Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c5.s2.81

c5.s2.81

1 The passages of Kālidāsa referred to here are verses 67 and 68 *Raghuvamśa*, canto IV, beginning—विनीताध्वश्रमास्तस्य वङ्क्षुतीरविचेष्टनैः. In the *Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society* (Vol. II, p. 35 ff. and 391 ff.) Mahāmahopādhyāya Haraprasād Śāstrī has sought to place Kālidāsa about the middle of the sixth century A. C. depending on the garbled reading of Mallinātha who reads *Sindhu* instead of *Vaṅkṣu* in the line quoted above. With all due deference to the great authority of Pandit Śāstrī, I would venture to differ from him here. There cannot be the shade of a doubt that *Vaṅkṣu* is the correct reading here and not *Sindhu*. Vallabhadeva of Kashmir, who lived about five centuries earlier than Mallinātha, reads *Vaṅkṣu*, and the unquestioned genuineness and reliability of Vallabha's text as compared with that of Mallinātha has been fully established in the case of the *Meghadūta* where all those verses that had been accepted by Mallinātha as genuine, but had been rejected as spurious by modern critics like Pandit Īśvaracandra Vidyāsāgara, Gildemeister and Stenzler, are found to be absent from the text of Vallabha. The superiority of Vallabha's text thus established in the case of *Meghadūta* applies with equal force to the *Raghuvamśa*. To an editor like Mallinātha living in the far south in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, *Vaṅkṣu* or *Vakshu*, a river in Bactria, was an unfamiliar, outlandish name, and he had no hesitation in substituting for it *Sindhu* which was nearer home, forgetting though that it would have been geographically absurd for Raghu to have marched northwards from the Persian frontier and met the Hūṇas on the Indus. It is significant again, as has been shown by Professor K. B. Pathak, who first drew pointed attention to Vallabha's reading (*Ind. Ant.* 1912, p. 265 ff. and the introduction to his *Meghadūta*) that Kṣīrasvāmin who lived about four centuries earlier than Mallinātha speaks in his commentary on the *Amarakośa*, of Bactria as the province that is referred to in this passage of Kālidāsa; this shows that so late as the eleventh century, Bactria through which the river *Vakshu* or Oxus flows was considered to be the country where Kālidāsa placed the Hūṇas. *Vaṅkṣu* is a well-known river in the *Mahābhārata* (*Cf.* Sabhāparva, 51. 26). Moreover, an examination of the variants given in Mr. G. R. Nandargikar's splendid edition of *Raghuvamśa* shows that Cāritravardhana, Sumativijaya, Dinakara, Dharmameru and Vijayagaṇi, in fact, most of the great old commentators, follow Vallabha, and adopt the old reading.