THE MUGHAL COURT & HINDI LITERATURE 43 (1662), which is a collection of approximately seven hundred dohas and sorathds. The majority of the couplets take the shape of amorous utterances of Radha and Krishna, but each couplet is complete in itself. They are intended to illustrate figures of rhetoric and other constituents of a poem. As the verses do not connect themselves into a story the order of their arrangement can be changed and they have come down in different recensions. The most famous is that made for prince Azam Shah, the third son of the Emperor Aurangzeb, and hence called the Azam Shahi recension. A brief description of this work will help to indicate the nature of Hindi works on poetics. The vast amount of literature of this type seems to indicate that in India the dictum that a poet is born and not made would have to be reversed. In the Azam Shahi recension there are first a few miscellaneous verses. Then there are verses applic- able to each of four kinds of hero {nayak), followed by nearly two hundred verses which describe the varieties and sub-varieties of heroine {nayika) . Next there are verses illustrating the various constituents of poetic style {^ras), its excitants and its ensuants, among which verses about a hundred and seventy deal with the pangs of love in separation. The third section is a Nakhsikh, and ends with verses descriptive of the six Indian seasons. In the fourth part there are moral apophthegms and allusive sayings and a collection of verses illustrating sentiments appro- priate to various occasions. In the last part besides the conclusion and other verses there are verses illustrating the different styles {ras) of poetry, which are considered in India to be nine in number. These are hasya (comic), karund (pathetic), raudra (furious), vjra (heroic), bhaydnaka (terrible), bibhatsa (disgustful), adbkuta (marvellous), sdnta (quietistic), and srihgdra (erotic). Only the first eight are referred to in this part of the Sat Sal, as the last {srihgdra) had already been dealt with at length in an earlier part of the recension.
