The Gāhā Sattasaī or Gāhā Kośa ( sa, गाथासप्तशती Gāthā Saptaśatī) is an ancient collection of
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
n poems in
Maharashtri Prakrit language. The poems are about love. They are written as frank monologues usually by a married woman, or an unmarried girl. They often express her unrequited feelings and longings to her friend, mother or another relative, lover, husband or to herself. Many poems are notable for describing unmarried girls daring for secret rendezvous to meet boys in ancient India, or about marital problems with husbands who remains emotionally a stranger to his wife and bosses over her, while trying to have affairs with other women.
''Gatha Saptasati'' is one of the oldest known
Subhashita-genre text.
It deals with the emotions of love,
and has been called as "opposite extreme" to ''
Kamasutra
The ''Kama Sutra'' (; sa, कामसूत्र, , ; ) is an ancient Indian Sanskrit text on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfillment in life. Attributed to Vātsyāyana, the ''Kama Sutra'' is neither exclusively nor predominantly ...
''. While ''Kamasutra'' is a theoretical work on love and sex, ''Gaha Sattasai'' is a practical compilation of examples describing "untidy reality of life" where seduction formulae don't work, love seems complicated and emotionally unfulfilling. It also mentioned
Radha
Radha ( sa, राधा, ), also called Radhika, is a Hindu goddess and the chief consort of the god Krishna. She is worshiped as the goddess of love, tenderness, compassion, and devotion. She is the avatar of goddess Lakshmi and is also de ...
and
Krishna
Krishna (; sa, कृष्ण ) is a major deity in Hinduism. He is worshipped as the eighth avatar of Vishnu and also as the Supreme god in his own right. He is the god of protection, compassion, tenderness, and love; and is one ...
in one of its verse as
nayika
The Ashta-Nayika is a collective name for eight types of ''nayika''s or heroines as classified by Bharata in his Sanskrit treatise on performing arts - '' Natya Shastra''. The eight nayikas represent eight different states (''avastha'') in rela ...
and nayak respectively.
Authorship and date
The collection is attributed to the king
Hāla
(r. 20–24 CE) was a Satavahana king who ruled in present-day Deccan region.Mahajan V.D. (1960, reprint 2007) ''Ancient India'', S.Chand, New Delhi, ,pp.394-95 The Matsya Purana mentions him as the 17th ruler of the Satavahana dynasty.
The ...
who lived in the 1st century. Inside the text, many poems include names of authors, some of which are names of kings from many South Indian particularly Deccan region kingdoms from the first half of the first millennium CE. According to Schelling, one version of the text names 278 poets.
According to Ram Karan Sharma, this text is from the 1st century CE. According to Ludwik Sternbach, the text was interpolated and revised by later scribes.
It is unlikely to be the work of Hala, based on style, inconsistencies between its manuscripts and because other sources state it had as many as 389 authors.
Sternbach places the text between 2nd and 4th-century CE.
Khoroche and Tieken place the text between 3rd and 4th century CE, but before 640 CE because
Banabhatta cites it in his preface to the 4th-century classic ''
Harshacharita
The ''Harshacharita'' ( sa, हर्षचरित, ) (''The deeds of Harsha''), is the biography of Indian emperor Harsha by Banabhatta, also known as Bana, who was a Sanskrit writer of seventh-century CE India. He was the ''Asthana Kavi'', ...
''.
Manuscripts
The text exists in many versions. Manuscripts have been found in many parts of India in many languages, far from Maharashtra. The existence of many major recensions, states
Moriz Winternitz
Moriz Winternitz ( Horn, December 23, 1863 – Prague, January 9, 1937) was a scholar from Austria who began his Indology contributions working with Max Müller at the Oxford University. An eminent Sanskrit scholar, he worked as a professor i ...
, suggests that the text was very popular by early medieval era in India. The poems were changed over time, sometimes deleted and replaced with different poems, though every manuscript contains exactly 700 poems consistent with the meaning of the title.
The first critical edition of the ''Sattasaī'' was by
Albrecht Weber in 1881. It is based on seventeen manuscripts, and contains 964 poems in total, of which 430 are common to all manuscripts. Weber was also the first person to translate the poems into a European language (into German), but his translation was published in journals and not as a separate book. The only English translation to include 700 verses (1–700 of Weber's edition) is by Radhagovinda Basak in 1970. There is also a Sanskrit translation of the ''Sattasaī'' with commentary, made available by the
Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan
Central Sanskrit University, formerly Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, is a central university (India), central university located in New Delhi, India, to promote Sanskrit. Established in 1970, it functions under the Ministry of Human Resource Dev ...
. One of the most important translation of this text along with an elaborate introduction has been done by Sadashiv Atmaram Joglekar in Marathi, published in 1956.
The text was popular across India, and attracted at least fourteen commentaries.
Contents
It consists of 700 single-verse poems, divided into 7 chapters of 100 verses each. All the poems are couplets, and most are in the musical
''arya'' metre. Many poems of the text include names of gods and goddesses in
Hinduism
Hinduism () is an Indian religion or '' dharma'', a religious and universal order or way of life by which followers abide. As a religion, it is the world's third-largest, with over 1.2–1.35 billion followers, or 15–16% of the global p ...
, for allegorical comparison of a woman's feelings.
Samples
References
Bibliography
*
*
Review*
*
*
*Joglekar, Sadashiv Atmaram (1956).
Hal Satvahanachi Gatha Saptashati. (Marathi).
External links
Sanskrit Gatha Saptashati a Sanskrit translation of the Gaha Sattasai, with commentary
at
GRETIL The Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages (GRETIL) is a comprehensive repository of e-texts in Sanskrit and other Indian languages.
It contains several texts related to Indology
Indology, also known as South Asian studies, is ...
{{Hindudharma
Hindu texts
Ancient Indian literature
Poetry anthologies
Love poems
Prakrit literature