By Mahamahopadhyaya Hara Prasad Shastri, M.A., C.I.E.

As already stated, the only positive facts known about Kalidasa's date is that he lived some time before 634 and 620 A.D. That gives the outer limit of his date, but the inner limit will have to be found out. The Indian tradition asserts that Vikramaditya of Ujjain founded the Era of 56 B.C., and that he had nine gems in his court, one of them being Kālidāsa. This tradition asserts four different facts : (1) That there was a Vikra maditya at Ujjain in 56 B.C.; (2) that he founded the era of 56 B.C.; (3) that he had a court in which there were nine distinguished men, and (4) that Kālidāsa was one of them. Let us examine all these four statements.

(1) There was no great king at Ujjain in the year 56 B.C. There was indeed a great conqueror at Palitānā or Pratisthāna on the Godavari far away from Ujjain named Vasisthiputra. But it is nowhere asserted that he had nine gems in his court.

(2) The Era of 56 B.C. had nothing to do with Vikramaditya at all. For the first three centuries we do not get any inscription dated in this Era. There is only one inscription dated in this era in the fourth century, but in that inscription the Era is called Krita or newly made (by calculating backwards). In the fifth century there are several inscriptions dated in this era, in the earliest of which dated 404 A.D., it is called both Krita and Malavaganāmnāta, i.e., newly made and adopted by the tribes of Malwa. Gradually the word Krita was dropped and it was called the Mālava Era or the era adopted by the Malavas. In an inscription dated 533 A.D., this era is called "Mālavaganasthityanusarātat Kālajnānāya likhitesu, i. e., for the purpose of ascertaining time according to the convention of the tribe of Mālavas. It is only in the eighth century of this era which

had the name Kirta in the beginning, and the name Mālava after that, became associated with the name of Vikrama. There are scholars who think that the name Vikrama, there, is not a proper name, but a common noun denoting prowess as the epoch of the era coincides with Dashera festival in which kings used to show their prowess by issuing from their capital in a great procession and cutting down the branch either of a Sami or a Kovidāra tree. It is only in the thirteenth century, when the Indian people had lost all their date traditions and lost their historical sense, that the full name Vikramaditya became associated with this era.

(3) So there was no Vikramaditya in 56 B.C. and the era of 56 B.C. became associated with the name of Vikramaditya in the thirteenth century A. D., i.e., after fourteen centuries of its existence.

The theory of nine gems is equally untenable, because the nine gems belong to different periods. One of them Varahamihira by his own statement wrote one of his great works in 505 A. D. Amarasimha, the other gem, is universally believed to have flourished about the end of the sixth century. There are so many Vararuchis, all equally distinguished, that it is impossible to tell which Vararuchi is included among the nine gems. So the list of gems given in Indian tradition includes names of men belonging to different periods and is, therefore, useless as a chronological data.

(4) If there be no nine gems, it is scarcely possible that Kalidasa was one of them. So from Indian traditions there is no possibility of getting a clue to Kalidasa's date.

The attempt made by S. Roy, Esq., to take Kālidāsa back to the second century B.C. on the ground that some of the expressions used by him are not sanctioned by Patanjali, though they may be sanctioned by Panini, is opposed to the history of the development of the Sanskrit language. Patanjali wrote his Bhasya for a language which was fast vanishing and going out of use. It is a well-known fact that when he wrote, literary vernaculars had grown up in different provinces and that he was

legislating for the speech of the Sistas only. The word sista means a well-to-do Brahmin inhabitant of Aryavarta who was an expert in at least one of the sciences of the Hindus. It is a well-known fact that since then vernaculars were constantly influencing Sanskrit. As the number of Sistas was diminishing, Panini's grammar and Patanjali's Bhasya were fast going out of use and they had constantly to be revived and resuscitated by new commentaries and by new recasts. Other schools of grammar were constantly rising up for the purpose of validating vernacularised expressions in Sanskrit or, better perhaps, Sanskritised vernacular expressions. If it can be proved that Kālidasa flourished at a period when Panini and Patanjali went to sleep, S. Roy's position would be absolutely untenable.

There was a theory that Matrigupta, the Viceroy of Kashmir, under Pravarasena in the third century was Kālidāsa. This is equally opposed to facts. In none of his books Kālidāsa shows any familiarity with the scenes and surroundings of Kashmir. The geographical accounts of India given by him in his books

are

equally opposed to the theory of third century A. D. The Huns then were not in the north-western corner of India and the Persian Empire was very little known.

The most recent theory about the date of Kālidāsa is that he flourished at the court of Chandra Gupta II, Vikramaditya of the Gupta Dynasty, i.e., about the beginning of the fifth century A.D. or a little earlier. The principal argument on which that theory is based is that the description of seasons given in the Mandasore inscriptions of 436 and 473 is an imitation of Kalidasa's Ritusamhāra. But it has already been shown that a very large number of dated inscriptions at Mandāsore contained descriptions of seasons, and they extend, so far as is known, from 404 to 533 A.D. If the first of these inscriptions, that was written in 404, be an imitation of Kālidāsa, Kālidāsa's date must go back to at least the middle of the fourth century. But this nobody is prepared to accept. Is Ritusamhara really such a fine poem that poets of a particular locality should continue to imitate it for two centuries? On the other hand, if it

is true that Kalidasa was an inhabitant of Western Malwa and if the poets of that locality were fond of describing seasons, in season and out of season, and that even in inscriptions, it is more reasonable to suppose that Kālidāsa as a young poet acquired the taste of describing seasons, not only in Ritusa mhara but in all his works he is constantly describing them and as he grew in age and experience these descriptions became more and more concise and more and more effective. So it is much better to suppose that the poets of Mandasore and Western Malwa had a convention of describing seasons, and Kalidasa was trained under that convention. Then, again, is it true that the poet Vatsabhatti who wrote the Sun Temple inscription had the Ritusa mhara before him? I do not think he had. If he were imitating Kalidesa he would not have condescended to write on such trivial plants as Lavali, the fodder of elephants, and Lajana, a common shrub without beauty and without any attraction. Read side by side, Ritusamhāra and that inscription, neither of them appears to be an imitation of the other. All that can be said about the date of Kālidāsa from this source is that Kalidasa flourished when poets loved to describe the seasons, and as he was a product of this love, he should not be placed at the beginning but either in the middle or in the end of this period, i.e., at the latter half of the period between 404 and 583 A. D. His writings, or rather geographical and historical informations contained in them, tend to the same direction.

(1) It is a well-known fact that the Roman Empire was split into two after Constantine the Great about the middle of the fourth century A.D., that the Western Empire of Rome was destroyed by the Vandals, Goths and Huns at about 475 A.D., and that the Eastern Empire with Constantinople as its capital got the name of the Byzantine or the Greek Empire. Had Kalidasa flourished before the fall of the Western Empire he would certainly have mentioned the Romans. But in the Raghuvamsa he mentions only the Yavans or the Greeks.

(2) Nearer home he does not speak of the Parthians, or the Palhavas as they are called in India, but of the Persians, who became the dominant race west of Hindu India from the middle of

the third century, and the greatest extension of whose dominions was in the sixth century A.D., when they conquered a part of Western India.

It is a remarkable fact that in Raghuvamsa, the hero Raghu after conquering Aparānta, i.e., Konkan and Surat, goes by land route to Persia. He had no enemies or independent principalities to conquer between Surat and Persia, all that territory being absorbed in Sassanide Empire, whose greatest monarch Nausirvan flourished from 531 to 579 A.D.

(3) The simultaneous existence of the Greek and the Persian Empire shows that Kālidāsa must have lived either in the end of the fifth or in the sixth century, for in the first half of the fifth century Greek Empire was a shadow of Rome and in the seventh the Persian Empire was destroyed by the Muhammadans,

(4) The Huns, who destroyed the Roman Empire, proceeded from the Chinese borders in the first century A.D., and fell upon the Western Empire, and in the beginning of the fifth they practically destroyed it. Finding it impossible to do the work of destruction any more in the West, a current of the stream of Huna invasion came down to the north-west corner of India and settled there, after the destruction of the Roman Empire.

From their new home at Sakala, in the Punjab, they poured in torrents in a south-easterly direction and broke the Gupta Empire into pieces. They seemed to have conquered the whole of Malwa, for a king of Eastern Malwa seems to have acknowledged the Hun supremacy. They carried everything before them with fire and sword and people trembled at their name. But the combined efforts of the people of Malwa and of the remnant of the Gupta Empire seem to have repulsed them with great slaughter some time before 533 A.D., and confined them to the north-western corner of India, i.e., the Western Punjab, Peshawar and Kashmere.

In the Raghuvamsa, Kalidasa places the Huns on the Indus and in the north-west corner of India. Was it before they destroyed the Gupta Empire or after it?

From what has