nimitra and the Çakuntalā share also Praharṣiṇī, Rucirā,[1] Çālinī, and Sṛagdharā; the latter adds the Rathoddhatā,[2] the Vikramorvaçī a Mañjubhāṣiṇī.[3] The earliest play has one irregular Prākrit verse, the second two Ãryās, and, 29 of varied form of the types measured by feet or morae, and the last seven Ãryās and two Vaitālīyas. The predominance of the Ãryā is interesting, for it is essentially a Prākrit metre, whence it seems to have secured admission into Sanskrit verse.
Not unnaturally, efforts[4] have been made on the score of metre to ascertain the dates of the plays inter se, and in relation to the rest of the acknowledged work of Kālidāsa. The result achieved by Dr. Huth would place the works in the order Raghuvaṅça, Meghadūta, Mālavikāgnimitra, Çakuntalā, Kumārasambhava, and Vikramorvaçī. But the criteria are quite inadequate; the Meghadūta has but one metre, the Mandākrāntā, which occurs so seldom in the other poems and plays that any comparison is impossible,[5] and the points relied upon by Dr. Huth are of minimal importance; they assume such doctrines as that the poem which contains the fewest abnormal caesuras is the more metrically perfect and therefore the later, while the poem which has the largest number of abnormal forms of the Çloka metre is artistically the more perfect and so later. A detailed investigation of the different forms of abnormal caesuras reveals the most perplexing counter-indications of relative date, and the essential impression produced by the investigations is that Kālidāsa was a finished metrist, who did not seriously alter his metrical forms at any period of his career as revealed in his poems, and that there is no possibility of deducing any satisfactory conclusions from metrical evidence. The fact that the evidence would place the mature and meditative Raghuvaṅça,[6] which bears within it unmistakable proofs of the author's old age, before the Meghadūta and long before the Kumārasambhava, both redolent of love and youth, is sufficient to establish its total untrustworthiness.
- ↑ ¹
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 3
- ↑ Huth, op. cit., Table.
- ↑ Hillebrandt (Kālidāsa, p. 157) points out the complexity of the position.
- ↑ H. A. Shah (Kauṭilya and Kālidāsa (1920), p. 5), argues that Raghuvaṅça, ix. 53 shows a more advanced view of hunting as a useful sport when regulated (Arthaçāstra, p. 329) than the Çakuntalā. But the dramatic propriety of the passage of the Çakuntalā renders the contention uncertain. Whether Kālidāsa knew precisely our Arthaçāstra is also uncertain.
