Person · Kashmiri chronicler · India
Kalhaṇa
Also known as Kalhana, Kalhan
A Kashmiri Brahmin, son of a minister of King Harsha of Kashmir, who wrote the Rajatarangaṇī about 1149 — the only sustained work of dynastic history in Sanskrit. He states his method at the outset: to write without love or hatred, using older chronicles, inscriptions, grants and coins.
- Date
- 1100–1160
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 34.084, 74.797
Worth knowing
He is severe about most of his kings, including the ones nearest his own time, and his account of the collapse of Harsha's reign is the earliest detailed narrative of a political crisis by an Indian writer. Nothing else is known about his life beyond what the poem says.
About the place
Placed at Srinagar, the capital whose politics he had grown up inside and whose kings his chronicle judges.
Connections (2)
- Canonised by textRājataraṅgiṇī
Everything in this journey except the excavated tile pavements at Harwan is known primarily from Kalhana's chronicle. He names the founders, the temples, the villages granted to them and the canals dug to water them, and he wrote three hundred and fifty years after the Karkotas, using earlier chronicles he names and criticises. The repository's Kashmir is largely his.
- Contemporary capital withKathāsaritsāgara
Somadeva finished the Kathasaritsagara about 1070 for Queen Suryamati and Kalhana the Rajatarangini about 1149, at the same Kashmiri court within eighty years. One produced the largest story collection in any language and the other the only sustained work of history in Sanskrit, which makes eleventh-century Kashmir the most productive literary establishment in the subcontinent.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kalhana”. Kalhana, Rājataraṅgiṇī, book I, verses 7–23, on his method; M.A. Stein's introduction (1900).
Open Kalhaṇa in the repository →