Appointment with Kalidasa

Author(s): G K Bhatt
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 19

Appointment with Kalidasa
(iii) The dramatic plot of Malavikāgnimitra draws on the life of the Sunga king Agnimitra. Those who believe that Kālidāsa lived in the Gupta age regard the date as a matter of history; and believe that any poet can draw on the historical material of the past; it is not necessary that he should be a contemporary of the historical personalities mentioned in his writing. Mirashi conjectures the play to have been written on the occasion of the marriage of Vākāțaka Rudrasena and Chandra Gupta's daughter Prabhāvatīguptā 20 However, the obvious references to the present, prevailing rule of king Agnimitra in the epilogue of the play remains a puzzle and is not at all explained by the advocates of the Gupta age view.
The epilogue refers to Agnimitra as a current ruling king21 and suggests that Kālidāsa must have been his contemporary; the time is first century B. C.
(iv) A medal discovered at Bhita depicts the scene of deer hunt, reminding of Dusyanta's hunt in Śakuntala. Prof. Ray thinks it to be of the Sunga period (117-72 B. C.).22 The protagonists of the Gupta period do not accept that the scene is from Kālidāsa's play and do not take the period of the medal as conclusively proved.
(v) Some cultural and historical references in Kālidāsa's works are indicative more of an early age rather than the Gupta period. For example: the reference in Sakuntala to the vaikhānasa-vrata and the ancient Vaikhānasa-smrti; employment of Yavanīs, that is, Greek women as the personal body-guards of a king; the mention in Meghaduta of the village elders who still remember the legend of Vatasarā ja Udayana; continuous reference to Asoka; the rather unusual word used for Indra, Akhandala, and its phonetic associations : Akbandala > Ākhandara > Alexander. It is also worth remembering that the Gupta kings were Vaisnava, while Kalidasa, though non-sectarian, was particularly devoted to Śiva.
(vi) The linguistic evidence like the simplicity of Kālidasa's language, his grammatical forms which go against Pāṇini's rules but which sometimes accord with Patanjali's sentence-construction, 23 and such other language and grammar peculiarities are in favour of an carly period for Kalidasa.
(vii) The problem of the dates of Sanskrit poets can be tackled from a fresh direction provided by Indian art. Prof. C. Sivaranamurti, ex-Director, National Museum, Delhi, has made a special study of Indian sculptures and paintings, and has come to the conclusion that, "The understanding of a forgotten past is made possible and what is left unexplained or vague by one is explained and made clear by the other, as art and literature act as real mirrors'. 24 This approach is as interesting as it is valuable. A study of the parallelisms between Kālidāsa's poetic ideas and literary allusion on the one hand and art representations on the otier necessarily lead to the belief that Kālidāsa must have been an early poet. A few examples are given further. (a) Kālidāsa describes the Kalpa tree as creating everything that a woman needs for her decoration, in his Meghadūta 25 A sculpture from Barhut