by the same person. On the basis of textual evidence from the Dashakumaracharita, he opines that the author must have lived earlier than the Muslim invasion of India, i.e., before the 11th century. Moreover, since the Kavyadarsha refers to the Prakrit poem Setubandha (सेतुबंध) composed in the 5th century, he is led to 6th-8th century as the most probable time of composition. (This remains in some tension with the fact that Dashakumaracharita is not referred to by any other text until the 10th century. There is also a conflicting tradition, generally considered unreliable, which makes Dandin a contemporary of Kalidasa.) Relationship with the Avantisundarī Another work attributed to Daṇḍin is the Avantisundarī or Avantisundarīkathā (The Story of the Beautiful Lady from Avanti). Like the Dashakumaracharita this is in prose, but is even more fragmentarily preserved: the two surviving manuscripts break off early in the text. A later Sanskrit poem, the Avantisundarīkathāsāra (Gist of the Story of the Beautiful Lady from Avanti) seems to have summarised the full story, and its surviving portion covers more of the story, and more again is preserved in a thirteenth-century Telugu translation. These texts overlap significantly with the stories in the Dashakumaracharita. Precisely how the Dashakumaracharita and the Avantisundarī originally related is unclear. Although many have argued that the two must have been composed by different people, the Avantisundarī too is 'unmistakably ascribed to Daṇḍin by its colophons and by later sources'. Several eminent scholars now believe on stylistic and other grounds that, as suggested by the verse summary and its Telugu translation, both the Avantisundarī and the Daśakumāracarita originally formed a single massive prose work that was broken up at a relatively early age in its transmission; another view is that the two represent separate stages in the life and work of the same author. Editions and commentaries The first translation, into Telugu, was produced by Ketana in c. 1250. Editions of the original Sanskrit text have been published in modern times by Agashe, Godbole and Parab, Kale, and Wilson. The work has been translated into English by Haksar, Jacob, Kale, Onians, and Ryder. In particular, the edition by Kale includes the original in Sanskrit, a literal English translation, as well as an extensive commentary on the stylistic and historical aspects of the text. In her translation of the lipogrammatic chapter, Onians omits the labial roman letters 'b', 'm' and 'p'. (E.g., she uses