Dashakumaracharita (The narrative of ten young men, IAST: Daśa-kumāra-Carita, Devanagari: दशकुमारचरित) is a prose romance in Sanskrit, attributed to Dandin (दण्डी), written in the seventh to eighth centuries CE.

It describes the adventures of ten young men, the Kumaras, who are the sons of princes and royal ministers.

The seventh chapter of the Dashakumaracharita contains a specimen of lipogrammatic writing (a species of constrained writing). At the beginning of the chapter, Mantragupta is called upon to relate his adventures. However, during the previous night of vigorous lovemaking, his lips have been nibbled several times by his beloved; as a result, they are now swollen, making it painful for him to close them. Thus, throughout his narrative, he is compelled to refrain from using any labial consonants (प,फ,ब,भ,म).

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The text

Most extant texts of Dashakumaracharita are composed of

  1. Pūrvapīthikā (पूर्वपीठिका, Prologue) divided into 5 chapters (Ucchvāsa, उच्छ्वास);
  2. The Dashakumaracharita proper, divided into 8 chapters;
  3. The Uttarapīthikā (उत्तरपीठिका, Epilogue), without any subdivisions.

Some text at the beginning and the end of Dashakumaracharita proper has been lost; thus it contains only eight of the ten narratives, and furthermore, the stories of Rajavahan and Vishruta are incomplete. The 1st and the 3rd parts seem to have been added later by various authors (some of whom have tried to mimic the style of the original); indeed, there are several disparate versions for these parts in existence.

In the early twentieth century, Agashe doubted this attribution on the grounds that the two works differ very widely in style and tone. Since a poet Dandin (presumably distinct from a prose writer) is also mentioned in sundry ancient Indian texts, he is led to conjecture the existence of at least three distinct Dandins. Since Dandin (literally, a staff-bearer) is also a common adjective for ascetics or religious mendicants, Wilson doubted whether it was the author's proper name at all.

On the other hand, in the mid twentieth century Kale accepted that Kavyadarsha and Dashakumaracharita had been written by the same person. On the basis of textual evidence from the Dashakumaracharita, he opines that the author must have lived earlier than the Muslim invasion of India, i.e., before the 11th century. Moreover, since the Kavyadarsha refers to the Prakrit poem Setubandha (सेतुबंध) composed in the 5th century, he is led to 6th-8th century as the most probable time of composition. (This remains in some tension with the fact that Dashakumaracharita is not referred to by any other text until the 10th century. There is also a conflicting tradition, generally considered unreliable, which makes Dandin a contemporary of Kalidasa.)

Relationship with the Avantisundarī

Another work attributed to Daṇḍin is the Avantisundarī or Avantisundarīkathā (The Story of the Beautiful Lady from Avanti). Like the Dashakumaracharita this is in prose, but is even more fragmentarily preserved: the two surviving manuscripts break off early in the text. A later Sanskrit poem, the Avantisundarīkathāsāra (Gist of the Story of the Beautiful Lady from Avanti) seems to have summarised the full story, and its surviving portion covers more of the story, and more again is preserved in a thirteenth-century Telugu translation. These texts overlap significantly with the stories in the Dashakumaracharita. Precisely how the Dashakumaracharita and the Avantisundarī originally related is unclear. Although many have argued that the two must have been composed by different people, the Avantisundarī too is 'unmistakably ascribed to Daṇḍin by its colophons and by later sources'.

<blockquote>Several eminent scholars now believe on stylistic and other grounds that, as suggested by the verse summary and its Telugu translation, both the Avantisundarī and

the Daśakumāracarita originally formed a single massive prose work that was broken up at a relatively early age in its transmission; another view is that the two represent separate stages in the life and work of the same author.</blockquote>

Editions and commentaries

The first translation, into Telugu, was produced by Ketana in c. 1250. Editions of the original Sanskrit text have been published in modern times by Agashe, Godbole and Parab, Kale, and Wilson. The work has been translated into English by Haksar, Jacob, Kale, Onians, and Ryder. In particular, the edition by Kale includes the original in Sanskrit, a literal English translation, as well as an extensive commentary on the stylistic and historical aspects of the text. In her translation of the lipogrammatic chapter, Onians omits the labial roman letters 'b', 'm' and 'p'. (E.g., she uses the circumlocution 'honey-creator' instead of 'bumblebee'). There is also a translation into German by Mayer.

Critical commentaries on the text have been written by, inter alia, Ghanashyama, Gupta and Pankaj. A more extensive bibliography may be found in Onians.

Historical research

The Dashakumaracharita has been used to examine the creation of the Ajanta Caves, interpreting it as an extended metaphoric telling of the 5th-century fall of the Vākāṭaka dynasty, and a comparison to the 7th-century Pallava dynasty, which is the period that the work is conventionally dated to. Spink argues that the work has an essentially historical core, almost readable as a roman a clef, which is an accurate account of the Vākāṭaka fall and that Dandin (or one of the Dandins) had a personal, perhaps familial, connection to the events in the 5th century. Evidence from the text has also been used to establish the spread of the worship of Vindhyavasini in the period.

Criticism and analysis

The Dashakumaracharita has been compared to the Spanish genre of picaresque, linking the settings and drawing parallels 6th-century disorder of India to the disorder of Spain in the late mediaeval period. It has also been noted that the Dashakumaracharita, while fantastic, has realism that is not present in contemporary prestigious works, and involves thieves, prostitutes and other less exalted members of society. Dandin may have borrowed major themes from the Brihatkatha. It has been said to focus on "how people are, rather than how they should be".

Bibliography

; Sanskrit text

; Translations

; Analysis

  • The Jacob translation at Project Gutenberg
  • Daśakumāracarita text (In Romanized Sanskrit)
  • Dashkumarcharitam by Dandi, 1822, Sharadakridan Press, Mumbai. English translation by M R Kale

References