preceded, it cannot be before, for in that case Persians should not be in Guzerat and in Sindh, for there is a good deal of evidence that Guzerat and some portion of the deserts of Sindh were then parts of the Gupta Empire. It was only after the Hun invasion that the Persians could get hold of these territories, so the fact that Kalidasa mentions the Huns in the north-western parts of India shows that when he wrote the Raghuvamsa, the Huns had already been driven out from Malwa and Hindustan.

(5) This is borne out by another statement of Kālidāsa. In the 6th canto of Raghuvamsa a great hero is described as the ruler of Avanti, i.e., Malwa. Kālidāsā gives such a vivid description of his personal appearance that he appears to have been not only a contemporary but a friend of that great ruler, and he is described as a newly rising moon. Who could be this ruler but Yasodharma, who humiliated the Huns and commemorated his victories by raising two monolith pillars containing a proud inscription in each, now lying prostrate at Songne, five miles from Mandasore, with two big statues which may represent either Yasodharmadeva himself, or the deity he worshipped. These are lying neglected in the midst of bushes. They are in Sindhia's territory. They should be taken care of and erected in their proper positions and cleared of dirt, because they would remind the people of India of the most glorious day of her ancient existence.

(6) Kālidāsa mentions the Tibetan as Utsavasanīketān’ which is a Sanskrit word formed by the combination of the names of the Tibetan provinces bordering on India-U. Tschang, Bostan and Khotan. The Tibetans came to the notice of the world in the sixth century A.D. The Chinese in that century called Tibet Uchan from the names of the two provinces bordering on China. From the fact that Kālidāsa called the Tibetans Utsava Sanketan it can be said that his Raghuvamsa at least belonged to the sixth century, and it is a curious fact that he names Tibet exactly in the same way as the Chinese did.

(7) There is another very curious expression in the fourth canto of the Raghuvamsa in which Kalidasa says that Raghu

placed Aksobhya in Tibet. Now, the earlier Mahayanists worshipped Amitabha who is still revered by every sect of Northern Buddhism, be it in China, Korea, Mongolia or Japan. Next comes the cult of Aksobhya and after that that of the five Dhyāni Buddhas. The Aksobhya calt became dominant by the end of the fifth century. The Hindus were in greater sympathy with Aksobhya than with any other Buddhist deity. He was regarded as a Rsi, as a Bhairava and as Siva himself. Kālidāsa nowhere showed any predilection for Buddhism. He is absolutely silent about it. This is the only instance in which he has mentioned a Buddhist deity, who has much in common with Siva whom Kālidāsa worshipped. The mention of Aksobbya shows that he flourished about a century before Yuan Chwang.

(8) From Tibet Kalidasa crosses the Himalayas and comes down to Kamarupa, which was then a powerful kingdom as will be shown from the recently discovered Pancasara inscription of Bhaskara Varma, a contemporary of Harsa (606-648). Thanks to the interpretation of that inscription by Pandita Padmanatha Vidyavinoda of the Cotton College, Gauhati, we have come to know that nine powerful kings preceded Bhaskara Varma in the kingdom of Kamarupa. These nine kings must have reigned there for more than hundred years bringing the date of Kālidāsa from the middle of the fifth to the middle of the sixth century A.D.

(9) Rapson has shown in his work on Indian coins that the Guptas began to coin money from 319 A.D. and continued to do so till 606 A.D., when their empire was formally put an end to by Harsavardhana who began to coin money in his own name. But during the latter half of this period, after the Hun invasion, the Guptas were no longer a military power. They were emperors in name and had all the insignia of royalty among which coining money was one. The condition of the Gupta Empire then was just like that of the Moghul Empire after the invasion of Nadir Shah. The Moghul Emperors were then emperors in name and in form. Even the East India Company coined money in their names up to the year 1827, when Lord Amherst

saw the Emperor at Delhi and told him that he had ceased to reign. The East India series of coins began from that year. Kalidasa puts the Emperor of Magadha exactly in this situation. In the great assembly of the princes of India at the Svayambara of Indumati in Vidarbha, the first place of honour is accorded to the King of Magadha. But there is the significant expression :कामं नृपाः सन्तु सहमशोडन्ये । राजन्वतौ माहुरनेन भूमिम् ॥

नक्षत्रत। राग्रह सलापि ।

Galfa-faq-emejquifa; ||

"Let there be thousand other kings, but the Earth is possessed of a king because of him; just as there may be thousands of stars, but the night would be called luminous only when the moon is there." This clearly gives the king of Magadha a precedence over the rest of the kings of India, and the fact that Indumati was taken to him first of all, shows that his position was undisputed. But Kalidāsa takes care not to describe him as a military leader, but as a man fond of sacrifices, and describes his capital as a great city.

(10) In Southern India the Pandya capital was Madura and the Cola capital was Uragapura or Uraiara which is at present a suburb of Trichinopoly on the Kaveri. Eut Kalidasa makes the Pandyas the masters of Uragapura, and nowhere in his works. mentions the Cholas. These two powers from the beginning of their existence in remote antiquity, long before Asoka, were at war with each other. But we know from Sewell's works, that their hostilities became acute from the beginning of the third century and at the end of the struggle the Cholas lost their kingdom and their capital. Vincent Smith says that about 575 A.D., the Pandyas, the Cholas and the Cheras equally felt the power of a newly-rising kingdom, viz., that of the Pallavas. But the Cholas were not at their old place, for Yuan Chwang says that he found the Cholas a weak race at Cudduppa, nearly 300 miles north of Trichinopoly. The fact that Kalidasa does not mention the Pallavas shows that he flourished before the Pallavas had risen to power, but at the time when the Cholas had lost their capital

B

in their struggle with the Pandyas. Historical researches have not yet been able to fix with exactitude the time when Uragapura fell into the hands of the Pandyas. But as the struggle continued for four centuries fron the beginning of the third, it may be inferred that they lost it in the 4th century of that struggle, for in the beginning of the 6th century we find them 300 miles away from their home.

(11) In the Kumāra Sambhava which will be proved later on to have preceded the Raghuvamsa Kālidāsa describes the condition of lotuses in a reservoir of water when its embankment fails. In Bengal, tanks are made by excavations, but in countries where there are many plateaux, vast reservoirs of water are often formed by throwing up an embankment on one side, when the other sides are formed by highlands. There is a historical reservoir of this kind at Girnar. Its embankment was thrown up by a nephew of Chandragupta Maurya in the 4th century B. C. That embankment gave way in about 150 A.D. and it was repaired by the Saka King Rudrādaman, but it gave way again about 475 A.D. and was repaired by an officer of the Gupta Emperor. The affair made a deep impression on the people of Gujrat and Malwa, and Kalidasa describes the scene in a simile in the Kumāra Sambhava. It was most likely a recent event when Kalidasa described it.

(12) In the 16th canto of Raghuvamsa Kalidasa describes the desertion of Ayodhya and its re-peopling by Kusa. Rapson in his work on Indian coins says that the Guptas had three Capitals, viz., (i) Pātaliputra, (ii) Ayodhya and (iii) Ujjain. Their own province was Magadha from which they extended their conquest towards the west. They conquered Hindusthan and made Ayodhya their second capital and then conquered Malwa, and made Ujjain their third capital. It is not a fact that they deserted one capital for another, but they had all the three at one and the same time. It is most probable that on the advance of the Huns Ayodhya and Ujjain were both deserted and the Guptas had recourse to Pataliputra, their earliest capital. This desertion was seen by Kalidasa, for he describes it very vividly and

perhaps he saw it even after its re-peopling. The fact that it was re-peopled is proved by the statement in Bana's Harsacarita that it continued the 'pilkhana' (elephant stable) of Harsa and that it was presided over by a scion of the Gupta family called Skanda Gupta, who came in 606 to Harsa at Thaneswar immediately after the latter's accession to the throne and gave him a good deal of advice in state-craft.

(13) There is no doubt that the reign of Skanda Gupta of the Imperial Gupta dynasty was the most popular, the most prosperous and the most brilliant in the history of that dynasty. It is also a fact that he loved Malwa and spent much of his time at Ujjain. Kālidāsa describes a temple of Skanda on a hill named Devagiri situated on the road leading from Ujjain to Mandāsore. This deity is still worshipped at the same Devagiri as Khande Rao which is a vernacular form of Skanda. It contains the statues of Skanda on horse back which shows that in the mind of the man who consecrated that temple, the deity Skanda and the Emperor Skanda were one and the same. Kālidāsa was of the same mind, for otherwise the glorious description of what now is an obscure temple cannot be accounted for. To those who know the Indian custom, it is well known that no temple is dedicated to a living man. It is only shortly after his death that temples are dedicated to him. This Skanda temple was therefore erected after the death of Skanda Gupta to commemorate him and so Kalidasa, who was a devoted follower of Siva, describes this temple as dedicated to Siva's son in a manner worthy of the unspent genius of a young poet.

(14) There were poets before Kalidasa and these were great poets too; there were poets after Kalidasa and there were great poets too, but none of them describes the Himalaya so minutely and so lovingly as Kālidāsa has done. He describes every part of the Himalayas both lengthwise and crosswise; both in the lower regions and in the higher regions. Did he enjoy any special facilities to travel in the Himalayas? We in the twentieth century cannot imagine that he did; but in one of his inscriptions Yasodharmadeva proclaims it as one of his glorious acts, that he has made