Kalidasa

INDIAN AUTHOR

Kalidasa, (flourished 5th century CE, India), Sanskrit poet and dramatist, probably the greatest Indian
writer of any epoch. The six works identified as genuine are the dramas Abhijnanashakuntala (“The
Recognition of Shakuntala”), Vikramorvashi (“Urvashi Won by Valour”), and Malavikagnimitra(“Malavika
and Agnimitra”); the epic poems Raghuvamsha (“Dynasty of Raghu”) and Kumarasambhava (“Birth of
the War God”); and the lyric “Meghaduta” (“Cloud Messenger”).

As with most classical Indian authors, little is known about Kalidasa’s person or his historical
relationships. His poems suggest but nowhere declare that he was a Brahman (priest), liberal yet
committed to the orthodox Hindu worldview. His name, literally “servant of Kali,” presumes that he was
a Shaivite (follower of the god Shiva, whose consort was Kali), though occasionally he eulogizes other
gods, notably Vishnu.

A Sinhalese tradition says that he died on the island of Sri Lanka during the reign of Kumaradasa, who
ascended the throne in 517. A more persistent legend makes Kalidasa one of the “nine gems” at the
court of the fabulous king Vikramaditya of Ujjain. Unfortunately, there are several known Vikramadityas
(Sun of Valour—a common royal appellation); likewise, the nine distinguished courtiers could not have
been contemporaries. It is certain only that the poet lived sometime between the reign of Agnimitra, the
second Shunga king (c. 170 BCE) and the hero of one of his dramas, and the Aihole inscription of 634 CE,
which lauds Kalidasa. He is apparently imitated, though not named, in the Mandasor inscription of 473.
No single hypothesis accounts for all the discordant information and conjecture surrounding this date.

An opinion accepted by many—but not all—scholars is that Kalidasa should be associated with Chandra
Gupta II (reigned c. 380–c. 415). The most convincing but most conjectural rationale for relating Kalidasa
to the brilliant Gupta dynasty is simply the character of his work, which appears as both the perfect
reflection and the most thorough statement of the cultural values of that serene and
sophisticated aristocracy.

Tradition has associated many works with the poet; criticism identifies six as genuine and one more as
likely (“Ritusamhara,” the “Garland of the Seasons,” perhaps a youthful work). Attempts to trace
Kalidasa’s poetic and intellectual development through these works are frustrated by the impersonality
that is characteristic of classical Sanskrit literature. His works are judged by the Indian tradition as
realizations of literary qualities inherent in the Sanskrit language and its supporting culture. Kalidasa has
become the archetype for Sanskrit literary composition.

In drama, his Abhijnanashakuntala is the most famous and is usually judged the best Indian literary
effort of any period. Taken from an epic legend, the work tells of the seduction of the
nymph Shakuntala by King Dushyanta, his rejection of the girl and his child, and their subsequent
reunion in heaven. The epic myth is important because of the child, for he
is Bharata, eponymous ancestor of the Indian nation (Bharatavarsha, “Subcontinent of Bharata”).
Kalidasa remakes the story into a love idyll whose characters represent a pristine aristocratic ideal: the
girl, sentimental, selfless, alive to little but the delicacies of nature, and the king, first servant of
the dharma (religious and social law and duties), protector of the social order, resolute hero, yet tender
and suffering agonies over his lost love. The plot and characters are made believable by a change
Kalidasa has wrought in the story: Dushyanta is not responsible for the lovers’ separation; he acts only
under a delusion caused by a sage’s curse. As in all of Kalidasa’s works, the beauty of nature is depicted
with a precise elegance of metaphor that would be difficult to match in any of the world’s literatures.

The second drama, Vikramorvashi (possibly a pun on vikramaditya), tells a legend as old as

the Vedas(earliest Hindu scriptures), though very differently. Its theme is the love of a mortal for a
divine maiden; it is well known for the “mad scene” (Act IV) in which the king, grief-stricken, wanders
through a lovely forest apostrophizing various flowers and trees as though they were his love. The scene
was intended in part to be sung or danced.

The third of Kalidasa’s dramas, Malavikagnimitra, is of a different stamp—a harem intrigue, comical and
playful, but not less accomplished for lacking any high purpose. The play (unique in this respect)
contains datable references, the historicity of which have been much discussed.

Kalidasa’s efforts in kavya (strophic poetry) are of uniform quality and show two different subtypes, epic
and lyric. Examples of the epic are the two long poems Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava. The first
recounts the legends of the hero Rama’s forebears and descendants; the second tells the picaresque
story of Shiva’s seduction by his consort Parvati, the conflagration of Kama (the god of desire), and the
birth of Kumara (Skanda), Shiva’s son. These stories are mere pretext for the poet to enchain stanzas,
each metrically and grammatically complete, redounding with complex and reposeful imagery.
Kalidasa’s mastery of Sanskrit as a poetic medium is nowhere more marked.

A lyric poem, the “Meghaduta,” contains, interspersed in a message from a lover to his absent beloved,
an extraordinary series of unexcelled and knowledgeable vignettes, describing the mountains, rivers,
and forests of northern India.

The society reflected in Kalidasa’s work is that of a courtly aristocracy sure of its dignity and power.
Kalidasa has perhaps done more than any other writer to wed the older, Brahmanic religious tradition,
particularly its ritual concern with Sanskrit, to the needs of a new and brilliant secularHinduism. The
fusion, which epitomizes the renaissance of the Gupta period, did not, however, survive its fragile social
base; with the disorders following the collapse of the Gupta Empire, Kalidasa became a memory of
perfection that neither Sanskrit nor the Indian aristocracy would know again.
Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur, (born May 7, 1861, Calcutta [now
Kolkata], India—died August 7, 1941, Calcutta), Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer,
playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use
of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on
classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and
he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India. In 1913 he
became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The son of the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, he early began to write verses, and, after
incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned to India. There he published several books
of poetry in the 1880s and completed Manasi (1890), a collection that marks the maturing of his genius.
It contains some of his best-known poems, including many in verse forms new to Bengali, as well as
some social and political satire that was critical of his fellow Bengalis.

In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his family’s estates at Shilaidah and
Shazadpur for 10 years. There he often stayed in a houseboat on the Padma River (the main channel of
the Ganges River), in close contact with village folk, and his sympathy for them became the keynote of
much of his later writing. Most of his finest short stories, which examine “humble lives and their small
miseries,” date from the 1890s and have a poignancy, laced with gentle irony, that is unique to him
(though admirably captured by the director Satyajit Ray in later film adaptations). Tagore came to love
the Bengali countryside, most of all the Padma River, an often-repeated image in his verse. During these
years he published several poetry collections, notably Sonar Tari (1894; The Golden Boat), and plays,
notably Chitrangada (1892; Chitra). Tagore’s poems are virtually untranslatable, as are his more than
2,000 songs, which achieved considerable popularity among all classes of Bengali society.

In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal at Shantiniketan (“Abode of

Peace”), where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions. He settled
permanently at the school, which became Visva-Bharati University in 1921. Years of sadness arising from
the deaths of his wife and two children between 1902 and 1907 are reflected in his later poetry, which
was introduced to the West in Gitanjali (Song Offerings) (1912). This book, containing Tagore’s English
prose translations of religious poems from several of his Bengali verse collections,
including Gitanjali (1910), was hailed by W.B. Yeats and André Gide and won him the Nobel Prize in
1913. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against
the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre.

From 1912 Tagore spent long periods out of India, lecturing and reading from his work in Europe, the
Americas, and East Asia and becoming an eloquent spokesperson for the cause of Indian independence.
Tagore’s novels in Bengali are less well known than his poems and short stories; they
include Gora (1910) and Ghare-Baire (1916), translated into English as Gora and The Home and the
World, respectively. In the late 1920s, when he was in his 60s, Tagore took up painting and produced
works that won him a place among India’s foremost contemporary artists
Bhartrihari
Bhartrihari was a king who renounced this world when he discovered that his favorite queen
pined for some one else. The poor king was in for even greater heartbreak when he found out
the queen’s paramour was himself ensnared in the love coils of another – a beautiful courtesan.
This girl, in turn, could think of no one else but king Bhartrihari! Complications of love life
inspired Bhartrihari to become a recluse and a poet.

Bhartrihari may be considered one of the most original philosophers of language and religion in
ancient India. He is known primarily as a grammarian, but his works have great philosophical
significance, especially with regard to the connections they posit between grammar, logic,
semantics, and ontology. His thought may be characterized as part of the shabdadvaita (word
monistic) school of thought, which asserts that cognition and language at an ultimate level are
ontologically identical concepts that refer to one supreme reality, Brahman. Bhartrihari
interprets the notion of the originary word (shabda) as transcending the bounds of spoken and
written language and meaning. Understood as shabda tattva-the "word principle," this complex
idea explains the nature of consciousness, the awareness of all forms of phenomenal
appearances, and posits an identity obtains between these, which is none other than Brahman.
It is thus language as a fundamentally ontological principle that accounts for how we are able to
conceptualize and communicate the awareness of objects. The metaphysical notion
of shabda Brahman posits the unity of all existence as the foundation for all linguistically
designated individual phenomena.

Bhartrihari, (born 570? CE, Ujjain, Malwa, India—died 651?, Ujjain), Hindu philosopher and

poet-grammarian, author of the Vakyapadiya (“Words in a Sentence”), on the philosophy of
languageaccording to the shabdadvaita (“word nondualism”) school of Indian philosophy.
Of noble birth, Bhartrihari was attached for a time to the court of the Maitraka king
of Valabhi(modern Vala, Gujarat), where most likely his taste for sensuous living and material
possessions was formed. Following the example of Indian sages, he believed he had to
renounce the world for a higher life. Seven times he attempted monastic living, but his attraction
to women caused him to fail each time. Though intellectually he presumably understood the
transitory nature of worldly pleasures and felt a call to Yoga and ascetic living, he was unable to
control his desires. After a long self-struggle, Bhartrihari became a yogi and lived a life of
dispassion in a cave in the vicinity of Ujjain until his death.
Three of the works attributed to Bhartrihari are titled shataka (“century”): the Shringara (love)-
shataka, Niti (ethics and polity)-shataka, and Vairagya (dispassion)-shataka. Most schoalars are
confident only that the first is his. Another work sometimes attributed to Bhartrihari,
the Bhattikavya(“Poem of Bhatti”), performs linguistic gymnastics to demonstrate the subtleties
of Sanskrit.

In popular Indian tradition, Bhartrihari is identified as a king who was

discouraged by the inconstancy of women and driven to renounce the world. The
legend, recorded in the vikramacharita, says that a brahman priest who had
obtained a fruit of immortality decided to give it to king Bhartrihari. But
the king relinquished it to his beloved queen, who gave it to her paramour,
who in his turn gave it to one of his mistresses, and she presented it again
to the king. After reflecting for a time on this chain of events, the king
cursed all women and retired to the forest. A single verse, a late addition
to the Bhartrihari collection, is associated with this legend:
The Passage of Time'
"yatraAnekah: kvacidapi gRhe tatra tiSTaty athaiko 
      yatrApy ekas tadanu bahavas tatra naiko2pi cAnte 
      ittham naiyau rajanidivasau lolayan dvAv ivAkSau 
      kAlah: kalyo bhuvanaphalake krIDati prANisAraih:" 

   "In a certain house, where there were once many, there is one now; 
    Where there were many, at the end none remains! 
    With night and day as two alternating pieces of dice, 
    On the chessboard of the world, Time plays with living beings as pawns." 

     "Adityasya gatAgatair aharahah: saMkSIyate jIvitaM 

      vyAparair bahukAryabhAragurubhih: kAlo na vijnAyate 
      dRSTvA janmajarAvipattimaraNaM trAsas' ca notpadyate 
      pItvA mohamayIM pramAdamadirAm unmattabhUtAM jagat" 

   "With the endless cycle of sunrise and sunset, life shortens; 

    Engrossed in mundane tasks, man fails to notice the passage of time! 
    Nor anxiety is felt at witnessing birth, advance of years, suffering 
                                                    and finally death; 
    Oh, the world becomes intoxicated after drinking the wine of delusion!"