Page:India—what can it teach us?.djvu/20

 admits that the era of Vikrama does by no means prove the historical reality of a King Vikramaditya and his nine literary gems in the first century B.C. On the contrary, he holds that the Vikrama era is simply the era of the Kings of Malavas, and that the name Vikrama era is due to a mere misunderstanding. A King Vikrama is never mentioned before 1050 after the era of Vikrama.

The characteristic difference between the Vikrama era (56 B.C.) and the Saka era (78 A.D.) is that the former is Karttikadi, beginning with the month of Karttika, i. e. October-November, while the latter is Kaitradi, beginning with the month of Kaitra, i. e. March-April. As autumn was considered in India as the right time for war and conquest, Professor Kielhorn thinks that from calling the autumn (sarad) Vikramakala or conquest time, the year itself came to be called by the same name, and when the years had been calculated from this Vikrama time, Vikrama was mistaken for the name of a King Vikrama, and, as it was the Malava era, of a King of Malava. This is certainly ingenious, but it requires some further proof.

I say the same with regard to the date which I assigned to the Renaissance of Sanskrit Literature. I had tried to show that that period began about 400 A.D., and that the great break between the ancient Vedic and Buddhistic literature, and this artificial Kavya literature, was due to the inroads of the Scythians. I had fixed that literary interregnum as