महावीरचरितम् (महाकवि भवभूति - वीररस-प्रधान रामकथा नाटक सम्पूर्ण ७ अङ्क सटीक)

Introduction [xl] India is supposed to have been founded by a Vikramāditya (57 B.C.), and some scholars place Kālidāsa in the court of this Vikramāditya. But the best modern opinion¹ makes the Golden Age of the classical Sanskrit literature coincident with the bloom of the Gupta dynasty, several kings of which had assumed the title of Vikramāditya. This brings Kālidāsa somewhere between 375 and 475 A.D. 7. Bhavabhūti's works certainly influenced by those of Kālidāsa.— The matter of Kālidāsa's Śākuntala is an old epic legend which we find in the Mahā-Bhārata; and the matter of his Urvaśī may be traced through the Brāhmaṇas back to the hymns of the Ṛigveda itself. Accordingly, the fact that Bhavabhūti alludes in his Mālatī-Mādhava (see ii. 7¹⁰, iii. 3) to the familiar tales of Śakuntalā and Dushyanta, and of Purūravas and Urvaśī, has of course not an atom's weight towards proving that he knew the tales from Kālidāsa's plays. On the other hand, the dénouement of the Uttara- Rāma-charita resembles that of the Śākuntala enough to suggest that Bhavabhūti was familiar with Kālidāsa's technique. Again, the parallelisms in thought and expression as between Bhavabhūti and Kālidāsa (they have been put together for study in appendix 4) present further cumulative evidence looking in the same direction. Thirdly, the parallelism between act ix of Mālatī and act iv of Urvaśī is even yet more weighty as proof. In the one we have the love-lorn Mādhava wandering in quest of his Mālatī, and in the other the distracted Purūravas seeking in vain for Urvaśī. Here again, as between Bhavabhūti and Kālidāsa, the dramatic situation and its poetic treatment bear such striking similarity as to suggest direct and conscious imitation. Fourthly, Bhavabhūti's dramatic device (at M. M. ix. 25, 26) of making the desperate Mādhava send a cloud as messenger to his beloved, is so clearly an imitation of Kālidāsa's Cloud- messenger or Megha-dūta that there can be scarcely a doubt that Bhava- bhūti (perhaps its earliest imitator) here had that famous and much- imitated poem distinctly in mind,—so complete is the correspondence of the stanzas concerned not only in situation but also in the words and even in the characteristic metre. Indeed, as concerns points three and four, we may say that Bhavabhūti has deliberately set himself to use Kālidāsa's motifs, and if possible, in so doing, to surpass him. So much then seems certain, that Bhavabhūti studied and imitated Kālidāsa. Accordingly he may have been either a somewhat younger

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¹ See B. Liebich, Das Datum des Kālidāsa, Indogermanische Forschungen, Band xxxi (1912), pp. 198-203. This paper gives a convenient statement of the vari- ous older views and arguments with the needed references to previous discussions. Compare also Professor Pathak's paper on Kālidāsa and the Hūṇas of the Oxus valley, Ind. Ant. for Nov. 1912, pp. 265– 267.