A recognition of Kalidasa

KALIDASA ABHIJNANASHAKUNTALAM
The Recognition of Shakuntala
Translated by Vinay Dharwadker
Penguin Books
347 pages; Rs 499

Few people know that Swami Vivekananda was fluent in Sanskrit. He had a disciple named Sharatchandra Chakravarty who kept a diary, written in Bengali but it has since been translated into English. This anecdote is from this diary. Shri Ramakrishna had a householder disciple named Nag Mahashaya. On one occasion in 1897, when Sharatchandra Chakravarty was present, another disciple, who frequently visited Nag Mahashaya, came to meet Swami Vivekananda and mentioned Nag Mahashaya. Swami Vivekananda addressed this disciple in Sanskrit with a reference to Nag Mahashaya's great spiritual success. Translated, the quote reads: "We have been destroyed in our pursuit of the truth. O bee! You are the one who has indeed been successful."

What is remarkable is not that Swami Vivekananda spoke in Sanskrit, but that he used a quote from literature, Kalidasa's Abhijnanashakuntalam in this case. The Shakuntala story is about King Dushyanta and Shakuntala, and King Dushyanta said this when a bee was hovering around Shakuntala's lips.

Kalidasa was one of the greatest of Sanskrit poets. We don't know much about his biographical details or about when he lived and wrote - probably between 2nd century BC and 5th century CE. Among Kalidasa's works are Malavikagnimitram (the love story between King Agnimitra and Malavika), Vikramorvashiyam (the story of King Pururava and Urvashi), Raghuvamsham (the story of King Raghu's dynasty), Kumarasambhavam (the birth of Kumara or Skanda), Ritusamharam (about the seasons) and Meghadutam (when the cloud was used as a messenger).

Kalidasa was introduced to the world outside India through Abhijnanashakuntalam. That came about through a 1789 translation by William Jones. In the preface to this translation, Vinay Dharwadker writes, "Jones's inaugural rendering in English, based on an unedited form of the play in the Bengal recension, appears in England in 1789 (shortly before the French Revolution), and triggers other translations not only in the world's modern languages but also in those of India itself."

Indeed, there was a remarkable spate of translations. Among the early English ones, there was Monier Monier-Williams in 1856 and Arthur Ryder in 1912. The first German translation was in 1791, the one that enraptured Goethe. This was by George Foster and was based on the Jones' English translation. This is, thus, 225 years of the German translation of Abhijnanashakuntalam.

A couple of months ago, the Sanskrit Department of University of Calcutta invited me to deliver a talk on "225 years of the German translation" at the first Premchandra Tarkavagisha Memorial Lecture. Tarkavagisha was a noted professor in Sanskrit College, and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was one of his many illustrious students.

The discussant, a noted retired professor of Sanskrit from the university, asked me questions that flummoxed me. To understand the context, let me quote from Mr Dharwadker's preface. "Jones's English version, which is based on the latter's own intermediary interlinear rendition in Latin prose." With oral transmission, there were several versions of the text with some variations across them. This is not the Valmiki Ramayana or Mahabharata, where we have some kind of "Critical Edition". For many other texts, including Abhijnanashakuntalam, the Nirnaya Sagar editions are the best. This is what the translator uses, rightly.

We know that Jones based his translation on the Bengal recension. Jones was probably more familiar with Latin than with English. The discussant asked: which Bengal recension text did Jones use, and did he first translate into Latin and then into English, or did he directly translate into English? He didn't expect me to know the answers but to to illustrate that there are several questions to which we don't know the answers.

There are other English translations of Abhijnanashakuntalam - Michael Coulson in 1992, C R Devadhar and N G Suru (1934), W J Johnson (2001), M R Kale (1969), Barbara Stoler Miller (1984), Chandra Rajan (1989) and Somadeva Vasudeva (2006). So why another? Any translator undertakes a new translation because he/she is unhappy with existing ones. Mr Dharwadker has taken stock of these English translations (and Hindi ones) and given us in his own, based on the Nirnaya Sagar Hindi translation.

The translation is superbly done and Mr Dharwadekar explains lucidly what he has done and why (some people may not know that parts of Abhijnanashakuntalam are in Prakrit). I also loved the preface, the translator's note, copious Act-by-Act notes and appendices (such as ones on the role of time and space, staging and performance, rasa theory and Sanskrit verse forms). Anyone interested in an English translation of Abhijnanashakuntalam will get a very good flavour of what Kalidasa wrote.

This is also a scholar's treasure-trove. Penguin Classics has also given us English translations of Raghuvamsham (A N D Haksar) and Kumarasambhavam (Hank Heifetz). This is great going and I am sure the four remaining ones are in the pipeline. Reflecting my bias across Kalidasa works, I am waiting for Meghadutam. But on Abhijnanashakuntalam, do read this.