Madhura Vijayam
Madhurā Vijayam (Sanskrit: मधुरा विजयं), meaning "The Victory of Madurai", is a 14th-century C.E Sanskrit poem written by the poet Gangadevi. It is also named "Vira Kamparaya Charitham" by the poet. It chronicles the life of Kumara Kampana, a prince of the Vijayanagara Empire and the second son of Bukka Raya I. The poem describes in detail, the invasion and conquest of the Madurai Sultanate by the Vijayanagara empire. The poem along with Ibn Battuta's memoirs and epigraphical and numismatic records, has been used as a historical source for determining the history of the Madurai Sultanate  and the Vijayanagar empire's conquest of the Sultanate. Content. "Madhura Vijayam" (lit. The conquest of Madhura (Madurai) or "Vira Kamparaya Charitham" (lit. The history of the brave king Kampa) is a mahākāvya (epic poem) in nine cantos (chapters), though possibly there was an extra canto (now lost) between the eighth and final canto. The available text contains 500-odd verses. M. Krishnamachariar in his "History of Classical Sanskrit Literature" describes the narrative as consisting of "melodious verses" and summarizes it thus: In the early chapters, Gangadevi, the wife of Kumara Kampanna II, describes the historical background of the Vijayanagar  empire, the benevolent rule of Bukka I, the birth and early life of Kumara Kampanna. The middle chapters detail the adulthood actions of Kampanna, his south bound invasion and conquest of Kanchipuram. After conquering Kanchipuram and subduing "Sambuvaraya" chieftain, Kampanna enjoys a brief interlude while consolidating his southern conquests. He is visited by a strange woman (described as the Goddess Meenakshi in disguise) who pleads with him to liberate South India from the rule of the Madurai Sultanate. Heeding her exhortation, Kampanna resumes his invasion of the South. The final chapters chronicle his invasion of Madurai, where he destroys the  Muslim armies, slays the last sultan in single combat and restores the temple of Srirangam to its old glory. In relation to other works. The fact that the "Madhura Vijayam" refers to the "Kṛṣṇa-karṇāmṛta" of Līlāśuka, praising him (in verse 1.12) immediately after Daṇḍin and Bhavabhūti, has been used to fix a bound on the date of its author. S. K. De, in "History of Sanskrit Literature" co-written with S. N. Dasgupta, mentions this poem in the section on poems with historical themes alongside the later "Raghunāthābhyudaya" of Rāmabhadrāmbā (which is on Raghunatha Nayaka). Again, in the section  on the anthologies and women poets, along with the later Tirumalāmbā who wrote the "Varadāmbikā-Pariṇaya", he calls Gaṅgādevī a "more gifted" poetess, and the poem as "written in a simple style, comparatively free from the pedantry of grammar and rhetoric". Similarly, Dasgupta, in the section on historical "kāvya"s, mentions it alongside the "Hammīra-kāvya". Discovery and publication. "Madhura Vijayam" was discovered in 1916 in a private traditional library at Thiruvananthapuram by Pandit N Ramasvami Sastriar. It was found in the form of a single manuscript of sixty-one palm leaves, bound between two other unrelated works. The available poem  is made up of nine cantos (chapters) containing 500-odd verses, with some verses incomplete and others missing and presumed lost, including possibly an entire canto between the eighth and final canto. Though the printed editions have been based on this single manuscript discovered in Trivandrum, the "New Catalogus Catalogorum" lists three other manuscripts discovered later: two of them are also in Trivandrum, and the third, in Lahore, has even less text (contains only seven cantos).