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Saints and Poets
A woman stands in a full court telling a king she is his wife, and he looks at her with polite blankness.
We do not know when he lived, where he was born, what he did, who he married, or how he died. We do not know his name, Kalidasa means servant of Kali, which is a title or a nickname, not something a father writes down.
What we have is six works.
And they are so far ahead of everything around them that Sanskrit literature is usually divided in two. Before him, and after.
Estimates have ranged across seven centuries. The consensus now puts him in the fourth or fifth century CE. Most probably in the reign of Chandragupta II (380-415).
The position is argued from evidence inside the poems. And it has been held from William Jones in the eighteenth century, through to modern scholars.
That is an inference, not a record. There is no inscription, no contemporary mention, no document.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.