Vasudeva is a well known yamaka or alliteration poet. The rules of alliteration in yamaka poetry are complex and rigorous, involving repetition of the same combination of syllables, split in different ways to convey different meanings. As a difficult discipline attempted by a few Sanskrit poets, the skill and the level attained by Vasudeva is very creditable. Vasudeva (10th century CE) was the literary genius who created the Yudhishthira Vijaya, Tripura Dahanam and Saurikarthodaya, yamaka (alliterative) poems in Sanskrit. He was a Nambudiri Brahmin of the Pattattu family near Thiruvullakkavu temple in Perumanam village, a few miles south of Thrissur in Kerala. Literary evidence suggests that he was the pupil of Bharata Guru, a scholar and contemporary of King Kulashekhara, as King Ramavarma was known, was Vasudeva’s patron and is generally identified with Kulashekhara Varman (900 CE), who wrote two plays, Subhadra Dhananjaya and the Tapatisamvarana. The linguistic peculiarities o