x PREFACE
Kalidasa has suffered from attempts 1 to defy style by placing him before Acvaghosa, and to ignore 2 the use of his works in Vatsabhatti by ascribing him to the period 525-75, when no great Empire existed, on the strength of his picture of India in the Raghuvanga. Much more ingenious is an effort 3 to fix his home in Kashmir, and to trace in his poetry an adumbration of the Pratyabhijnacastra of that land, with its doctrine of recogni- tion of the unity of the divine love. Kalidasa would thus be a master of suggestion, which later was definitely developed in Kashmir as the essence of poetry by the Dhvanikara, who was doubtless not Anandavardhana. Use by Kalidasa of the Padma Purana has been suggested but is not plausible. His possible relation to the Vakatakas has been investigated, and use has been made of Ksemendra's ascription to him of a Ktmte^vara- dautya, but all is mere hypothesis. 4
Discussion of the migration of fables and other literature has failed to achieve decisive results. Some stress has lately been laid on the evidence of connexions between Egypt and India contained in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri? but it is difficult to believe seriously that Isis was worshipped in India as Maia, c as asserted with complete vagueness in the Isis litany, 7 and Professor Hultzsch's effort 8 to find Kanarese explanations for certain terms in the farce regarding Charition's adventures on the coast of a country bordering the Indian Ocean, are as little plausible as those of Sir G. Grierson to discover Sanskrit. It seems prima facie absurd to suppose that any Greek farce writer would trouble to embody passages, in foreign speeches which would be utterly unintelligible to his audience. 9
1 Kshetresacnandra Cnattopadhyaya, Allahabad Univ. Stud., ii. 80 ff. ; K. G. 3an- kar, IHQ. 1. 3090. But contrast IHQ. ii. 660 for Acvaghosa 's influence on Kalidasa's grammar.
s D. R. Bhandarkar, ABI. viii. 202-4.
s Lachhmi Dhar Kalla, Delhi University Publications, no. 1.
- See POCM. 1924, p. 6.
4 In ii. no. 300 a woman Indike appears.
6 xi. no. 1380. That Maya is meant is not probable.
7 iii. no. 413. 8 JRAS. 1904, pp. 399 ff.
9 Pischel's view that mixture of language is Indian specifically is disproved by Reich, DLZ 1915, p. 591. India was known in Egypt, but there is not the slightest ground to believe that any one knew Kanarese or Sanskrit well enough to reproduce either of them in a ■farce.
