Banabhatta: Court Poet and the Harshacharita

Bana tells his own story at the start of the Harshacharita. That is why we know so much about his family and youth. Read the story in order: birth, loss, wandering and the royal camp.

1. Where was Bana born, and who were his parents?

Bana was born in Pritikuta, a village on the river Shona. The Shona is also called the Son. The village lay in the region called Kanyakubja.

His father was Chitrabhanu. His mother was Rajadevi. Bana’s family were Brahmins, the learned and priestly class. Pritikuta itself was a settlement of Brahmins known for their learning.

Picture a small village where most families study and teach the scriptures. Bana grew up in a place like that.

Do not hunt for his birth year. No source used for this lesson gives one. For exams it is enough to know that he lived in the seventh century CE.

2. How old was Bana when his father died?

Bana lost his mother when he was a small child. His father raised him alone. Then his father died too. Bana was about fourteen years old.

By then he had gone through initiation, a religious ceremony for a young Brahmin boy. He had also come home from his teacher’s house. So he was a schoolboy, not a baby, when he became an orphan.

Many students write “orphaned as a child”. That is only half right. His mother died early, but his father lived until Bana was fourteen. The number fourteen is a clear exam fact.

3. Why did Bana leave home?

After his father’s death Bana was deeply distressed. He took to a wandering life to forget the sorrow. Later he admitted that his youth “was not without those follies”.

He gathered many odd friends. They included poets, a snake-doctor, a goldsmith, a singer and a dancing girl. In all, his party held forty-four people.

Bana then set out on a long tour. The tour ended at Harsha’s camp. Imagine a young man leaving a small village with a crowd of friends. It looked more like a travelling troupe than a lone student.

The text gives no count of years for this tour. So never write “he wandered for several years”. Say only that he went on a long tour.

4. What did Harsha first say about Bana?

Harsha did not welcome him warmly. The king treated him with scant respect at first. Scant means very little. He called Bana a “great libertine”. A libertine is a person who lives without moral limits.

In one English translation the king’s words are “He is a thorough petit-maitre”. A petit-maitre is a dandy, a man too fond of fashion and show.

Bana answered with a proud speech. He said he came from a holy family of Brahmins. He said he had a full education in the scriptures. The speech worked.

Within a few days Harsha was so impressed by Bana’s genius that Bana became his trusted friend. It is like a job interview that starts badly. A calm, confident answer turns it round.

5. Does Harsha appear in the opening chapters?

Yes, he does. Many students think the first two chapters are only about Bana. That is almost right, but not exact.

Chapter I covers Bana’s family and youth. Chapter II covers his journey to the royal camp. In Chapter II Bana has his first audience, which is a formal meeting with the king. The king sees him and asks, “Is that Bana?”

Harsha’s own ancestry and rise begin only in the chapters after this scene. So use this safe line. The opening chapters are autobiographical, and they come before Harsha’s own story begins.

The name means “the life of Harsha”. Bana wrote it in Sanskrit prose. Prose is ordinary running text, not verse. His prose is ornate. That means it is rich, long and full of poetic detail.

6. What is an akhyayika, and how is it different from a katha?

Bana used two special words for his two books. Both books are gadya-kavya. That means poetic prose.

Think of a news report and a fairy tale. Both tell a story. The first is meant to record real events. The second is a tale.

Do not call the Kadambari a chronicle. Bana himself calls it a tale.

7. What is an ucchvasa?

An ucchvasa is a chapter. The word means a “breathing pause”. Bana uses it for the chapter breaks in an akhyayika. The Harshacharita has eight of them.

Think of a runner who stops to breathe between laps. Each ucchvasa is a short pause in the story.

Learn the term with its meaning. It is easy to remember the name and forget what it stands for.

8. Is it really "India's first historical biography"?

Be careful with this popular line. The safer wording is that Bana wrote the first biography of a historical king. A biography is the life story of a real person.

The same source also calls the book “a very early attempt at a historical romance”. A historical romance is a tale built on real people and events. It adds colour from the writer’s imagination.

The facts in the book are “dressed up by the poet’s art”. Bana freely uses supernatural and epic touches. Think of a film “based on a true story”. The events are real, but the drama is added.

So treat the Harshacharita as a rich but flattering source. It is useful, yet it is not a plain record.

9. Where does the Harshacharita stop?

The book is incomplete as a life of Harsha. It stops after Harsha rescues his sister Rajyashri. She was about to enter a funeral pyre when he found her. A pyre is a pile of wood on which the dead are burned.

Some scholars note that the book “leaves out many of the glorious achievements” of the king. It “stops with the recovery of Rajyashri”. It also ends with Harsha ruling Kanouj as well as Sthaneshvar. That, in fact, was only the beginning of his rise as emperor.

The last chapter shows the rescue scene. So the Harshacharita alone does not tell the story of Harsha’s whole reign.

A source is a record that historians use to learn about the past. The Harshacharita is a rich source for Harsha’s family and times. But it also leaves gaps. The next items show both sides.

10. Who killed Rajyavardhana, and what does Bana leave out?

Rajyavardhana was Harsha’s elder brother. He beat the Malwa army with ease. Then the king of Gauda killed him by a trick. He was caught off guard in his own camp. Gauda was an enemy kingdom.

Bana does not even give the names of these enemy kings. Other sources fill the gap. Xuanzang, the Chinese pilgrim, names the Gauda king as Shashanka. Modern historians name the Malwa king as Devagupta.

A court poet praises his patron, so he may skip his rivals’ names. It is like a school magazine that cheers its own team but never names the rival captain. Historians must look elsewhere for such details.

11. What does the text say about Pushyamitra?

Chapter VI lists kings who died because of their own weaknesses. One line reads: “A base-born general, Pushpamitra, pounded his foolish Maurya master Brihadratha, having displayed his whole army on the pretext of manifesting his power.”

Pushpamitra is the same person as Pushyamitra. The spelling changes with the translation. This is the famous Harshacharita line about the end of the Mauryas. The Mauryas were the dynasty that ruled before him.

This is how Bana tells it. Note the spelling when you meet the name in a question.

12. Who was Bhaskaravarman, and what did he send?

Bhaskaravarman was the heir of the kingdom of Assam. The text calls him “Bhaskaradyuti, otherwise named Bhaskaravarman”. He sent a confidential messenger, Hamsavega, to Harsha. A confidential messenger is an envoy trusted with private words.

The envoy came “followed by a long train of men carrying munificent presents”. Munificent means very generous. The message offered friendship between the two kings.

This scene is the source of a CDS 2017 question, shown later in this lesson. Assam here is Kamarupa, and the Varman dynasty ruled it.

13. When did Harsha begin to rule, and how do school books describe Bana?

Harsha began to rule in 606 CE at Kannauj. His rule ran until 647 CE. Kannauj is a city on the river Ganga. He belonged to the Pushyabhuti dynasty, also called the Vardhana dynasty. His family’s earlier capital was Sthaneshvara, present-day Thanesar in Haryana.

Harsha “patronised scholars like Banabhatta”. To patronise means to support with money and honour. The Class 7 book adds that Bana “also composed a biography of Harsha titled Harshacharita”.

The Class 12 book calls Bana Harsha’s “court poet”. It dates him to about the seventh century CE. Use the phrase “seventh century” for Bana, not a narrower date.

Bana’s name is tied to two prose books and a few smaller works. Learn which ones are firmly his. Exams love the traps in this list.

14. Who finished the Kadambari?

Bana died with the Kadambari unfinished. His son completed it. The son is named Bhushanabhatta. Some accounts call him Bhushana or Pulinda.

Bana’s part ends at a precise point. It stops in the middle of a speech in which Kadambari’s sorrows are told. The son took up the story there. He carried it on without a break, except for a few opening verses in honour of his father.

Think of a relay race. One runner hands the baton over mid-lap. The story keeps running. In short, the part by Bana comes first and the part by his son comes after.

15. What are Bana's other works?

The Chandisataka is a hymn of 100 verses to the goddess Chandi. Chandi is a form of the Mother Goddess. It uses the sragdhara metre. A metre is a fixed pattern of syllables in a line of verse. The sragdhara line has twenty-one syllables.

The Mukutataditaka is a lost play. Its title means “the crowned head kicked”. It is known only from quotations in later writers. Its theme is Bhima’s revenge on the Kaurava king Duryodhana.

16. Did Bana write Parvatiparinaya?

No. This is a common trap. Parvatiparinaya is a play on the wedding of Shiva and Parvati. It is a dramatic version of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava.

It was “written by a very late Southerner, Vamana Bhatta Bana in the 15th century”. Notice the word Bana in the author’s name. That is how the mix-up starts.

Only the Chandisataka is a firm second work, besides the two prose books.

17. Why does Bana matter in Sanskrit literature?

Later writers copied his style. It “became a craze with later writers to imitate the graces of Bana’s majestic style”. Playwrights like Bhavabhuti and Bhatta Narayana were among them. So were historical poets like Bilhana and Someshvara.

Writers of champus copied him too, such as Somadeva and Bhoja. A champu is a work in mixed prose and verse. It is like a singer whose style every new singer tries to copy.

Bana’s genius as a prose writer is compared to Kalidasa’s genius as a poet and dramatist.

18. How does Bana rate Kalidasa?

Bana praises Kalidasa among the “master-poets of old”. He names him with Vyasa, Satavahana, Bhasa and Gunadhya. So Kalidasa came before Bana.

This fixes the order of the two poets. It does not fix the gap in years. So do not call them contemporaries. And do not quote a gap such as “two centuries”, because no source here gives one.

School books call the Kadambari “one of the world’s first novels”. A novel is a long story in prose.

Three real questions test this text. Each one tests a detail, not just the name of the writer. Read the questions as they were asked, then learn the trap in each.

19. What do the previous-year questions ask?

Read each stem and its options before the answer. The links open the full paper page.

The trap is to mix up the writer and the patron. Harshacharita and Kadambari are by Bana. Harsha himself wrote the plays Ratnavali, Priyadarshika and Nagananda.

The Dipavamsa is a Pali chronicle of Sri Lankan history. It is not the life of one person. The other three are biographical works about specific kings.

This question tests a detail inside the text. Bhaskaravarman, the heir of Assam, sent presents to Harsha. He belonged to the Varman dynasty. All three questions treat the Harshacharita as a real historical source.