GAUDA

a city, a country, and a literary style in ancient India. The city is better-known under its Anglicized form, Gaur. Its first recorded reference is by the grammarian Panini (5th century BC), and its location may be inferred to have been in eastern India. The name Gauda, in Sanskrit literature, is commonly applied to a country in what is now eastern India. In this sense it occurs fairly widely in the Puranas and other sources. It seems always to have coincided roughly with an area south of the Ganges River in West Bengal. The name is often used in a wider sense for the western parts of Bengal, as opposed to Vanga (modern Bangladesh). From early times the inhabitants of Gauda were known as seafarers. In literature, the poetic style Gauda or Gaudi, also known as Pracya (eastern), is described by Dandin in his work on poetics, Kavyadarsa.