Who is kalidasa

However, he worked in the court of Emperor Vikramaditya ruler of Ujjain. Seetharama Sastry, in his debut direction. Answer: His plays and poetry are primarily based on the Vedas, the Mahabharata and the Puranas. He is still remembered today because as kalidas was a writer ,he also written many moral poems,also they are most popular in most of the regions. So,due to his incredebile poem he is still remembered today.

Complete answer: Kalidasa was a poet in the court of King Vikramaditya of Ujjain, a famous Gupta king. He lived during the late 4th century or the early 5th century. Kalidas is unambiguously accepted as the greatest of Sanskrit poets and dramatists. The princess understood that Kalidasa was no learned man but a fool. So she drove him out of the palace. With the blessings of Goddess Kali, Kalidasa was endowed with knowledge and wit.

He wrote two epic poems called Kumara sambhava, which means birth of Kumara and the Raghuvamsha, which means dynasty of Raghu. According to M. Winternitz, the reputed German scholar of Indology, the great popularity that this drama has enjoyed in India, is proved by the fact that there are several versions of its text.

It has several times been translated in to German and other European languages. Attempts have been made for adapting it for the stage too. Abhijnanashakuntalam Abhigyanashakuntala, a drama of seven acts is based on the old legend of Shakuntala, described in Mahabharata. It is the love story of the king Dushyanta and the hermit girl Shakuntala. Their mutual attraction leads to their marriage by the Gandharva form of marriage in the hermitage.

The curse of the sage Durvasa makes the king forget all about his wedding but the discovery of the sign ring given by Dushyanta to his bride reminds him of the happenings in the forest grove, leading to his ultimate union with his wife and son in the abode of divine beings. The play is universally recognised as the best specimen of dramatic art in the entire Sanskrit literature. About Kalidasa Who, worth the name, is not roused to rejoicing at the blooming of cultured expressions of Kalidasa like that of bunchy blossom in sweet abundance.

Popular legends on the life of Kalidasa Kalidasa, who was first quite a blockhead and was married to a princes, being stung by the scornful words of his wife, determined to secure the favour of Gauri by penance with the result that the goddess conferred upon him high poetic genius. On his return Kalidasa was asked by his wife -… and the poet taking each of the three words as the beginning of three different works composed the Kumara, Megha and Raghu.

It is said that Kumaradasa, the king of Ceylon, the author of the Janakiharana threw himself on the funeral pyre of his friend Kalidasa who was murdered by a courtesan of Kumaradasa 6th century A. A comparison of the two poets is inevitable, and Kalidasa does not suffer. His Rama exhibits a depth of near-tragic heroism unparalleled in Sanskrit literature. The lyric "elegy" Meghaduta Cloud Messenger is a short but striking work displaying another dimension of Kalidasa's genius.

This masterpiece tells of an exiled demidivinity who, in his anguish for the well-being of his bride, commissions a monsoon thunderhead to carry news of his safety to her in the north.

This work is the fount of an enormously productive genre in Sanskrit and related Indic literatures. The Meghaduta alone drew 45 commentaries, more than any other Sanskrit composition.

As love stories, Kalidasa's three dramas are not unusual, but the author's control of dialogue, situation, and detail is masterly. Though the Malavikagnimitrais assumed to be the earliest of Kalidasa's dramas, it is not an immature work. It is less satisfying than the other two because of its story. The Vikramorvasiya 's theme of the love of the human king and the divine nymph has greater potential for high pathos and even tragedy, and, for the most part, Kalidasa again takes advantage of the subject matter.

Here he must struggle with the truly Himalayan barrier of language. Since there will never be many Europeans, even among the cultivated, who will find it possible to study the intricate Sanskrit language, there remains only one means of presentation.

None knows the cruel inadequacy of poetical translation like the translator. He understands better than others can, the significance of the position which Kalidasa has won in Europe.

When Sir William Jones first translated the Shakuntala in , his work was enthusiastically received in Europe, and most warmly, as was fitting, by the greatest living poet of Europe. How explain a reputation that maintains itself indefinitely and that conquers a new continent after a lapse of thirteen hundred years?

None can explain it, yet certain contributory causes can be named. No other poet in any land has sung of happy love between man and woman as Kalidasa sang. Every one of his works is a love-poem, however much more it may be. Yet the theme is so infinitely varied that the reader never wearies.

It is of love eventually happy, though often struggling for a time against external obstacles, that Kalidasa writes. In his drama Urvashi he is ready to change and greatly injure a tragic story, given him by long tradition, in order that a loving pair may not be permanently separated. In this case it must be remembered that Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu, and the story of a mighty god incarnate is not to be lightly tampered with. The man is the more variable phenomenon, and though manly virtues are the same in all countries and centuries, the emphasis has been variously laid.

But the true woman seems timeless, universal. Kalidasa could not understand women without understanding children. It would be difficult to find anywhere lovelier pictures of childhood than those in which our poet presents the little Bharata, Ayus, Raghu, Kumara.

Beautiful as his women are, he never does more than glance at a little girl. No doubt it is easier for a Hindu, with his almost instinctive belief in reincarnation, to feel that all life, from plant to god, is truly one; yet none, even among the Hindus, has expressed this feeling with such convincing beauty as has Kalidasa. It is hardly true to say that he personifies rivers and mountains and trees; to him they have a conscious individuality as truly and as certainly as animals or men or gods.

The return to urban surroundings makes the vision fade; yet the memory remains, like a great love or a glimpse of mystic insight, as an intuitive conviction of a higher truth. Not only are the snows and windy music of the Himalayas, the mighty current of the sacred Ganges, his possession; his too are smaller streams and trees and every littlest flower. It is delightful to imagine a meeting between Kalidasa and Darwin. They would have understood each other perfectly; for in each the same kind of imagination worked with the same wealth of observed fact.

I know not with whom to compare him in this; even Shakespeare, for all his magical insight into natural beauty, is primarily a poet of the human heart. That can hardly be said of Kalidasa, nor can it be said that he is primarily a poet of natural beauty. The two characters unite in him, it might almost be said, chemically. The matter which I am clumsily endeavouring to make plain is beautifully epitomised in The Cloud-Messenger.

The former half is a description of external nature, yet interwoven with human feeling; the latter half is a picture of a human heart, yet the picture is framed in natural beauty. So exquisitely is the thing done that none can say which half is superior. Of those who read this perfect poem in the original text, some are more moved by the one, some by the other.

Kalidasa understood in the fifth century what Europe did not learn until the nineteenth, and even now comprehends only imperfectly: that the world was not made for man, that man reaches his full stature only as he realises the dignity and worth of life that is not human. That Kalidasa seized this truth is a magnificent tribute to his intellectual power, a quality quite as necessary to great poetry as perfection of form.

Poetical fluency is not rare; intellectual grasp is not very uncommon: but the combination has not been found perhaps more than a dozen times since the world began. Because he possessed this harmonious combination, Kalidasa ranks not with Anacreon and Horace and Shelley, but with Sophocles, Vergil, Milton. How can sympathy with one form of life do other than vivify our sympathy with other forms of life? We have seen that he had a formal and systematic education; in this respect he is rather to be compared with Milton and Tennyson than with Shakespeare or Burns.

He was completely master of his learning. In an age and a country which reprobated carelessness but were tolerant of pedantry, he held the scales with a wonderfully even hand, never heedless and never indulging in the elaborate trifling with Sanskrit diction which repels the reader from much of Indian literature.

It is true that some western critics have spoken of his disfiguring concerts and puerile plays on words. This is scarcely a matter for argument; a reader can do no more than state his own subjective impression, though he is glad to find that impression confirmed by the unanimous authority of fifty generations of Hindus, surely the most competent judges on such a point.

The only real criticism is subjective. We know that Kalidasa is a very great poet, because the world has not been able to leave him alone.