ICAJATARANGINI (or "the river of kings," from the Sanskrit riijan, king, and ta•angiiil, a river or stream) is the name of four chronicles of the history of Cashmere written in Sanskrit verse; the first by Kalhan'a, bringing the history of Cashmere till about 1148 after Christ; the second, a continuation of the former, by Jonarcija, to 1412; the third, a continuation of the second, by S'rivara, a pupil of Jonaraja, to 1477; and the fourth, by PrajyabhatT a, from that date to the conquest of the valley by the emperor Akber. Among these chronicles, however, it is especially the first which has earned a great reputation, inasmuch as it is the most important and the completest of all known Hindu chronicles, and, for this reason, may be considered as the only surviving work of Sanskrit literature which betrays an attempt at historiography. The author of the work, the Pandit Kalhan'a—of whom we merely know that he was the son of Champalta, and lived about 1150, under the reign of Sinhadeva of Cashmere—reports that before entering on his task, he had studied 11 historical works written previously to his time, and also a history of Cashmere by the sage Nila, which seems to be the oldest of all; but that., not yet contented with these sources of information alone, he had also examined old documents, such as grants and proclamations made by kings, texts of laws, and sacred books. It may be presumed, therefore, that Kalhan'a had not merely the desire, but set honestly to work to elucidate the history of Cashmere up to his date. And so far as the last few centuries preceding him are concerned, it is possible that the facts narrated by him are reliable; but, owing to the uncritical disposition of the Hindu mind in till matters that regard historical facts, those especially of a more or less religious or legendary char acter, and also to his bias to produce a consistent system of chronology, great doubts must attach to all that relates in his work to the ancient history of India. In spite of
these shortcomings, however, which are more those of the nation to which the author belonged, than those of the individual himself, much that is reported by Kalhan'a is the only source of information we have of the history of Cashmere, and much very valuable as coming from an indigenous source. Kalhan'a begins his work, as may be expected, with the mythological history of the country; the first king named by him is Gonarda, who, according to his chronology, would have reigned in the year 2448 before Christ; and the last mentioned by him is Sinhadeva, about 1150 after Christ. The Sanskrit text of the complete work, together with that of the three other Rajatarangin'is, which is of little extent, has been edited at Calcutta, 1835, under the auspices of the general committee of public instruction and the Asiatic society of Bengal. Six sections of it have been edited with notes, and learned appendixes, in French, by A. Troyer, who likewise translated into French these sections, as well as the remaining two (RIldjatarangini, Histoire des Reis du Kachmir. etc., vols. i. to iii., Paris, 1840-52).—See also II. H. Wilson, An Essay on the Hindu History of Casimir, in the Asiatic Rescardes, vol. xv., and Lassen's Indisehe Alterthumskunde, vols. i. and ii.