Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/148

 VI

KĀLIDĀSA

1. The Date of Kālidāsa

It is unfortunate, though as in the case of Shakespeare not surprising, that we know practically nothing of the life and age of Kālidāsa save what we can infer from his works and from the general history of Sanskrit literature. There are indeed stories of his ignorance in youth, until he was given poetic power by the grace of Kālī, whence his strange style of Kālidāsa, slave of Kālī, which is not one prima facie to be expected in the case of a poet who shows throughout his work the finest flower of Brahmanical culture. But these tales are late and worthless, and equally without value is the fiction that he was a contemporary of King Bhoja of Dhārā in the first half of the eleventh century A.D. As little value, however, attaches to a tale which has been deemed of greater value, the alleged death of Kālidāsa in Ceylon when on a visit there by the hand of a courtesan, and the discovery of his murder by his friend Kumāradāsa, identified with the king of that name of the early part of the sixth century A.D. The tradition, as I showed in 1901, is very late, unsupported by the earliest evidence, and totally without value.

The most prevalent tradition makes Kālidāsa a contemporary of Vikramāditya, and treats him as one of the nine jewels of that monarch's entourage. Doubtless the king meant by the tradition, which is late and of uncertain provenance, is the Vikramāditya whose name is associated with the era of 57 B.C. and who is credited with a victory over the Çakas. Whatever truth there may be in the legend, and in this regard we have nothing but conjecture, there is not the slightest reason to accept so early a date for Kālidāsa, and it has now no serious supporter outside India. But, based on Fergusson's suggestion that the era of