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"Sakuntala," or the Fatal Ring, is considered one of the best dramas of Kalidasa. It has been translated into English by Sir W. Jones. Bhavabhuti, a Brahmin by birth, was called by his contemporaries the Sweet Speaking. He was the author of many dramas of distinguished merit, which rank next to those of Kalidasa.
These were the materials which Kalidasa, the Attic dramatists, and the bards of the Nibelungen found ready, awaiting their artistic treatment. But the mythology of the New World, with all its pretty and agreeable naivete, affords hardly enough, either of variety in situation or of complexity in motive, for a grand epic or a genuine tragedy.
Behind Sakoontala, as behind Endymion, there is a Soul-symbol; only Kalidasa, like Keats, is preoccupied in his outer mind more with forest beauty and natural magic and his romantic tale of love. It marks a stage in the descent of literature from the old impersonal to the modern personal reaches: from tales told merely to express the Soul-Symbol, to tales told merely for the sake of telling them.
I know of no European drama of any importance which treats of a prosperous and happy love as its principal subject; it needs the delicate pen of a Kalidasa to make it endurable. It does not of course follow that love is to be altogether banished from dramatic art.
I would remark in passing that many of the most poetic and striking adjectives in both the Raghu and the Kumarasambhava of Kalidasa are borrowed unblushingly from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Padma patrabha-nibha may also mean 'of the splendour of the gem called Marakata. Nilakantha, however, shows that this would militate against the adjective Kankojwalatwacham below.
The second period, to which belong the two great epic poems, the "Ramayana" and the "Mahabharata," according to the best authorities ends with the sixth or seventh century B.C. The third period embraces all the poetical and scientific works written from that time to the third or fourth century B.C., when the language, having been progressively refined, became fixed in the writings of Kalidasa, Jayadeva, and other poets.
It has been translated into Italian and published in Paris. The Hitopadesa, a collection of fables and apologues, has been translated into more languages than any book except the Bible. It has found its way all over the civilized world, and is the model of the fables of all countries. The dramas of Kalidasa, the Hindu Shakespeare, contain many episodes borrowed from the great Epic poems.
It was his court at Ujjain which is believed to have been adorned by the "Nine Gems" of Sanskrit literature, amongst whom the favourite is Kalidasa, the poet and dramatist. Amidst much that is speculative, one thing is certain. The age of Vikramadytia was an age of Brahmanical ascendancy.
The panel in the center of the attic, representing India, reads The moon sinks yonder in the west, While, in the east, the glorious sun Behind the herald dawn appears Thus rise and set in constant change those shining orbs And regulate the very life of this our world. Kalidasa. The panel at the right of the attic, representing Japan, reads
That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history; that Western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden all this is the work of Caesar; and, while the creation of his great predecessor in the east has been almost wholly reduced to ruin by the tempests of the Middle Ages, the structure of Caesar has outlasted those thousands of years which have changed religion and polity for the human race and even shifted for it the centre of civilization itself, and it stands erect for what we may designate as eternity.