Note 16 — VI KĀLIDĀSA
Reading edition
Similar evidence can be derived from Kālidāsa’s Prākrit, which is plainly more advanced than that of Bhāsa, while his Māhārāṣṭrī can be placed with reasonable assurance after that of the earlier Māhārāṣṭrī lyric, which may have flourished in the third and fourth centuries A.D. He is also earlier than the Aihole inscription of A.D. 634, where he is celebrated, than Bāṇa (A.D. 620), and above all than Vatsabhaṭṭi’s Mandasor Praçasti of A.D. 473. It is, therefore, most probable that he flourished under Candragupta II of Ujjayinī, who ruled up to about A.D. 413 with the style of Vikramāditya, which is perhaps alluded to in the name Vikramorvaçī, while the Kumārasambhava’s title may well hint a compliment on the birth of young Kumāragupta, his son and successor.16 The Mālavikāgnimitra with its marked insistence on the horse sacrifice of the drama seems to suggest a period in Kālidāsa’s early activity when the memory of the first horse sacrifice for long performed by an Indian king, that of Samudragupta, was fresh in men’s minds. Moreover the poems of Kālidāsa are essentially those of the Gupta period, when the Brahmanical and Indian tendencies of the dynasty were in full strength and the menace of foreign attack was for the time evanescent.