Note 114 — III DRAMATIC THEORY XIII THE THEORY OF THE DRAMATIC ART

The date of Vātsyāyana thus becomes of interest, but unluckily it is still undefined with any precision.114 It certainly seems, however, that Kālidāsa was familiar with a text very similar to and perhaps identical with the Kāmaçāstra, and this reasonably may be regarded as giving A.D. 400 as the lower limit of date. That the Kauṭilīya Arthaçāstra has been used by Vātsyāyana gives no precise result, in view of the difficulty of dating exactly that text. But the mention by Vātsyāyana of the Ābhīras115 and Andhras certainly suggests, taken into conjunction with his silence as to the Guptas, that he wrote before the power of the latter had established itself in western India, and we may assign his work to approximately A.D. 300. If so we must believe that already in Kālidāsa’s age the Prākrits of his characters were more or less artificial, and with this well accords his introduction of Māhārāṣṭrī for the verses of those to whom Çaurasenī is assigned in prose, an obviously literary device.