Bāṇa’s Harṣacarita in Keywords

Bāṇa is considered the foremost writer of Sanskrit prose and one of “the brightest stars in the galaxy of Sanskrit poets” (Kane) and is well-known for his use of obscure words and rare meanings of common words a good number of which have not been recorded in our standard Sanskrit dictionaries. In his famous Harṣacarita he relates the deeds of King Harṣavardhana (606–647 CE), his patron. It is praised as “a veritable mirror of the many-sided culture as it had evolved during Gupta times” and as “a perennial spring spurting valuable facts about the cultural history of ancient India” (Agrawala). The late Professor Willem Bollée (1927–2020) has prepared an index of words and notions of the Harṣacarita with a view to unclosing the wealth of cultural information contained in this masterpiece of Bāṇa. He has released the present edition for printing.