The History of Indian Literature c9.67

c9.67

court. Now it is upon this one verse—a mere waif and stray, that has come, like Schiller’s ‘Mädchen aus der Fremde,’ from nobody knows where,\* and which is, in any case, of the most questionable authority—that the assumption rests that Kálidása flourished in the year 56 b.c.! For people were not satisfied with hastily accepting as genuine coin the tradition here presented—and this notwithstanding the fact that they at the same time impugned to some extent the trustworthiness of the verse embodying it †—they at once rushed to the conclusion that the Vikrama here named must be *the* Vikramáditya, whose era, still current in our own day, commences with the year 56 b.c. But then, we know of a good many different Vikramas and Vikramádityas : ‡ and, besides, a tradition which is found in some modern works,§ and which ought surely, in the first instance, to have been shown to be baseless before any such conclusion was adopted, states expressly (whether correctly or not is a question by itself) that king Bhoja, the ruler of Málava, who dwelt at Dhárá and Ujjayiní, was the Vikrama at whose court the ‘nine gems’ flourished; and, according to an inscription,‖ this king Bhoja lived about 1040–1090 a.d. On the other hand, there exists no positive ground whatever for the opinion that the Vikrama of the verse is *the* Vikramáditya whose era begins in b.c. 56. Nay, the case is stronger still; for up to the present time we have absolutely no authentic evidence[^asterisk] to show whether the era of Vikramáditya dates from the year of his birth, from some achievement, or from the year of his death, or whether, in fine, it may not have been simply introduced by him for astronomical reasons!dagger “To assign him to the first year of his era might be quite as great a mistake as we should commit in placing Pope Gregory XIII. in the year one of the Gregorian Calendar, or even Julius Cæsar in the first year of the Julian period to which his name has been given, *i.e.*, in the year 4713 b.c.” (Holtzmann, *op. cit.*, p. 19).