Kalidasa
Kalidasa is regarded as the greatest poet and dramatist in classical Sanskrit, and almost nothing about his life is known with certainty. He probably lived in the fourth or fifth century AD, most likely at the court of a Gupta ruler, perhaps Chandragupta II — the dating rests on internal evidence, on references to astronomical and cultural details, and on the absence of any external record. His name means servant of Kali, and a persistent legend holds that he was an illiterate herdsman married by a trick to a learned princess and granted eloquence by the goddess. It is a story attached to him rather than evidence about him. Seven works are generally accepted as his: three plays, two long narrative poems, and two shorter lyric poems. Abhijnanashakuntala, the recognition of Shakuntala, is his most famous play, telling of a king who falls in love with a hermitage-raised woman, forgets her under a curse, and recognises her through a ring. When Sir William Jones translated it into English in 1789 it caused a sensation in Europe; Goethe wrote a verse in its praise and borrowed the structure of its prologue for Faust. Meghaduta, the cloud messenger, is a shorter poem in which an exiled spirit asks a passing monsoon cloud to carry a message to his wife, and describes the whole landscape of India along the route. It created a genre. Kumarasambhava and Raghuvamsha are his epics, and Ritusamhara a cycle on the seasons. His reputation rests on compressed imagery, control of metre, and a treatment of love and nature that avoids both coarseness and abstraction.
- Lived: 370 CE – 450 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: poet, playwright
