A History of Sanskrit Literature c11.s7.14

c11.s7.14

No other epic of Kālidāsa has come down to us, and the relation in time of his epics to his dramas is insoluble. The suggestion that he is responsible for the *Setubandha*,³ which relates the tale of Rāma from the advance against Rāvaṇa and the building of the bridge to Laṅkā down to Rāvaṇa's death, is excluded by the style, with its innumerable plays on words, alliterations, recondite similes, exaggeration, and its enormous compounds. Its date is uncertain, as of Pravarasena of Kashmir⁴ its author or patron we know nothing definite. Still more ludicrous is the suggestion that the *Nalodaya*⁵ is his; that rimed poem of intolerable affectation is perhaps not the production of Ravideva, author of the *Rākṣasakāvya*, of equal demerit, before the seventeenth century, but the work of Vāsudeva, protégé of Kulaçekhara and Rāma.