[4] The titles of Vishakhadatta’s father and grandfather do indicate one point of interest: that he came from a princely family, certain to have been involved in political administration at least at a local level.
It would be a travesty to suggest that one can detect in his writing a clipped, quasi-military diction as it would be to think of Kālidāsa as an untutored child of nature simply because he shows himself less steeped than Bhavabhūti in philosophical erudition.
In relative, rather than absolute, terms his style includes towards the principle of “more matter and less art.” There have been other cases of contributions to Sanskrit literature by men of action - for instance, the three plays ascribed to the celebrated monarch, Harsha (vardhana).
Harsha no doubt wished to show that he could write as well as he could rule: yet in the last resort, one suspects that he would have been more interesting to know as a man than as a dramatist.
Only the fragments of the Devichandragupta (Devi and Chandragupta) have survived in the form of quotations in the Natyadarpana of Ramachandra and Gunachandra, two works of king Bhoja: the Shringaraprakasha and the Sarasvatikanthabharana,[5] and the Natakalakshana Ratnakosha of Sagaranandi.