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Amara Sinha

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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AMARA SINHA ( c. A.D. 375 ), Sanskrit grammarian and poet, of whose personal history hardly anything is known. He is said to have been "one of the nine gems that adorned the throne of Vikramaditya," and according to the evidence of Hsiian Tsang, this is the Chandragupta Vikramaditya that flourished about A.D. 375. Amara seems to have been a Buddhist; and an early tradition asserts that his works, with one exception, were destroyed during the persecution carried on by the orthodox Brahmins in the 5th century. The exception is the celebrated Amara-Kosha (Treasury of Amara), a vocabulary of Sanskrit roots, in three books, and hence sometimes called Trikanda or the "Tripartite." It contains 10,000 words, and is arranged, like other works of its class, in metre, to aid the memory. The first chapter of the Kosha was printed at Rome in Tamil character in 1798. An edition of the entire work, with English notes and an index by H. T. Colebrooke, appeared at Serampore in 1808. The Sanskrit text was printed at Calcutta in 1831. A French translation by A. L. A. Loiseleur-Deslongchamps as published at Paris in 1839.