Kalidasa's Shakuntala Reached English in 1789 and German in 1791, and Goethe Answered It With a Four-Line Poem

In 1789 a judge of the Supreme Court in Calcutta, Sir William Jones, published an English version of a Sanskrit play under the title Sacontala, or the Fatal Ring. A German translation made from his English followed in 1791, and by July of that year Goethe’s four-line poem about the heroine was in print. The play is Abhijnanashakuntala, “The Recognition of Shakuntala”, and its author is Kalidasa, whom the Encyclopaedia Britannica calls probably the greatest Indian writer of any epoch.

Six works that scholars accept as his

The three plays are Abhijnanashakuntala; Vikramorvashi, “Urvashi Won by Valour”; and Malavikagnimitra, “Malavika and Agnimitra”. Vikramorvashi tells of a mortal king’s love for a divine maiden, and Britannica singles out its fourth act, in which the grief-stricken king wanders through a forest and speaks to the flowers and trees as though each were his lost love. Malavikagnimitra is a light intrigue among the women of a royal household. Its hero, Agnimitra, was a Shunga king dated to about 170 BCE, which gives the earliest limit for when the poet could have lived.

The two long poems are Raghuvamsha, “Dynasty of Raghu”, which follows the ancestors and descendants of Rama (see what the Ramayana is), and Kumarasambhava, “Birth of the War God”, which tells how Shiva and Parvati come together, how Kama, the god of desire, is burnt, and how Shiva’s son Kumara is born. Each stanza in them is complete in metre and grammar, and Britannica’s entry, written by the Sanskritist Edwin Gerow, says his mastery of Sanskrit as a poetic medium is nowhere more marked. The sixth work is the lyric Meghaduta, “Cloud Messenger”.

Jones knew only part of this list when he wrote his preface in 1789. He names the play Urvasi, the poem on “the Children of the Sun” (the Raghu line) and the poem on the birth of Cumara, and he regrets that Kalidasa left only two plays. Malavikagnimitra is not on his list. Jones called the poet “the Shakespeare of India”.

A cloud takes a message across India

The Meghaduta is short, and its plan is simple. A yaksha, a minor divine being in the service of Kubera, the god of wealth, is banished for twelve months from his home city of Alaka and from his wife. In H. H. Wilson’s 1813 English version, the poem opens eight months into the exile at a hill called Ramagiri, just as the rains begin and heavy clouds gather and drift north. The yaksha asks one of them to carry a message to his wife, and to give the cloud its bearings he describes the route: the mountains, rivers and temples it will pass on the way to the Himalayas.

Britannica describes those passages as vignettes of the mountains, rivers and forests of northern India. Wilson’s notes place Ramagiri on a hill a short way north of Nagpur, covered with temples of Rama and visited by pilgrims. Today Maharashtra’s Kavikulaguru Kalidas Sanskrit University, named for the poet, is at Ramtek, near Nagpur.

The play of the ring

Kalidasa took the story of Shakuntala from the Mahabharata (see what the Mahabharata is). In the epic, the Munich scholar Jens-Uwe Hartmann writes, she matters mainly as a mother: her son Bharata founds the line, and the name Bharat for India derives from his. Kalidasa kept the outline but made Shakuntala the centre of the play. Britannica names a second change: King Dushyanta is not responsible for the separation of the lovers, and acts only under a delusion caused by a sage’s curse.

The plot, as Hartmann summarises it, runs as follows. Dushyanta is hunting a deer when ascetics warn him off, and at their hermitage he meets Shakuntala, the foster daughter of the sage Kanva. They marry by mutual consent while Kanva is away, and the king leaves her his signet ring before returning to his capital. A visiting sage, angered at being ignored, curses her: the man she is thinking of will forget her. The curse is softened so that it ends when a token of recognition appears. When Shakuntala reaches the court, pregnant, the king does not know her, and she finds the ring is gone; it fell into the water at a place of pilgrimage on the road.

A fisherman later finds the ring inside a fish and is arrested as a thief. The ring reaches the king, his memory returns, and after he has helped the god Indra against a demon he meets, in a hermitage, a boy playing with a lion cub. The boy is his son Bharata, and the family is reunited. Hartmann notes that the ring in the fish and the heroine carried off by a nymph are not in the epic and were added by the poet. He adds that by Indian convention every play ends happily.

The fourth act is the part the pandits praised. In his preface Jones says the pandit Radhacant named Sacontala as the most esteemed of all Sanskrit plays, and quoted a couplet that singled out the fourth act, and four stanzas within it, as showing Kalidasa’s genius at its height. That act is Shakuntala’s farewell to the hermitage. In Jones’s translation, Kanva calls on the trees of the grove to hear that she is leaving, she who “drank not, though thirsty, before you were watered”. She embraces a creeper she has tended, and a fawn she raised catches at the hem of her robe.

The play also sorts its characters by speech. Men of high standing speak Sanskrit; women and most other characters speak Prakrit, dialects closer to the spoken languages of the time, which Jones described as Sanskrit softened to the sound of Italian.

Where the evidence puts him

Britannica’s summary of the date is that Kalidasa lived sometime between the reign of Agnimitra, about 170 BCE, and the Aihole inscription of 634 CE, which praises him. Two inscriptions help from the later end.

The Aihole inscription is a verse eulogy of the Chalukya king Pulakeshin II, composed by the Jain poet Ravikirti and recorded on the wall of the temple he had built. F. Kielhorn’s edition in Epigraphia Indica converts its date, Saka year 556, to 634 or 635 CE. Its last verse wishes Ravikirti victory and says his poetic skill has earned him the fame of Kalidasa and of Bharavi. Kielhorn thought the claim an exaggeration, but he also saw that Ravikirti had studied the Raghuvamsha closely, and that a verse from it was echoed in a Bodh Gaya inscription dated 588 CE. By 634 Kalidasa’s name served as a measure of poetic fame.

The other fixed point is at Mandasor, in Madhya Pradesh, where J. F. Fleet edited an inscription recording that a guild of silk weavers restored a Sun temple in 473 to 474 CE; its verses were composed by a poet named Vatsabhatti. Britannica says the poet Kalidasa is apparently imitated there, though not named.

Between those points the sources differ, and each should be read by name. Jones put Kalidasa in the first century BCE, at the court of a King Vikramaditya. Britannica says many but not all scholars link him to the Gupta emperor Chandra Gupta II, who reigned from about 380 to 415 CE (see the Gupta age), and calls the case the most convincing but most conjectural one. Hartmann writes that there are fairly good grounds for placing him at the start of the fifth century.

Of the man himself, Britannica says very little is known. His name means “servant of Kali”. A tradition makes him one of nine “gems” at the court of Vikramaditya of Ujjain, though Britannica points out that several kings bore that title and that the nine could not have been contemporaries. A Sinhalese tradition says he died in Sri Lanka in the reign of Kumaradasa, who took the throne in 517. In 1813 Wilson wrote that little about the poet was settled by history and much was told by tradition.

From Calcutta to Weimar

Jones’s own account of how he came to the play is in his preface. He had read of Sanskrit dramas in one of a series of letters titled Edifying, asked the Brahmins of Bengal about them, and was told that the best loved was Sacontala. He got a copy and, with his teacher Ramalochan, put it word for word into Latin, then into English, and finally eased the stiffness of the foreign idiom. The British Library’s catalogue gives his edition, printed in Calcutta in 1789, as the first translation of the play.

Manuscripts show that the play circulated in more than one version. The British Library holds a Bengali-script copy dated 1671, once in the collection of H. T. Colebrooke, and a Devanagari-script copy dated between 1780 and 1815. Its catalogue records the two as different recensions, meaning separate lines of copying, each with its own modern editions: A. L. Chezy’s of 1830, printed in Paris with a French translation, for the Bengali one, and Otto Bohtlingk’s of 1842 for the Devanagari.

In Germany, Georg Forster translated Jones’s English into German in 1791. Goethe read the play in that version, and the two couplets he wrote about it went into print in July of the same year. Hartmann prints the German: the poet lists the blossoms of the early year, the fruits of the later year, what charms and what feeds, heaven and earth, and says that if he names Shakuntala, everything has been said. The last line runs “Nenn ich Sakontala dich und so ist alles gesagt.”

Goethe was not alone. Hartmann quotes a letter from Friedrich Schiller to Wilhelm von Humboldt saying that nothing in all of Greek antiquity comes close to the Sakontala as a portrait of beautiful womanhood or love. Nearly forty years after his first reaction, Goethe wrote to Chezy in Paris that he now understood the overwhelming impression the play had first made on him. Hartmann also says Goethe drew inspiration for the “Prelude on the Theatre” in Faust from the play, whose Sanskrit prologue has a stage manager speaking to an actress. Franz Schubert began sketching an opera on the subject from 1820, to a libretto by Johann Philipp Neumann, and left it in fragments. Hartmann judges that probably no other Indian work, the Bhagavad Gita included, has found a comparable echo in Germany.

Readers who want the plays in modern English can start with Barbara Stoler Miller’s Theater of Memory, published by Columbia University Press in 1984, which contains versions of all three: Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, Urvasi Won by Valor and Malavika and Agnimitra.

A name that is still attached to institutions

The Government of Madhya Pradesh set up the Kalidasa Academy at Ujjain in 1978, its Department of Culture says, to keep the poet’s memory refreshed and to build a research institution around the classical tradition with Kalidasa at its centre.

The Kalidas Samaroh is held at the Kalidas Sanskrit Akademi in Ujjain. Its 66th All India edition was inaugurated by Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar in November 2024, and the Kalidas Alankaran Samman for 2022 to 2023 was presented to eight recipients in four genres. Dhankhar said that in Kalidasa’s works human emotion and the bond between people and nature meet. Madhya Pradesh Tourism lists the 2024 festival as running from 12 to 18 November, with Samman awards to Pt. Uday Bhavalkar of Pune and Pt. Arvind Parekh of Mumbai for classical singing, and to Dr. Sandhya Purecha of Mumbai and Guru Kalawati Devi of Manipur for classical dance.