Vikramarjuna Vijaya

Vikramarjuna Vijaya (Kannada- ವಿಕ್ರಮಾರ್ಜುನ ವಿಜಯ) (Victory of the Mighty Arjuna), also known as Pampa Bharatha is a classic work of the 10th century Jain poet Pampa (902–975 AD).^[1] It is a Kannada version of the great epic, the Mahabharata of Vyasa. Pampa chose Arjuna, the central figure of the Pandava Clan, as the protagonist of his epic. This work differs from Mahabharata in several aspects, one of them being Arjuna crowned as king and Subhadra as queen after the Kurukshetra war, instead of Yudhishthira and Draupadi, respectively.

A court poet of Chalukya king Arikesari II, a Rashtrakuta feudatory, he is most known for his epics, Vikramarjuna Vijaya (Pampa Bharata) and Adipurana, both written in Champu style, which he created and which served as the model for all future works in Kannada. The works of Jain writers Adikavi Pampa, Sri Ponna and Ranna, collectively called the "three gems of Kannada literature," heralded the age of classical Kannada in the 10th century, the Medieval Kannada literature.^[2]