A History of Indian Literature v1.c7.s3.1

v1.c7.s3.1

Much as has been done with regard to the opening-up of Indian literature, yet its actual history is still to a great extent wrapped in darkness and unexplored. Above all, the chronology of the history of Indian literature is shrouded in truly terrifying darkness, and most of the riddles still remain to be solved by research. (It would be so pleasant, so convenient, and, especially for a handbook, so desirable, if one could divide Indian literature into three or four periods, separated by definite dates, and place the different literary productions in one or the other of these periods. But every attempt of such a kind is bound to fail in the present state of knowledge, and the use of hypothetical dates would only be a delusion, which would do more harm than good. It is much better to recognise clearly the fact that for the oldest period of Indian literary history we can give no certain dates, and for the later periods only a few.) Years ago the celebrated American Sanskrit scholar W. D. Whitney¹ gave utterance to these words which since then have often been repeated: "All dates given in Indian literary history are pins set up to be bowled down again." For the most part this is still the case to-day. (Even to-day the views of the most important investigators with regard to the age of the most important Indian literary works, differ, not indeed by years and decades, but by whole centuries, if not even by one or two thousands of years. What can be determined with some certainty, is at most only a kind of relative chronology. We can often say : this or that book, this or that class of literature is older than a certain other; however, with regard to its real age it is only possible to offer hypotheses. The surest mark of differentiation for this relative chronology still lies in the language. Less reliable are peculiarities of style; for it has often happened in India that later works have imitated the style of an older class of literature, in order to assume an appearance of antiquity. Often, indeed, also the relative chronology is spoiled, because many works of Indian literature, and just those which were the most popular, and therefore are the most important for us, have suffered manifold revisions, and have come to us in various modifications. If we find, for example, the Rāmāyaṇa or the Mahābhārata quoted in a book, the date of which can even only approximately be fixed, then the question always arises first, whether this quotation refers to the epics as we have them at present, or to the older versions of the same. Still greater does the uncertainty become through the fact that, of the majority of the works of the older literature, the authors’ names are as good as unknown to us. They are handed down to us as the works of families, of schools, or monastic communities, or a mythical seer of primitive times is named as the author. When at last, we come to a time where we have to deal with the works of quite definite individual writers, then these are, as a rule, only mentioned by their family names with which the literary historian of India knows as little what to do, as probably a German literary historian with the names Meier, Schultze or Müller, when these are given without a first name. If, for example, a book under the name of Kālidāsa, or the name of Kālidāsa is mentioned anywhere, then it is by no means certain that the great poet of this name is meant, it can equally well be another Kālidāsa.[^1)