Kālidāsa

Kālidāsa is the supreme poet of classical Sanskrit literature and one of the great writers of world literature. Little is known of his life — he probably flourished in the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE, perhaps at the court of the Gupta emperor Candragupta II at Ujjayinī — but his seven surviving works define the classical style: three plays, Abhijñānaśākuntalam (The Recognition of Śakuntalā), Vikramorvaśīyam and Mālavikāgnimitram; two court epics (mahākāvya), Kumārasambhavam (The Birth of Kumāra) and Raghuvaṃśam (The Dynasty of Raghu); and two lyric poems, Meghadūtam (The Cloud Messenger) and Ṛtusaṃhāram (The Gathering of the Seasons). His subject is love — in union and, above all, in separation — set in a natural world that seems to feel with human beings. When Śakuntalā was translated into English in 1789, it astonished Europe; Goethe and Herder hailed it, and it opened the West to Indian literature.

Life and legend

Kālidāsa never speaks of himself, and his dates have been placed anywhere from the 2nd century BCE to the 6th century CE. Most scholars now place him in the Gupta period, around 380–450 CE: his works echo Gupta court culture, and a Sanskrit inscription of 634 CE at Aihole already praises him. His loving descriptions of Ujjayinī (Ujjain) and the Malwa region in the Cloud Messenger suggest he lived there. Tradition makes him one of the “nine gems” at the court of a legendary King Vikramāditya.

A famous legend says he was a beautiful but stupid young man, found sawing off the branch he was sitting on, and chosen by scheming courtiers as a husband for the arrogant scholar-princess Vidyottamā, who had humiliated them in debate. On their wedding night, she discovered his ignorance and drove him out. He prayed to the goddess Kālī, who granted him eloquence; he returned and knocked on her door. She asked, “Asti kaścid vāgviśeṣaḥ?” — “Is there anything special in your speech?” — and he composed three great works, each beginning with one of her words: Asti (the Kumārasambhava), Kaścit (the Meghadūta), Vāk (the Raghuvaṃśa).

The Recognition of Śakuntalā

The play

Abhijñānaśākuntalam, in seven acts of prose and verse, develops a story from the The Mahābhārata (Ādi Parva), transforming it with a curse and a ring.

King Duṣyanta, hunting a deer, enters the hermitage of the sage Kaṇva, who is away on a pilgrimage. There he sees Śakuntalā, Kaṇva’s foster daughter — the child of the sage Viśvāmitra and the nymph Menakā, abandoned at birth and protected by birds (śakunta). She is watering the trees with her two friends. A bee buzzes around her face; Duṣyanta steps forward to “rescue” her. They fall in love and marry by the gāndharva rite — mutual consent, without ceremony. He gives her his signet ring and returns to his capital, promising to send for her.

Lost in thought of him, Śakuntalā fails to greet the irascible sage Durvāsas at the hermitage. He curses her: the one she is thinking of will forget her — unless he sees a token of recognition. Her friends obtain this mitigation but do not tell her.

Kaṇva returns, learns of the marriage, blesses it, and sends the pregnant Śakuntalā to her husband. Act IV, her farewell to the hermitage, is the most celebrated in Sanskrit drama: the trees offer her garments and ornaments, the peahens stop dancing, the creepers shed their leaves like tears, a fawn she raised tugs at her hem; Kaṇva, an ascetic, is overcome by a father’s grief.

At court, Duṣyanta, under the curse, does not recognise her. She reaches for the ring — but it is gone, lost when she bathed at a holy pond. He rejects her as an impostor. Humiliated, she is carried off by a shining form of light, her mother Menakā.

Later, a fisherman is arrested for possessing the royal ring, found in a fish’s belly. When Duṣyanta sees it, his memory returns, and he is consumed by remorse. He paints her portrait and pines.

In the final act, Duṣyanta, returning from fighting demons in heaven for Indra, stops at the hermitage of the sage Mārīca, where he sees a bold little boy playing with a lion cub. The boy is his son, Bharata — the future emperor after whom India (Bhārata) is named. Śakuntalā appears, worn by grief; the lovers are reunited.

Meaning

The play explores love passing from desire to maturity through suffering. The curse lets Kālidāsa preserve Duṣyanta’s honour (in the Mahābhārata he simply lies) while exploring memory, forgetting and recognition. Nature is a participant: the hermitage’s plants and animals respond to Śakuntalā’s emotions.

The Cloud Messenger

Meghadūtam is a lyric poem of about 111 verses in the slow, stately mandākrāntā metre. A yakṣa (a demigod attendant of the god of wealth, Kubera), exiled for a year for neglecting his duty, pines in the Rāmagiri hills in central India for his wife in the Himālayan city of Alakā. At the start of the monsoon, seeing a great cloud, he asks it to carry a message to her.

He describes the route the cloud will take northward — over rivers, mountains and cities, including Ujjayinī with its palaces and the temple of Mahākāla — in a sensuous travelogue of India, each place animated with love. Then he describes his wife, wasting away with longing, and gives the message: he imagines her in everything, he endures, the curse will end. The poem founded a genre, the sandeśa-kāvya (messenger poem), imitated for centuries.

The Birth of Kumāra

Kumārasambhavam tells how the god Śiva, an ascetic absorbed in meditation in the Himālaya, came to marry Pārvatī, daughter of the mountain, so that their son Kumāra (Skanda) could defeat a demon. The gods send Kāma, god of desire, to strike Śiva with his flower-arrows. Śiva opens his third eye and burns Kāma to ash. Pārvatī, realising beauty alone cannot win him, undertakes severe austerities. Śiva, disguised as a young ascetic, tests her by mocking Śiva; she defends him passionately; he reveals himself. The eighth canto, describing their lovemaking in explicit detail, was condemned by some critics as improper for the parents of the universe.

The Dynasty of Raghu

Raghuvaṃśam, in 19 cantos, traces the solar dynasty from Dilīpa through Raghu, Aja, Daśaratha and Rāma (retelling the The Rāmāyaṇa in compressed form) to the decadent Agnivarṇa, who dies of debauchery — a meditation on kingship and its decline.

Style

• Simile (upamā): Indian critics said upamā Kālidāsasya. In the Raghuvaṃśa, the princess Indumatī passes the suitors at her svayaṃvara like a lamp carried along a royal road at night, lighting each mansion in turn and leaving it dark.
• Suggestion (dhvani): meaning conveyed by implication — the theory of the critic Ānandavardhana, who drew examples from Kālidāsa.
• Rasa: the evocation of aesthetic emotion — above all śṛṅgāra, the erotic, in union and in separation.
• Vaidarbhī style: clarity, sweetness, balance.

Reception

Sir William Jones’s translation of Śakuntalā (1789) was translated into German by Georg Forster (1791). Goethe wrote a famous epigram, and modelled the “Prelude in the Theatre” of Faust on its prologue. Herder, Schiller and the Schlegels admired it. Rabindranath Tagore, Arthur W. Ryder, and many others translated or celebrated Kālidāsa. Indian painting, dance and film have drawn on Śakuntalā.

Key terms

Kāvya

Ornate classical Sanskrit poetry.

Mahākāvya

The court epic.

Rasa

Aesthetic emotion evoked in the audience.

Śṛṅgāra

The erotic rasa — love in union and separation (vipralambha).

Gāndharva marriage

Marriage by mutual consent.

Using Kālidāsa in conversation

• On love: separation, not union, is love’s deepest form.
• On style: upamā Kālidāsasya — for simile, Kālidāsa.
• On parting: Śakuntalā’s farewell to the hermitage, where even the trees weep.
• On desire: Kāma burned by Śiva’s eye — passion must be transformed, not merely indulged.