Which of the following literature was written by King Harshavardhana ?
(a) Priyadarshika
(b) Harshacharita
(c) Ratnawali
(d) Naganand

Question

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Correct — option (1), 'Only (a), (c) and (d)'. Harshavardhana, who ruled from about 606 to 647 CE from Thanesar and then Kanauj, was that rare thing among Indian kings, a working dramatist, and three Sanskrit plays are attributed to him: Priyadarshika and Ratnavali, both natikas built on the familiar plot of a princess in disguise at a royal court and her eventual recognition and marriage, and Nagananda, a play of a different order altogether, which dramatises the Buddhist legend of the Bodhisattva Jimutavahana offering his own body to save the serpents from Garuda. Statements (a), (c) and (d) are therefore his. Statement (b), the Harshacharita, is not — and the whole question turns on that one line, because every other option printed on the page includes it. The Harshacharita is a biography OF Harsha, not BY him: it was composed by Banabhatta, the poet at his court, in ornate Sanskrit prose, and it is celebrated as the first substantial historical biography in Sanskrit literature, the model for the courtly charita form that followed. Bana also wrote the prose romance Kadambari. The confusion the question exploits is entirely natural — a work called Harshacharita sounds like a royal composition, and it is the text most often cited in connection with Harsha's reign — but 'charita' means the deeds or life of the person named, so the title identifies the subject, not the author. Once statement (b) is struck out, only option (1) remains, and that is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This option admits the Harshacharita, which was written by Banabhatta about Harsha rather than by Harsha himself, and it also drops Nagananda, which genuinely is Harsha's. It is the choice of a candidate who knows the two natikas, Priyadarshika and Ratnavali, and then completes the set with the most famous Harsha-related title without asking who wrote it — which is precisely the reading habit the question is designed to punish.  (c) This option makes the same error about the Harshacharita and compounds it by excluding Ratnavali, one of the two natikas most securely attributed to Harsha and the play most often quoted as his. Candidates arrive here when they remember Nagananda because of its unusual Buddhist subject, remember the Harshacharita because it is the standard source for the reign, and cannot recall which of the two court comedies belongs in the list.  (d) Accepting all four statements means accepting that Harsha wrote his own biography, which he did not — the Harshacharita is Banabhatta's work. This is the natural option for a candidate who recognises every title in the list as belonging to Harsha's reign and does not separate what the king composed from what was composed about him. Where three of four statements in a set are true, an omnibus option is only as good as the fourth, and here the fourth is a straightforward misattribution.

Concept: Harsha's reign is unusually well documented for early medieval India because three independent kinds of evidence survive for it: the king's own literary works, a court biography, and the account of a foreign observer. The plays — Priyadarshika, Ratnavali and Nagananda — show a Sanskrit courtly culture in which the ruler himself was expected to be a connoisseur and a patron; Nagananda's Buddhist subject also reflects Harsha's patronage of Buddhism and of Nalanda. The Harshacharita of Banabhatta is the first great Sanskrit prose biography and inaugurates a genre that later produced works such as Bilhana's Vikramankadevacharita and Kalhana's Rajatarangini in a related mode. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who spent years in India during Harsha's reign, supplies the outsider's description of the assemblies at Kanauj and Prayag and of the state of Buddhism. The three sources together are why Harsha is one of the few early Indian rulers whose personality is at all visible.

State PCS 2024 Q13 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q13 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer