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Updated: June 8, 2025
By following truth the soul becomes purified, and after a life consecrated to others and guided by the laws of justice, the individual may hope to reincarnate in some higher form. As the poet of Sakuntala has said "In other existences we all have loved and wept" but the divine Kalidasa teaches that past lives should not be spoken of, "for the mystery of rebirth is sacred."
The eldest and one of the loveliest of this family is the Hindu nymph Urvasi, whose love adventures with Pururavas are narrated in the Puranas, and form the subject of the well-known and exquisite Sanskrit drama by Kalidasa. Urvasi is allowed to live with Pururavas so long as she does not see him undressed.
We can hardly imagine doubt as to the century in which Shakespeare or Virgil lived, yet when I first studied Sanskrit the greatest of Indian dramatists, Kalidasa, was supposed to have lived about 50 B.C. His date is not yet fixed with unanimity but it is now generally placed in the fifth or sixth century A.D.
From early times, romantic love had been keenly valued, Sanskrit poets such as Kalidasa, Amaru and Bhartrihari celebrating the charms of womanly physique and the raptures of sex. What, in fact, in other cultures had been viewed with suspicion or disquiet was here invested with nobility and grandeur.
Weapons, seats, thrones, and chariots appeared on the stage; but it is highly improbable that the latter were drawn by the living animals supposed to be attached to them. There may have been some kind of aerial contrivance to represent celestial chariots. Kalidasa is the author of Sakuntala, Vikramorvasi and Malavikagnimitra. He has been designated the Indian Shakespeare.
Whatever may offend propriety, whatever may produce an unwholesome excitement, is excluded; for the hilarity of the audience, there is an occasional introduction on the stage of a parasite or a buffoon. The representation is usually opened by an apologue and always concluded with a prayer. Kalidasa, the Hindu Shakespeare, has been called by his countrymen the Bridegroom of Poetry.
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.
Thus Rise and Set In Constant Change Those Shining Orbs and Regulate the Very Life of this Our World. Kalidasa, India. Hitomaro, Japan. Confucius, China. So Tempered is the Genial Glow That We Know Neither Heat Nor Cold. Tulips and Hyacinths Abound. Fostered by A Delicious Clime the Earth Blooms Like A Garden. Firdausi, Persia. From Untrodden Ways Turn Aside. Phra Ruang, Siam. Zuhayr, Arabia.
We are not quite sure of the date of Kâlidâsa, the Indian Shakespeare, and though the doctrines of Śankara, Kabir, and Nânak still nourish, it is with difficulty that the antiquary collects from the meagre legends clinging to their names a few facts for their biographies. And Kings and Emperors, a class who in Europe can count on being remembered if not esteemed after death, fare even worse.
Throughout the whole range of Sanskrit literature from the simple lessons of Hitopadesha to the most elaborate polish of Naishadha from the terse vigour of Sankaracharjya to the studied majesty of Magha from the harmonious grace of Kalidasa to the ornate picturesqueness of Kadambari, there is probably no writer who can come up to Bhavabhuti in his wonderful command of Sanskrit language and surprising fluency and elevation of diction.
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