Vol, I, No. 3.] Pavana-dutam, or Wind-Messenger. A}, 
[ENEDS | 
5). Pavana-ditam, or Wind-Messenger, by Dhoytka, a court-poet of 
Laksmanasena, king of Bengal, with an Appendix on the Sena 
kings.—By Monmowan Cuaxkravarti, M.A., M.R.A.S. 
This poem was first brought to public notice by our Philo- 
: logical Secretary Mahamahopadhyaya. 
mEUTOcUCtION. Pandit Haraprasad Castri in “ Ness ‘of 
Sanskrit MSS.,” Second Series, vol. I, part I], pp. 221-2, (No. 225). 
A brief abstract of its contents was read by him in the Proceed- 
ings of this Society for July 1898, which was reproduced with 
some variations in his Preface to the above ‘“ Notices,” pp. xxxvii- 
viii. He described the MS. as “ a discovery of some importance,” 
and rightly, for before this, no poem of Dhoyika was known, and 
even up to now this MS. is the only copy known. Its owner Pandit 
Raghuram Tarkaratna of Visnupur, District Bankura, has, at the 
instance of its present subdivisional officer Babu Atal Behari Bose, 
kindly lent me the MS., and has thus enabled me to edit the 
text. 
The MS., on yellowish country paper, consists of 12 leaves. 
(or rather 23 pages), 1383” x32”. It was. 
Tho MS. apparently part of a large MS., forthe leaves. 
are numbered on the left side from 151 to 162. The text, five or 
six lines to a page, is 103” 113”, and has besides marginal 
notes. The characters are modern Bengali; the handwriting neat 
and generally legible. The colophon states that the MS. was copied 
by one Ramagati in Gaka 1752 Karttika sita, or A.D. 1830, 
October-November, bright half (of the lunar month), Ramagati is 
father of the present owner. In the text are various omissions 
and mistakes, some of which have been corrected in the margin 
apparently by the copyist himself. The marginal notes are few, 
and give no help in difficult or deficient passages. I have therefore 
giyen the text exactly as it stands in the MS., the conjectural 
emendations being noted in small brackets, and the omissions in 
larger brackets with asterisks. Several passages, however, still 
remain doubtful. 
The poem has 104 stanzas, all in the metre Mandakranta. It 
was composed in imitation of Kalidasa’s lyric 
oem, Megha-dutam, cloud-messenger, (better 
known in the south as Megha-sandegah). The metre is the same; 
the story is an evident adaptation from the latter; and in several 
stanzas reminiscences and even actual words of the Meghaduta 
verses can be traced. 
Contents. 
: Such imitations of Kalidasa’s poem are 
Imitations of not infrequent in later Sanskrit literature, 
Moghadutam, as the following list will show :— 
1. Wddhava-ditam, (vy. 141), by Madhava Kavindra 
Bhattacaryya of Talitanagara (Printed in J. Vidya-- 
sagara’s Kavya-samgraha, Calcutta). 
