- Lived:
- born around 1100, probably at Parihāspura (Paraspore), the ruined eighth-century capital northwest of Srinagar; his whole recorded life is the Kashmir valley, and his whole recorded act is the writing of one book there in 1148–49; of his death nothing is known
- Field:
- history — and poetry, in that order for the first time in India: author of the Rājataraṅgiṇī, the "River of Kings," the one sustained work of source-critical history that pre-thirteenth-century India produced
- The Big Idea:
- The past should be told the way a judge delivers a verdict — checked against documents, and free of love and hatred. Kalhaṇa stated that standard in his opening verses, listed the archive he had assembled, admitted what he could not recover, and then wrote three thousand years of his valley's kings to show it could be done.
- In their words:
- "That noble-minded [poet] is alone worthy of praise whose word, like the sentence of a judge, keeps free from love or hatred in recording the past." (Rājataraṅgiṇī i.7, tr. M. A. Stein, 1900)
- If you remember one thing:
- When someone says ancient India wrote no history, the honest answer is one name long — Kalhaṇa — and the honest footnote is that he was very nearly alone, which is exactly why this chapter has to explain both the man and the loneliness.