Gupta Period Literature: Kalidasa, Classical Sanskrit Drama and Learning

Why the Gupta Period Is Called the Classical Age of Sanskrit Literature

Peace, Royal Patronage and Sanskrit as the Court Language

Some historians call the Gupta period the classical age of India because its long peace and stability promoted notable achievements in many fields. Stability strengthened the economy, and a richer state could support scholars, poets and artists. Chandragupta II, who ruled from about 375 to 415 CE, kept many learned men, poets and artists at his court, and his patronage enriched it greatly. It was also a time when knowledge from earlier ages was gathered and compiled into texts, so that the epics, the Puranas and the law books took the shape in which they survive.

Sanskrit was the language of this achievement. Royal praise was composed in elaborate Sanskrit, and the Prayaga prashasti of Samudragupta, written by his court poet Harishena, is a eulogy in that language. Sanskrit was not, however, the language of everyone. It was meant almost exclusively for priests and elites, while Prakrit, Pali and Tamil were probably the languages of ordinary people. The classical literature of the age is therefore, above all, the literature of courts, temples and monasteries.

The main kinds of writing of the age were these:

• Drama: Plays written for performance, mixing Sanskrit and Prakrit.
• Kavya: Ornate poetry, from the long mahakavya in cantos to the short lyric.
• Epics and Puranas: The Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas, in simpler Sanskrit verse for a wide audience.
• Shastra: Learned treatises on law, language and the arts.
• Religious philosophy: Buddhist and Jain works in Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit.

The Golden Age Label and Its Limits

Some historians call the Gupta period the golden age of India, while others dispute the description. For literature the claim is strongest, since Kalidasa is often considered ancient India's greatest poet and playwright, but historians use the label with care for three reasons:

• Not everyone took part: Its court poetry and drama speak for a small part of society.
• Not all of it was new: Much of the work was the compiling and finishing of older material, such as the epics and the Puranas, rather than fresh composition.
• Not all of it is Gupta: The dates of many authors are uncertain, and works often counted as Gupta, such as the Mudrarakshasa and the Amarakosha, may belong to the sixth century or later.

The safer description is the classical age of Sanskrit literature, a span of about the fourth to the sixth century that includes writers who lived under the Guptas, under their Vakataka allies and under the kingdoms that followed.

Works of Kalidasa: Plays, Epic Poems and Shorter Poems

Kalidasa's Date and the Court of Chandragupta II

Little is known of Kalidasa's life beyond what his own works suggest. His plays and poems belong to the fourth or fifth century CE and cannot be dated more precisely. The firmest limits come from inscriptions. A Sanskrit inscription of about 473 CE at the Sun temple of Mandsaur contains verses that seem to imitate the Meghaduta, and the Aihole inscription of 634 CE in Karnataka is the first to name him, together with the poet Bharavi.

Several ancient and medieval books call Kalidasa the court poet of a king named Vikramaditya. The most popular view holds that he flourished in the reign of Chandragupta II, who took the title Vikramaditya, and that his career may have run on into the reign of Kumaragupta I. A later tradition goes further and places Kalidasa among nine gems, the navaratnas, at the court of King Vikramaditya, beside the lexicographer Amarasimha and the astronomer Varahamihira. That list comes from the Jyotirvidabharana, a literary forgery written long after Kalidasa, so it has no value as history. His link with Chandragupta II rests on tradition and on this scholarly view, so it is probable, not proven.

Three Plays of Kalidasa

Kalidasa wrote three plays, all of them love stories of kings, and each draws its plot from an older story or setting.

• Malavikagnimitra: Kalidasa's first play, also written Malavikagnimitram. It tells of the love of Agnimitra, the Shunga ruler at Vidisha, for Malavika, a handmaiden of his chief queen who is discovered to be of royal birth. Agnimitra was the son of Pushyamitra, who established the Shunga dynasty. The play also tells of Pushyamitra's horse sacrifice, in which Agnimitra's son Vasumitra guarded the sacrificial horse.
• Vikramorvashiyam: A five-act play, "Urvashi won by valour", on the love of King Pururavas and the celestial nymph Urvashi, a story with roots in the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata.
• Abhijnanashakuntalam: "The Recognition of Shakuntala", in seven acts, generally regarded as his masterpiece. It is based on a story in the Mahabharata.

The plot of the Abhijnanashakuntalam turns on a ring. King Dushyanta, on a hunting trip, meets and marries Shakuntala, the adopted daughter of the sage Kanva, and leaves his ring with her. Shakuntala offends the visiting sage Durvasa, whose curse makes the king forget her until he sees the ring again. On her journey to the court she loses the ring, and Dushyanta does not recognise her. A fisherman finds the ring and returns it, the king's memory returns, and he sets out to find her. The title names this token of recognition.

Epic Poems of Kalidasa: Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava

Kalidasa's two long poems are mahakavyas, poems written in cantos called sargas in the ornate kavya style.

• Raghuvamsha: The "lineage of Raghu", in 19 cantos and 1,564 stanzas, tells the stories of the kings of the Raghu dynasty, the solar line, from Dilipa through Raghu, Aja, Dasharatha and Rama to Agnivarna.
• Kumarasambhava: The "birth of Kumara" describes the youth of the goddess Parvati and her marriage to Shiva. Some manuscripts have 17 cantos, but only the first eight are generally accepted as Kalidasa's, and the birth of their son Kumara comes in the later cantos.

Historians also use the Raghuvamsha as a source on warfare. Few contemporary records describe the Gupta army, and on the view that Raghu's campaigns mirror those of Chandragupta II, the poem gives the best information on its tactics.

Meghaduta and Ritusamhara: Kalidasa's Shorter Poems

Kalidasa's two shorter poems show the lyric side of his art.

• Meghaduta: "The Cloud Messenger", also written Meghadutam, a poem of 120 stanzas. A yaksha, a minor deity banished by his master Kubera for a year, asks a passing cloud to carry a message of love to his wife. The poem describes in great detail the landscapes and weather of north India along the cloud's route, and it asks the cloud not to miss Ujjayini even if it must take a detour. Its theme gave rise to a whole later genre of messenger poems, the sandesha kavya.
• Ritusamhara: "The Medley of Seasons", in six cantos, one for each of the six Indian seasons, from summer (grishma) through the monsoon (varsha), autumn (sharad), early winter (hemanta) and winter (shishira) to spring (vasanta). Collated by William Jones, it was the first Sanskrit text to be printed and published in Calcutta, in 1792.

Classical Sanskrit Drama: Natyashastra, Conventions and Playwrights

Natyashastra and the Conventions of the Sanskrit Stage

The Natyashastra of Bharata is the ancient treatise on drama that guided the classical stage. NCERT dates it to about 300 CE, while other accounts place its first complete compilation between 200 BCE and 200 CE. In 36 chapters it covers dramatic composition and the structure of a play, the building of the stage, acting, gesture and movement, costume and make-up, and music. Its central idea is rasa, the emotional state that a performance should awaken in the audience. The roots of drama are older still, for the Mahabhashya, Patanjali's treatise on grammar of the second century BCE, holds the earliest reference to what may have been the seeds of Sanskrit drama.

The plays written in this tradition share a set of conventions:

• Two languages: A classical Sanskrit play is bilingual, using both Sanskrit and Prakrit. Most women and characters of low status speak Prakrit in its dialogue and songs.
• Stock characters: Plays are built around a hero (nayaka), a heroine (nayika) and a clown (vidushaka).
• The stage manager: A company was directed by the sutradhara, literally "the holder of the strings", who may also have acted.
• Happy endings: Classical plays normally end happily, and the Natyashastra frowns on violence shown on stage. Bhasa's Urubhanga and Karnabhara are the only known tragic Sanskrit plays of ancient India.

A later rule, set down by the fourteenth-century critic Vishvanatha, has women and characters of low status speak Maharashtri Prakrit in verse and Shauraseni Prakrit in prose, though it is not clear that earlier dramatists followed it.

Bhasa: The Early Plays and the Dating Debate

Bhasa is one of the earliest playwrights in Sanskrit and lived before Kalidasa, who praised him by name in the introduction to his first play, the Malavikagnimitra. His plays were lost for centuries and known only from mentions in other works, until the scholar Ganapati Shastri found manuscripts of 13 of them in 1910.

Bhasa's date is one of the most uncertain in Sanskrit literature. Estimates run from the fourth century BCE to the fourth century CE, and the 13 plays are most commonly placed in the first or second century CE. He is therefore best treated as a forerunner of the Gupta age rather than a Gupta author. His plays do not follow all the rules of the Natyashastra, for example in showing physical violence on stage, which is taken as a sign of their age.

His plays fall into two groups:

• Plays on the epics: Most of his plays draw on the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. They include the Madhyama-vyayoga, "The Middle One", and the two tragedies, the Urubhanga, "The Broken Thigh", which shows Duryodhana repenting as he lies dying, and the Karnabhara.
• Plays on the Udayana legend: His best-known plays, the Swapnavasavadattam and the Pratijna-yaugandharayana, are built on the legends of Udayana, king of Kaushambi, and his queen Vasavadatta. The legend stayed popular, and the Ratnavali, attributed to the seventh-century emperor Harsha, also tells of Udayana and a princess named Ratnavali.

Shudraka's Mrichchhakatika, the Little Clay Cart

The Mrichchhakatika, "The Little Clay Cart", is a ten-act play attributed to Shudraka, whom its prologue calls a king. It is set in Ujjayini and tells of Charudatta, a noble but poor young Brahmin, and his love for Vasantasena, a wealthy courtesan. A vulgar courtier, Samsthanaka, pursues Vasantasena and threatens them both, while a political subplot ends with the overthrow of the city's tyrant by a shepherd.

The play is unusual among Sanskrit dramas. Its story is invented rather than taken from an epic or a legend, its many characters from ordinary life speak a wide range of Prakrit dialects, and it shows a complex society, in which Charudatta is described as both a Brahmin and a sarthavaha, or merchant, although the Shastras defined trade as an occupation for Vaishyas. Its story is thought to have grown out of an earlier play by Bhasa, Charudatta in Poverty, which survives only in fragments.

NCERT dates Shudraka to about the fourth century CE, while other accounts place him in the fifth.

Vishakhadatta: Mudrarakshasa and Devichandraguptam

Vishakhadatta wrote political plays, a rare kind on the Sanskrit stage, and only two of his works are known.

• Mudrarakshasa: "The Signet of the Minister" tells how Chandragupta Maurya rose to power, with Chanakya as his guide against the minister Rakshasa. Its subject is the statecraft and court intrigue of the Mauryan age, not myth.
• Devichandraguptam: A play that survives only in quotations in later works. In it King Ramagupta agrees to surrender his queen Dhruvadevi to a Shaka enemy; his younger brother Chandragupta enters the enemy camp disguised as the queen and kills the Shaka ruler.

Vishakhadatta's own date is uncertain. Some scholars made him a contemporary of Chandragupta II, but he probably lived in or after the sixth century, and the Mudrarakshasa is dated anywhere from the late fourth to the eighth century. Whether the Devichandraguptam's story of Ramagupta records real events is also disputed.

Epics, Puranas and Smritis in Their Final Form

Mahabharata and Ramayana: The Final Compilation

The two Sanskrit epics were not written by one hand at one time. They grew over centuries and reached their final form by about 400 CE, for the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are dated between about 500 BCE and 400 CE. The Mahabharata grew in four stages:

1. Oral stage: The original story was probably composed by charioteer-bards, the sutas, who celebrated the victories of Kshatriya warriors.
2. Written stage: From the fifth century BCE, Brahmins took over the story and began to commit it to writing.
3. Vishnu stage: Between about 200 BCE and 200 CE, as the worship of Vishnu grew, Krishna came to be identified with Vishnu.
4. Didactic stage: Between about 200 and 400 CE, large didactic sections resembling the Manusmriti were added.

With these additions a text of perhaps fewer than 10,000 verses grew to about 1,00,000 verses, traditionally attributed to the sage Vyasa. A copper-plate inscription of 533‑534 CE from Khoh in present-day Madhya Pradesh already describes the Mahabharata as a collection of 1,00,000 verses, so the epic had reached its full size by then. Valmiki's Ramayana in its present form holds over 24,000 verses in seven kandas, or books.

Puranas: Sacred Stories in Simple Sanskrit Verse

The Puranas are collections of stories about gods and goddesses, the creation of the world, the genealogies of kings and sages, pilgrimages and rituals. Their compilation began in about 200 CE, and the bulk of them were established by 500 CE, in the Gupta era, though changes were made later. Tradition counts 18 major Puranas, the Mahapuranas, and 18 minor ones, the Upapuranas.

The Puranas differed from the Vedas in their audience. They were written in simple Sanskrit verse and were meant to be read aloud to everybody, including women and Shudras, who had no access to Vedic learning. Much of their content grew out of exchanges among priests, merchants and ordinary men and women who travelled from place to place sharing ideas. They record the rise of the traditions of Vishnu, Shiva and the goddess, and their myths became part of the carved stories on the walls of early temples.

Smritis of Yajnavalkya, Narada, Brihaspati and Katyayana

The smritis, or Dharmashastras, were Sanskrit law books written in verse, and a new group of them was composed between about 300 and 600 CE. They followed the Manusmriti, compiled between about 200 BCE and 200 CE, and several of them deal mainly with vyavahara, legal procedure.

• Yajnavalkya Smriti: Dated between the third and fifth centuries CE, it is set out in three books, on custom, judicial procedure, and crime and punishment. It is regarded as the best-composed of the law books and later had a greater influence on judicial practice in medieval India than the Manusmriti.
• Narada Smriti: A purely legal text, dealing only with procedural and substantive law, without the usual sections on conduct and penance.
• Brihaspati and Katyayana smritis: No manuscript of either has been found, but their verses are quoted in later texts, and scholars have gathered about 2,400 verses of the Brihaspati Smriti in this way. Both seem to have been devoted mainly to legal procedure.

Kavya, Fable and Lexicon Beyond Kalidasa

Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya and the Mahakavya Tradition

Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya is an epic poem in 18 cantos on the combat between Arjuna and Shiva, who appears in the guise of a kirata, a mountain-dwelling hunter. It expands a short episode of the Mahabharata's Vana Parva, in which Arjuna, at Indra's instruction, pleases Shiva with penance, and its chief mood is valour, the vira rasa. Indian tradition groups it with Kalidasa's Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava and three other poems as the six great mahakavyas.

The Kiratarjuniya needs care with its date, because it is often listed with Gupta literature. Bharavi lived in the sixth century CE, after the great Gupta rulers. The Aihole inscription of 634 CE names him with Kalidasa, and his poem was popular at the Pallava court; some scholars read the great relief at Mahabalipuram as Arjuna's penance from the Kiratarjuniya. He belongs to the classical age of Sanskrit poetry, but not to the Gupta court.

Later, at Harsha's court in the seventh century, Banabhatta, the court poet, wrote the Harshacharita, a biography of his patron, and the Kadambari, one of the world's first novels.

Panchatantra and Its Travels Across the World

The Panchatantra, "the five treatises", is a collection of animal fables in Sanskrit prose and verse arranged within a frame story. Its prelude names an aged Brahmin, Vishnu Sharma, as the author, who teaches the principles of good government to three princes through the tales; the name may be a pen name. The fables are far older than any written version, and the text's date can only be estimated. The current scholarly consensus places it around 300 CE, and it reached roughly its present literary form between the fourth and sixth centuries CE.

The Panchatantra is the most frequently translated literary work of India, and its journey west can be traced step by step:

1. India: The Sanskrit text took shape by about 300 CE.
2. Persia: Around 550 CE the physician Borzuy, at the Sasanian court of Anoushiravan, translated it into Pahlavi, or Middle Persian; another account dates the translation to 570 CE.
3. Arab lands: About 750 CE Ibn al‑Muqaffa translated the Persian version into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, named after two jackals of the first book, and it became the first masterpiece of Arabic literary prose.
4. Europe: One version reached Europe in the eleventh century, and before 1600 the tales existed in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German and English.

Today there are 200 versions of the text in more than 50 languages, and a version in nearly every major language of India.

Amarakosha of Amarasimha

The Amarakosha, properly the Namalinganushasana, "instruction concerning nouns and gender", is a Sanskrit thesaurus written by Amarasimha. It is one of the oldest Sanskrit lexicons that survive. Written in verses that are easy to memorise, it groups words by meaning in three kandas, beginning with heaven and the gods and then the earth and what it holds. Amarasimha mentions 18 earlier works of the kind, all now lost, and more than 40 commentaries have been written on his own.

Amarasimha's date is uncertain. Tradition counts him among the nine gems of King Vikramaditya, the legendary king inspired by Chandragupta II, but the nine-gems list is not historical evidence. One view places him in the sixth century, and some sources place him in the seventh.

Buddhist and Jain Learning and the Rise of Nalanda

Buddhist Philosophers: Asanga, Vasubandhu, Dignaga and Buddhaghosa

Buddhist scholars of this period wrote some of the most influential philosophy produced in India, much of it in Sanskrit. Buddhist writing in Sanskrit was already old: Ashvaghosha's Buddhacharita, a mahakavya on the life of the Buddha, was composed in the early second century CE. Four thinkers of the classical age stand out:

• Asanga: Active in the fourth century CE, he founded the Yogachara school of Mahayana Buddhism, whose teaching is called vijnanavada, "awareness only".
• Vasubandhu: Asanga's half-brother, active in the fourth to fifth century, wrote the Abhidharmakosha, the major source for non-Mahayana Abhidharma philosophy in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism, and after turning to the Mahayana helped found the Yogachara school with Asanga.
• Dignaga: Living in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, he created the first system of Buddhist logic and epistemology, which accepted only perception and inference as valid means of knowledge, and he influenced Hindu thinkers of the Nyaya school.
• Buddhaghosa: A fifth-century Theravada commentator who worked at the Mahavihara of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka and wrote in Pali; his Visuddhimagga, "The Path of Purification", is the principal Theravada text on meditation.

Later tradition counts Asanga and Vasubandhu among the 17 masters of Nalanda, the great monastery founded in the next century.

Jain Canon Written Down at the Council of Valabhi

Jain scholars produced a large literature in Prakrit, Sanskrit and Tamil, and the compilation of Jain works in Prakrit belongs to about 400 to 500 CE. The decisive step was the council held at Valabhi in Gujarat in 454 or 466 CE under Devardhigani Kshamashramana. Because the texts had been handed down by memory, which was steadily failing, the council wrote down the canon, the Agamas, which the Shvetambara sect accepts as its authentic scripture. The Digambaras reject these texts as incomplete, and the dispute over the canon is a central reason for the split between the two sects. Valabhi was also a centre of Buddhist learning in later centuries.

Nalanda Mahavihara Under Kumaragupta I

Nalanda was a great Buddhist monastery, a mahavihara, in present-day Bihar, widely considered to be among the greatest centres of learning in the ancient world. The foundation of a monastery there was laid by Kumaragupta I in the fifth century CE, and its establishment is dated to about 427 CE. A seal found at the site names its founder as Shakraditya, whom scholars identify with Kumaragupta I, and the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang later recorded the same tradition. When Faxian passed through the area earlier in the century, there was probably no university there yet.

Later Gupta kings added monasteries and temples, and Nalanda flourished under Gupta patronage through the fifth and sixth centuries, and later under Harsha and the Palas. All three Buddhist traditions, Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana, were taught there, and monks came from China, Tibet and Central Asia, and from Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma. Nalanda stands out as the most ancient university of the Indian subcontinent; it carried on the organised transmission of knowledge for 800 years and ceased to function as an institution in the thirteenth century. Nalanda Mahavihara is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a new campus of Nalanda University near its ancient ruins, at Rajgir, was inaugurated on 19 June 2024.

Prakrit and Tamil Literature Beside Sanskrit

Prakrit Literature: Jain Texts and Dramatic Prakrits

Prakrit remained a living literary language beside Sanskrit. The Jain Agamas were composed and handed down orally in Prakrit and were written down in the fifth century, at the Valabhi council. The dramatic Prakrits grew with the Sanskrit stage. Shauraseni, the speech of the Shurasena region, became a chief language of drama and is said to be the Prakrit closest to classical Sanskrit, while Maharashtri, the most widespread Prakrit under the Satavahanas, was used in the dialogue and songs of characters of low status in Sanskrit plays, especially those of Kalidasa.

Prakrit also had a lyric poetry of its own. The Gaha Sattasai is an anthology of love poems in Maharashtri Prakrit, written as frank monologues, usually in the voice of a married woman or an unmarried girl, and it is one of the oldest known texts of its kind.

Tamil Literature: Silappatikaram After the Sangam Age

Tamil had a classical literature older than the Gupta age, for the Sangam poems were composed and compiled between about 200 BCE and 200 CE. The Silappatikaram, "The Tale of an Anklet", is the earliest Tamil epic. Attributed by tradition to Ilango Adigal, said to be a prince who became a Jain monk, it was probably composed in the fifth century CE, though estimates range from the second to the sixth century. Its 5,730 lines tell the tragic love story of an ordinary couple, Kannaki and her husband Kovalan, and it blends themes from the Jain, Buddhist and Hindu traditions. While Sanskrit flourished in the north, the south had its own classical tradition in its own language.

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