It is, I believe, familiar knowledge that the work on Rhetoric called Kāvya-prakāśa was composed by two authors, Mammaṭa and Alaka or Alaṭa. The traditional verse quoted by Rājānaka Ānanda, in his commentary entitled Kāvya-prakāśa-nidarśanā—
informs us that Mammaṭa wrote the work as far as Parikara, and the rest was completed by Alaka. Sanskrit scholars therefore inferred that “about a third of the last chapter on Figures of Speech, or roughly speaking a tenth of the whole work, was written by Alaka, i.e. from the second half of the 118th, verse onwards”. But the reference to the joint authorship of the seventh Ullāsa by Arjunavarmadeva has given rise to the question whether “Alaka had a hand not only in the tenth, but also in the seventh chapter”. An attempt is made in the present article to examine the question and to arrive, if possible, at some definite conclusion in the matter.