The latest authorities are now agreed that the great and victorious king Vikramaditya who, as Lefmann says, “together with his battle of Korur has hitherto wandered incessantly like a wavering and restless shadow” from 57 B.C. to 560 A.D., may now be definitely assigned to a reign dating from 510 to 560 A.D. in which time, at Korur, he annihilated the Scythian army.[a]
BRAHMANIC LEARNING
Down to the time of Buddha and beyond, the Brahman schools were still in course of completing and elaborating their sacred knowledge (Veda), the triple science. Their later Upanishads worked up to the Vedanta, “an end or conclusion” of the Veda. Undoubtedly the Brahmans also learnt with and from their opponents. Their systems of mental investigation (nyaya, mimamsa) and pious exercises (yoga) can witness to this if to nothing else. And as the sons of Sakya taught in the language of the people and as Asoka had his admonitions engraved on stone tablets, so Brahmans had long before this begun to exhibit the laws and art of their sacred language side by side with logic and grammar.
Scholasticism, speculative inquiry, the narrow or strict sciences, in general, have in all ages shown themselves opposed and inimical to free artistic creation. This the Brahmans also demonstrated. For centuries they produced no really new poetic work. With care and diligence, unsurpassed elsewhere, they preserved and kept together the inheritance and possessions of antiquity, and imitated them on the same lines but produced nothing new. They needed to pass through the period of foreign dominion in order to receive a new impulse.
Then came the comparatively brief but brilliant period of the Guptas’ rule, under which the coins are first inscribed in Sanskrit. To this period belongs much that was formerly regarded as ancient and even primitive, and was probably really new, but built up on an ancient foundation. A single, but eloquent example, is the collection of the laws of Manu in the form in which it has come down to us. A great deal might be said on this subject. Here we will only remark that at this time the Brahmanical spirit received a fresh impulse and flourished anew.
At the court of King Vikramaditya of Ujjain were nine who are mentioned as the pearls of his age and dominion. An old and famous verse celebrates their names. Amongst them were Dhanvantari, the great physician and healer, Amarasinha, the renowned philologist and lexicographer, Varahamihira, the astronomer and architect, and some add Kalidasa, the poet of the Sakuntala.
It was shortly after the peace of Mangalore in 1783, that Sir William Jones became Judge of the Supreme Court in Bengal and first president of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. In the “edifying letters” of the French Jesuits he had read that there were many books in the north of India which were called Natak, and of which the Brahmans said that they contained a great deal of ancient history without any admixture of fable. He became eager to gain possession of these books in order that he might make himself acquainted with them either by means of translations, if such existed, or by himself learning their language; but he had no sooner come to an understanding with the Brahmans than he learnt from them that the statements were like many others made in those letters.
Natak, he was assured, were not histories at all, but fables, favourite popular books, discourses in prose and verse, such as had formerly been held, in various idioms, at the courts of the Rajahs. Jones thought they were probably treatises on matters of morals, or learning; others of his countrymen concluded from what they had heard that they might perhaps deal with dancing, music, and poetry, when an intelligent Brahman remarked that the Englishmen also possessed something of the nature of the Natak, which were performed publicly in the cold season (meaning dramas).
This was enough. On the question being asked as to which of these Natak was most highly prized, the man unhesitatingly answered “Sakuntala,” and Brahmanlike, had also a verse ready, which “unfolded,” it was said, “all the transcendent riches of the genius of Kalidasa.” A copy having been procured, it was literally translated into Latin with the assistance of his Pandit Ramalocan—of course through Persian—and from Latin into English. From this to publishing it was the work of the first leisure moment, and a noble example of Indian genius from the Sanskrit and Prakrit original was given to the world.
Jones’ English “Sakuntala” appeared in the year 1789, the year of the French revolution. It would be almost impossible to describe the enthusiasm called forth especially amongst the romantic school in Germany, by the “maiden from abroad,” in the foreign dress on a foreign soil, and the “ecstatic transports” over the gentle child from the penitential groves of ancient India. And it was at the fire of this enthusiasm that the lamp was lighted which shed its rays ever further and deeper into the hidden recesses of the Indian spirit, the Indian language, art, and science. And this was effected a hundred years ago by the alluring charm of the Sakuntala.[c]