The anthologies' Kalidasa outgrew the real one

Claim (verbatim)

A famous name in the subhasita tradition behaves like a gravity well. Kalidasa is the most-quoted poet in the anthologies, and the stanzas the anthologists stamp with his name vastly exceed what his genuine works contain. His secure corpus is small and well defined: the Raghuvamsa, Kumarasambhava, Meghaduta, Rtusamhara, and the three plays. Yet across the anthologies the label Kalidasasya sits on hundreds of verses, a large share of which occur nowhere in those works. The mechanism is accretion. When an anonymous or contested gem needed a father, the greatest name was the safe default, so orphan verses drifted to Kalidasa the way small bodies fall into the largest mass. The apocryphal-Kalidasa fraction is a direct read-out of the naming economy, and it means the anthologies preserve, under one celebrated label, a scatter of verses from poets whose own names were the first thing lost. The size of the false corpus is thus a measure of how the record launders anonymity into fame, inflating one survivor while erasing many.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: collecting every verse attributed to Kalidasa across the major anthologies (via Sternbach's Descriptive Catalogue of Poets Quoted in Sanskrit Anthologies and Inscriptions) and matching each against the GRETIL full texts of his securely attributed works, more than one-third of the distinct Kalidasa-attributed anthology verses will be absent from his genuine corpus; the greater-than-one-third apocryphal fraction is the deciding clause. Matching uses pada-level string search allowing orthographic variants, a verse counts as genuine only on a located hit in the accepted works, and the test voids for coverage if fewer than 100 distinct Kalidasa-attributed anthology verses are assembled.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the GRETIL e-texts of Kalidasa's accepted works (Raghuvamsa, Kumarasambhava, Meghaduta, Rtusamhara, Abhijnanasakuntala, Vikramorvasiya, Malavikagnimitra) searched pada by pada against the Kalidasa-attributed verses catalogued in Sternbach's Descriptive Catalogue of Poets Quoted in Sanskrit Anthologies and Inscriptions.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The tabulation the deciding clause needs is published: Sternbach's Maha-subhasita-samgraha traces each subhasita's occurrences in extant works alongside its anthology attributions, and his Descriptive Catalogue registers the anthology verses under Kalidasa's name with their conflicting ascriptions - the conjecture's own named instrument is the leak. The apocryphal-Kalidasa phenomenon is itself a commonplace of the literature, and Ingalls' verse-notes to the Subhasitaratnakosa mark which Kalidasa-attributed stanzas occur nowhere in his accepted works. The greater-than-one-third fraction is a read-off of printed per-verse apparatus, not an uncertain count.

• L. Sternbach, Maha-subhasita-samgraha (Hoshiarpur, 1974- ), apparatus of attributions and source-occurrences
• L. Sternbach, A Descriptive Catalogue of Poets Quoted in Sanskrit Anthologies and Inscriptions, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1978-1980)
• D. H. H. Ingalls (trans.), An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyakara's Subhasitaratnakosa, Harvard Oriental Series 44 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), general introduction and verse-notes

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.