A History of Sanskrit Literature c11.s8.1

c11.s8.1

As Sophokles seems to have found his perfect *milieu* in the Athens of Perikles' happy days, so Kālidāsa appears to us as the embodiment in his poems, as in his dramas, of the Brahmanical ideal of the age of the Guptas, when order had been restored to a troubled earth, foreigners assimilated or reduced, and prosperity broadcast.¹ Ingenuity² has traced in the history of the first five of the rulers in the *Raghuvaṁça* an exemplar of the exploits of the first five of the Gupta kings; granted that Kālidāsa may have known and profited by the literary activity of Hariṣeṇa, which doubtless extended far beyond the one inscription which has come down to us, still we may safely doubt any such parallelism. But Kālidāsa does represent, if we may judge from his poetry, the complete carrying out of the rule of life laid down for a Brahmin or a warrior or clansman. Youth, in this view, is the time for study under a teacher, then follows the period of manhood with its happy wedlock, then in stages that of the hermit whose mind is set on things eternal. The scheme is in many ways perfectly adapted to Indian life; it starves no side of man's life; four aims of existence are recognized by Kālidāsa himself, who finds them embodied in the sons of Dilīpa, themselves reflexes of Viṣṇu himself. They are duty, governing man's whole life; the pursuit of wealth and of love, the occupations of his manhood; and release, the fruit of his meditations in old age. We may not share the affection of Indian and even of a section of modern taste for the erotic scenes of the last cantos of the *Raghuvaṁça*, but we must not regard them as the outpourings of a sensual mind. The sages of the Upaniṣads themselves deemed marriage obligatory and the *Bṛhadāraṇyaka* gives the spell to obtain a male son; the saintly Çvetaketu is deemed an authority on the *Kāmasūtra*, and Kālidāsa expressly claims the divine precedent of Çiva and Umā as sanction for the most passionate married love. Statecraft again is essentially part of the material ends of life, and not only does he paint in Rāma an ideal ruler, but throughout the *Raghuvañça* we are reminded of the duties of kings to the subjects. Let us grant that his vision was Brahmanical; he deliberately repeats the condemnation of the *Rāmāyaṇa* on the Çūdra who threatens the security of established order by venturing to expose himself, head downwards, hanging from a tree to fire, in order by penance to acquire merit. This reminds us of Fa-hien's¹ emphatic testimony of the degradation of the Caṇḍālas in the Gupta realm.