Appointment with Kalidasa

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

Page 77

4 WORLD OF THOUGHT
(1)
A writer is bound to express or suggest a number of thoughts and ideas on different subjects and different aspects of life. It need not be supposed that they are always his personal thoughts or opinions; because a writer can, sometimes, be purely objective and may be expressing the thoughts of the particular character be has created and he may be trying only to be true to life. However, it is equally possible to conjecture from the writer's characters, their thoughts and actions, how his mind works, what thoughts and ideas he appears to prefer, his outlook on life and the values he accepts; in other words, the thoughts expressed by a writer are a clue to his 'philosophy of life'.
Some of the thoughts are related to values of life; but some others may be contemporary ideas only. The former may have no relation to particular time or circumstances and may express timeless verities. The latter are circumscribed by the times in which the writer lived; and in that case the date of the writer becomes an important factor in order to understand the thoughts in their proper context. The date of Kalidasa is uncertain; but the researchers so far have boiled down to two possibilities: Kalidasa may either be regarded as a contemporary of king Agnimitra of the Sunga dynasty and, as such belongs to the first century B. C., or a contemporary of Gupta and Väkätaka kings and belongs to the third or the fourth century A. D.1 Wide as the gap may appear, it does not pose a serious problem from the political angle. For, monarchial rule is the common aspect of ancient Indian history; and though the kings and their dynasties changed the political life continued in much the same way, and people were accustomed to the monarchial form of government.
It is when we look at society from the point of view of religion and philosophy that the changed outlook becomes important. The history of the ancient world testifies to social changes, sometimes overhauling changes in the life of a society, that religion and philosophy have wrought. There are possibly signs of such social changes in the period under consideration, and the literature of Kalidasa reflects them unconsciously.
The work of composing and collecting together into unified forms of the Vedas, Upanisads, Gita, the Mahabharata, Ramayana and some Puranas, which represent the wealth of ancient Indian religion, philosophy and literature, was completed by this time. The philosophy of life and of life beyond which the Upanisads teach was