DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

286 RELATION TO FEUDALISM [8.8
prose or poetry, in all the literary moods and expressions. There is no
question of this being court flattery. It was dearly a method followed to
endear a ruler of foreign descent to the indigenous ruling class, whose
tastes and training he had absorbed in his boyhood. The Vasudeva
included by Rajasekhara (10th century A.D.) among famous royal patrons
of Sanskrit literature and drama may have been the last Kusana emperor
of about A. D. 200. Such kings as the ‘ Great Satrap’ Rudradan^an could
talk of protecting the four varna castes all the more convincingly if
they talked in good Sanskrit and backed it up by gifts to brahmins
(implied in the Girnar inscription). It did not then matter that the
agent (niyukta) was Suvisakha, son of a Pahlava ( = Pehlevi, a
Persian) barbarian Kulaipa ; the proper attitude to cows, brahmins, and
Sanskrit mitigated the lamentable choice of parents on the part of both
Satrap and governor
The absehce of reliable biography or dated literary sources compels
up to make a generalization on such evidence as exists : The great period
of classical Sanskrit literature fe intimately bound (in its various
localities) to the rise of feudalism from above. This contrasts with
classical Greek and Latih, whose decline was completed by the onset of
feudalism. The reason is once again to be seen in the different historical
background, and the different function of feudalism in India.
Similarly, a secondary, minor, Sanskrit efflorescence and the rise of the
vernacular literature are to be attributed to the first successes of
feudalism from below. Yet, just one stanza by an unknown author
describes what must have been a familiar result of some ruthless feudal
governor’s oppression : villages deserted by all but a few peasant
families on the verge of being starved out. This is no. 1175 in the
anthology Subhasitaratnakosa of Vidyakara. I know of no other in
the whole of Sanskrit literature. Not every new class gives rise to a
great new literature, for not every new class is progressive, or feels
the need for literature, nor does it necessarily perform the task of
reorganizing the whole of society into a new, more productive form.
Experience, however, shows the converse to be true : Every great new
literary form implies the unfolding of a new social form, headed by some
new class, except under socialism, which accounts for the time lag in new