Note 9 — VI KĀLIDĀSA

An earlier date, to bring Kālidāsa under the Guptas, has been favoured by other authorities, who have found that the reference to a conquest of the Hūṇas must be held to be allusion to a contemporary event. This date is attained on second thoughts by Professor Pathak,9 who places the Hūṇas on the Oxus on this view, and holds that Kālidāsa wrote his poem shortly after A.D. 450, the date of the first establishment of their empire in the Oxus valley, but before their first defeat by Skandagupta, which took place before A.D. 455, when they were still in the Oxus valley and were considered the most invincible warriors of the age. On the other hand, Monmohan Chakravarti,10 who converted Professor Pathak to belief in the contemporaneity of Kālidāsa with the Guptas, places the date at between A.D. 480 and 490, on the theory that the Hūṇas were in Kālidāsa’s time in Kashmir. The whole argument, however, appears fallacious; Raghu is represented as conquering the Persians, and there is no contemporary ground for this allegation; manifestly we have no serious historical reminiscences, but, as is natural in a Brahmanical poet, a reference of the type of the epic which knows perfectly well the Hūṇas. The exact identity of the Hūṇas of the epic is immaterial; as the name had penetrated to the western world by the second century A.D. if not earlier, there is no conceivable reason for assuming that it could not have reached India long before the fifth or sixth centuries A.D.11