the parts about the court, the camp and the road are the fullest description of seventh-century north Indian political life that exists.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bāṇabhaṭṭa”. Banabhatta, Harṣacarita, trans. Cowell and Thomas (1897); Kādambarī, trans. Gwendolyn Layne (1991).
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