Gaha Sattasai
ancient collection of Indian poems
The Gāhā Sattasaī or Gāhā Kośa (Sanskrit: गाथा सप्तशती, romanized: Gāthā Saptaśatī) is an ancient collection of love poems in the Maharashtri Prakrit language. They are written as frank monologues usually by a married woman, or an unmarried girl. They often express her unrequited feelings and longings to her friend, mother, or another relative, lover, husband, or to herself. Many poems are notable for describing unmarried girls daring for secret rendezvous to meet boys in ancient India, or about marital problems with husbands who remains emotionally a stranger to his wife and bosses over her, while trying to have affairs with other women.
Gaha Sattasai is one of the oldest known Subhashita-genre text. It deals with the emotions of love, and has been called the "opposite extreme" of Kamasutra. While Kamasutra is a theoretical work on love and sex, Gaha Sattasai is a practical compilation of examples describing "untidy reality of life" where seduction formulae do not work, love seems complicated and emotionally unfulfilling. It also mentioned Radha and Krishna in one of its verse as nayika and nayak respectively.
Authorship and date
The collection is attributed to the king Hāla who lived in the 1st century. Inside the text, many poems include names of authors, some of which are names of kings from many South Indian particularly Deccan region kingdoms from the first half of the first millennium CE. According to Schelling, one version of the text names 278 poets.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5516899. VIAF identifies the subject as 181852328. The Library of Congress control number is n82110315. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gaha Sattasai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.