Līlāvaī is a verse romance in Prakrit. It was composed around the year 800 by a poet who called himself Koūhala. The story revolves around a king, called Sālāhaṇa or Hāla, and a princess, Līlāvaī, who fall in love but who cannot marry without doing the impossible: reuniting Līlāvaī’s cousin, Mahāṇumaī, with her lover, Māhavāṇila, who has disappeared without a trace.
Līlāvaī’s literary genealogy includes earlier verse romances in Prakrit, such as Taraṅgavaī by Pālitta, as well as prose narratives in Prakrit, such as Haribhadra’s Samarāiccakahā and Uddyōtana’s Kuvalayamālā. Koūhala’s story, however, involves many more fantastic elements. And it is notable that several characters in Līlāvaī are real figures in the history of Prakrit literate: this includes the hero, Hāla, who is based on the king that is said to have compiled the most famous anthology of Prakrit poetry, Seven Centuries (Sattasaī), and some of his ministers, such as Kumārila and Poṭṭisa, who are otherwise known as authors of some of the poems contained in Seven Centuries.
It is written in about 1360 verses, most of which are in the gāhā meter: a two-line form that counts by moras (mātrās) rather than by syllables. A number of verses, however, are composed in different metrical forms, and these are usually introduced at important moments in the narrative. I’ve selected this “non-gāhā” verses here: most of them are quite beautiful, although Koūhala very often uses the gāhā for similar kinds of lyrical descriptions.
The text has been edited by A. N. Upadhye (Līlāvaī: A Romantic Kāvya in Māhārāṣṭrī Prākrit, Bombay 1966 [second ed.; first ed. 1949]); these selections are from my ongoing reedition and translation of the text, for which I have kept Upadhye’s verse numbers.
This śārdūlavikrīḍitam verse occurs in the frame story. It is spoken by the wife of the poem’s author—whom a commentator names as Sāvitrī—and sets up her request for him to “tell a story in the Prakrit language.”
It was cited by a number of ancient authorities, including Trivikrama in his Prakrit Grammar (at 1.1.22) and Vāgbhaṭa in his Teaching on Literature (the Kāvyānuśāsanam, not to be confused with the Vāgbhaṭālaṅkāraḥ of a different author) on p. 21 of the 1915 Nirṇaya Sāgar press edition.
This verse is spoken by a Gandharva, whose name is later revealed to be Cittaṅgaa, to one of the main characters, Kuvalaāvalī, in an attempt to seduce her as she is picking flowers in the forest.
The meter does not seem to be otherwise recorded. It is, however, a syllable-counting meter with sixteen syllables per line (the pattern being: GLGLLLLLLLGLLGLG, or RNNJJG). It has the end-rhyme between the first two and last two lines that characterizes Prakrit verses called galitakas.
This is another śārdūlavikrīḍitam verse. It is spoken by Kuvalaāvalī to her friend Mahāṇumaī, after giving her own life story, and counselling Mahāṇumaī to remain with the bounds of propriety when conducting her relationship with Māhavāṇila. They have been up all night, and the two of them now notice that day is breaking.
This verse, in the pr̥thvī meter, is spoken by the narrator (Koūhala) right after king Hāla is requested to slay the demon that haunts a certain āśrama at night. The night whose arrival is described here is guaranteed to be the demon’s last, according to Hāla, but his soldiers are understandably nervous.