The Recognition of Kalidasa

Kalidasa: The Loom of Time (Rajan, Chandra)

In the 18^th Century, as Edward Said notes in Orientalism, Western scholars began their first hesitant attempts to ‘invade the Orient by stripping off its veils’, which is to say that they tried to understand the inscrutable people who had fallen into their custody, not by talking to them, but by reading the books they revered. So it was that the eccentric Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron translated the Zend Avesta and the Upanishads into French, and Charles Wilkins, an employee of the East India Company, translated the Institutes of Manu and the Bhagwad Gita into English. But it was Wilkins’ assistant, the extraordinary William Jones, who stumbled upon Kalidasa’s  Abhijnana Sakuntalam (the Recognition of Sakuntala), and brought it to Europe. It was the first piece of secular literature in Sanskrit that had been translated into a European language, and it was an instant hit. Herder and Goethe swooned over it. Franz Schubert named a two-act opera, and Ernest Reyer a ballet, after the eponymous heroine. Novalis and Schlegel exhorted their countrymen to study India and to apply the principles of Indian culture and religion to revitalize their own civilization, and the British hailed Kalidasa as the Indian Shakespeare.

What condescending colonialist nonsense, my sister told me long ago, when I was barely ten and would hang on to her every word. Kalidasa came first; it is Shakespeare who should be called the English Kalidasa. Yes, I said dutifully. The logic was flawless. Besides, the cheek of the Brits to claim to have discovered Our Kalidasa – as though we had temporarily misplaced him, or that he had been lying unnoticed, covered in goat droppings, in some jungle ruins. Wasn’t there an unbroken tradition among Sanskrit writers from the 7th century Bana Bhatta to the 19th century Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar  of invoking Kalidasa as their master in a preamble to their own writings? The man needed discovery no more than the nose on my face.

In my mind, therefore, Kalidasa and Shakespeare were purely political symbols, until decades later, I finally read both (embarrassingly, Shakespeare in original and now, Kalidasa as translated by Chandra Rajan) and so could actually form an opinion.

Sakuntala day-dreams about her absent lover. She doesn’t notice the entry, left centre, of the Sage Durvasa. Gripping drama by Kalidasa, picture by Raja Ravi Verma, courtesy http://www.chennaimuseum.org.