Kalhana's Rajatarangini of 1148 Runs to 7,826 Verses, Draws on Eleven Earlier Chronicles, Inscriptions and Coins, and Dates Each Reign From 855 Down to the Day

Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, the “River of Kings”, is a Sanskrit verse chronicle of Kashmir in 7,826 verses divided into eight books, written by the Kashmiri Brahmin Kalhana in 1148 by Britannica’s dating. M. A. Stein, who edited and translated it, reads Kalhana’s own dates as an introduction written in 1148 to 1149 and a close in 1149 to 1150. It runs from the first king of the valley to the poet’s own time, and from the reign that began in 855 onward it records each change of ruler by year, month and day.

Kalhana says what he read, names some of the books he found wanting, and states the standard he wants to be judged by.

The rule Kalhana set for himself

In the seventh verse of the first book, Kalhana says that only the poet is worthy of praise whose word, in Stein’s translation, is one that “like that of a judge, keeps free from love or hatred” in telling the facts of the past. Of this declaration Stein wrote that “we feel something of the historian’s spirit”. Britannica quotes the same verse as the ideal Kalhana stated.

He also gives a reason for writing at all. In verses 9 and 10, as Stein reads them, he says earlier writers had each recorded the kings of their own time, and that his own task was harder: to give a connected account where the story of earlier reigns had become fragmentary. He blames one cause. A poet named Suvrata had condensed the old royal chronicles into a handbook, and the full works faded after it. Suvrata’s poem, Kalhana says, is hard going because of misplaced learning, and says the list of kings by Kshemendra, an earlier Kashmiri poet, has mistakes in every part.

Eleven chronicles, inscriptions and coins

Verse 14 of the first book says Kalhana inspected eleven works of former scholars that contained the chronicles of kings, and also the Nilamata Purana, a Kashmiri text on the valley’s sacred places. Of the eleven chronicles Stein could say little beyond the names of their authors: Suvrata and Kshemendra, above, and Padmamihira, Helaraja and Chavillakara. Only the Nilamata Purana survives. Kalhana quotes Chavillakara directly, which Stein took as proof that he held that work in his hands.

Verse 15 names a second class of evidence: inscriptions recording the consecration of temples and grants by former kings, praise inscriptions, and written works. From this Stein concluded that Kalhana “besides being a Kavi, was also an antiquarian” and that much of his detailed information on temple foundations and endowments probably came from dedicatory inscriptions and copper-plate grants. Allusions in the text also show that Kalhana had looked at the old coinage and at antiquities he inspected himself.

For the last part of his story he had living witnesses. His father, Canpaka in Stein’s spelling (often written Champaka), was a senior official under King Harsha (1089 to 1101), and Stein thought Kalhana’s account of that reign is largely based on his father’s reports. Britannica adds that his uncle also served at court. The colophons that close each book describe Kalhana as the son of the minister Canpaka, and Stein saw no reason to doubt them.

How the eight books run

Britannica gives the layout. Book I weaves the early kings into epic tradition, with the first king, Gonanda, shown as a contemporary of Krishna, and it also names the Mauryan emperor Ashoka and the Kushan rulers Hushka, Jushka and Kanishka, together with the Hun king Mihirakula. A second line of kings, found in no other source, opens Book II. The founding of the Karkota dynasty by Durlabhaka Pratapaditya II closes Book III, and the Karkotas fill Book IV. After them the story runs from the dynasty that began in 855 to 1003, when the Lohara dynasty took over, across Books V and VI. The death of King Harsha in 1101 ends Book VII, and the years up to the steadier rule of Kalhana’s contemporary, King Jayasimha, make up the last book.

That last book alone has 3,449 verses by Stein’s count, close to half the work. It covers the half-century before Kalhana wrote, which he knew from living witnesses. From several signs in the text Stein judged from several signs in the text, that the author never gave this last book a final revision.

Two of the best-known kings in the chronicle are covered by tuput already. Lalitaditya Muktapida appears in Book IV with the Martand Sun Temple, and Stein’s remark on Kushan coins found in the valley appears in the article on Kanishka.

Where the dates have been checked

Dates in the chronicle come in the Laukika era, a calendar in use in Kashmir, and in the Shaka era. Stein’s translation shows that Kalhana wrote his introduction in Shaka 1070, which equals Laukika 4224 or 1148 to 1149 CE. The Karkota kings give the first test against outside records. The Tang annals of China record an embassy in 713 from a Kashmiri king whose identity with Chandrapida scholars had long recognised. Kalhana puts Chandrapida’s reign at 686 to 695, and Stein concluded that his dates for the early Karkotas run about 25 years too early.

Firmer ground begins with the accession of Avantivarman in 855 or 856 (Britannica gives 855). From there, Stein said, an unbroken run of coins vouches for Kalhana’s succession of kings, and Kalhana gives the year, month and day on which each reign ended. No conflicting evidence had come to light by 1900, Stein wrote, which strengthened his belief in the general accuracy of Kalhana’s chronology for the three centuries before his own day.

The early books are another matter, and Stein said so plainly in his introduction. Kalhana’s reckoning starts from the Kali era and ties the first king, Gonanda, to the age of the great war of the Kurus and Pandavas. Stein pointed out that Ashoka’s own inscriptions place him around the middle of the third century BCE, so taking Kalhana’s figures at face value puts Ashoka at least a thousand years too early, and the Kushan kings, by Stein’s 1900 reckoning, not less than eleven hundred. Scholars also differ on where reliable history starts. Britannica says the chronicle turns dependable from Book IV, while Stein put the beginning of contemporary records in the middle of the ninth century, in Book V. In Stein’s judgment Kalhana lacked the critical method of a modern historian, and added that much of the gap came from the thin records he inherited.

From a Calcutta copy to a critical edition

The text took a long road to print. Horace Hayman Wilson published an essay on it in 1825, working from three incomplete manuscripts, and called it the only Sanskrit composition then discovered to which the title of history could properly be applied. An edition printed in Calcutta in 1835 was based on a transcript the traveller William Moorcroft had a copyist make at Srinagar in 1823. A. Troyer printed the first six books at Paris in 1840 and finished a French translation in 1852. Stein records that Troyer’s edition used the same materials as the Calcutta one and judged his translation seriously flawed. An 1877 note in the Indian Antiquary lists Troyer’s work and General Cunningham’s 1848 article on the chronology, in the Numismatic Chronicle, as the main earlier labour.

Georg Bühler’s tour of Kashmir in 1875 showed that manuscripts in the Sharada script, the script of Kashmir, were far better than Devanagari copies, and that all of them derived from one manuscript, which he called the codex archetypus. Its owner would not let him do more than glimpse it. On his first visit in 1888 Stein was refused access too. In 1889, after repeated attempts, the heirs who held its pieces lent him the whole. It had 328 leaves, of which one in the middle and the last leaf were lost. Its scribe was Rajanaka Ratnakantha, whose other dated copies run from 1648 to 1673, which let Stein place the codex in the seventeenth century.

Stein published the Sanskrit text in 1892. His English translation, with an introduction, commentary and appendices, carries a preface dated 18 May 1900. Other Kashmiri writers carried the story forward after Kalhana. Stein names Jonaraja, Shrivara and Prajyabhatta, Kashmir Life adds a fourth, Suka, and Britannica says the history of Kashmir was continued in Kalhana’s manner down to the Mughal emperor Akbar’s annexation of the valley in 1586.

History or poem

Shonaleeka Kaul of Jawaharlal Nehru University notes in a 2014 article in History and Theory that A. L. Basham and R. C. Majumdar praised Kalhana as a historian in the 1960s, while also faulting his use of legend, belief in fate and poetic ornament. Romila Thapar in 1983 separated the earlier books, where supernatural causes loom large, from the later ones, which she saw as showing the maturity of his historical thinking.

Another reading comes from Kaul herself. She writes that the work is a kavya, a Sanskrit poem, and that its rhetoric, myth and moral teaching belong to its method and not to its flaws. She also notes that, by Kalhana’s own testimony, he was apparently among the last in a long line of Kashmiri chroniclers, so the chronicle was not the first of its kind. Her 2020 chapter in the Encyclopedie des historiographies names Whitney Cox, Walter Slaje and Lawrence McCrea among the scholars who now read the text within the world of kavya.