Udaya

Kalidasa

कालिदास

Also Shakuntala, Meghaduta, Raghuvamsha.

Poetry Sanskrit Probably the fourth or fifth century CE, at or near the Gupta court

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What it is#

Kalidasa is the poet Sanskrit measures itself against, and the body of work under his name is seven pieces: three plays, two long narrative poems and two shorter ones. Nothing certain is known about the man. The name means servant of Kali, the dating rests on internal evidence and on a tradition placing him at the court of a Vikramaditya, and the legend that he was an illiterate cowherd given eloquence by the goddess is almost certainly a later story about the work rather than a memory of the life. What survives is a voice: exact about weather, trees, animals and the behaviour of people in love, and almost entirely without cruelty.

Its shape#

Three plays: Abhijnanashakuntalam in seven acts, Vikramorvashiyam in five, Malavikagnimitram in five. Two mahakavyas: Raghuvamsha in nineteen cantos, on the dynasty Rama belongs to, and Kumarasambhava in eight genuine cantos, on the marriage of Shiva and Parvati and the birth of Murugan. Two shorter poems: Meghaduta, a hundred and eleven verses in the Mandakranta metre, and Ritusamhara, six cantos on the six seasons, whose attribution is disputed. The plays are in the standard mix of Sanskrit for the high characters and Prakrit for the rest, which is itself part of what they are saying.

What it argues about#

These are not settled texts

The constant subject is separation and what it does to people, and the constant method is to put a human feeling beside a natural fact without explaining the connection. Shakuntala is the test case for the harder question. A king loves a girl in a forest, a curse makes him forget her, and he rejects her in his own court in front of everybody; the ring restores his memory and the play ends in reunion and a son. Readers have taken this as a comedy of fate and as an exposure of what a woman is owed and does not get, and the argument is live. Kalidasa does not resolve it. The king’s remorse is given more lines than the reunion.

Episodes worth knowing#

The cloud as messenger

In Meghaduta a yaksha, exiled a year from his wife for neglecting his duty, sees a cloud moving north at the start of the rains and asks it to carry a message to her. The first half is the route, named place by place across central India to the Himalaya, and the second is the message. Nothing happens. The cloud does not reply and there is no indication it goes. The poem is one of the most imitated in Sanskrit, and dozens of later messenger poems substitute a bird, a wind or a swan for the cloud, none of them improving on the device of giving the errand to something that cannot hear.

The ring in the fish

Shakuntala, going to her husband’s court, loses the ring he gave her while bathing at a ford. The curse on her takes hold, the king does not know her, and she is left. Acts later a fisherman is arrested for trying to sell a royal ring he found inside a carp, the king sees it, and everything comes back at once. Kalidasa gives the fisherman and the constables a whole scene in Prakrit, comic and ordinary, immediately before the king’s collapse. Putting the two side by side is the kind of thing he is admired for, and it is also the part most translations cut.

Whose telling#

There is no single text

Sir William Jones’s Sakontala, 1789
The translation that reached Europe, and through Goethe and Herder changed how Sanskrit literature was regarded there.
The Mahabharata’s Shakuntala
The older version in the Adi Parva has no curse and no ring: the king simply denies her, and she shames him in open court.
Kathakali and Bharatanatyam settings
Shakuntala and the Kumarasambhava material are staged in several classical forms, and Ravi Varma’s paintings fixed the images most Indians carry.

Where the regions differ#

  • Tamil
  • Kerala
  • Telugu
  • Kannada
  • North
  • Maharashtra
  • Bengal
  • Punjab
  • Assam
  • Sri Lanka
  • Nepal
  • Gujarat
  • Odisha
  • Mithila
  • Kashmir
  • Tulu Nadu
  • manipur
  • rajasthan
  • konkani
  • sindhi
  • jharkhand
  • himalayan
  • kodava
Where it is kept: 4 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.
North India
Claimed by Ujjain, where Meghaduta lingers longest and where the Kalidasa Samaroh is held every year at Mahakaleshwar.
Kerala
Kalidasa’s plays are in the Koodiyattam repertoire, which is the only tradition that has performed Sanskrit drama continuously.
Kashmir
A Kashmiri origin is argued from the Himalayan detail in Kumarasambhava and Meghaduta, and the argument has never been settled.
Bengal
Tagore wrote on Shakuntala repeatedly and read the forest and the court as two orders of life, which is how the play is taught in Bengal.

All the works