KALIDASA'S CONQUEST OF GERMANY

Sakuntalam Conquered Germany

The famous German poet Novalis (Georg Philipp Hardenberg-1772-1801), a close friend of philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, was inspired by Kalidasa's play, Abhinjana Sakuntalam. The death of his fiance Sophie von Kuhn, in her early youth, became merged in his mind with the German perception of India as the cradle of humanity, resulting in his romantic mystery poem about her, Hymns to the Night. In the poem, he united the values of the departed young soul of Sophie with the values of Hinduism, reflecting Friedrich Maier’s (who translated Bhagavad Gita into German in 1802) definition of Sanskrit poetry as Morgentraume unseres Geschlechtes, "the childhood dream of our species." (1)

In 1795, Novalis met the 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn. He became infatuated with her on their first meeting. In 1795, two days before Sophie turned thirteen they got secretly engaged. Later that year, Novalis's brother Erasmus supported the couple, but the rest of Novalis's family resisted agreeing to the engagement due to Sophie's unclear aristocratic pedigree.

Novalis

In the final months of 1795, Sophie began to suffer declining health due to a liver tumour. She underwent liver surgery in Jena, without anaesthesia. In January 1797, to earn a stable income for the intended marriage, Novalis accepted the job of an auditor to the salt works at Weissenfels. Sophie once more became extremely ill, during which time Novalis's parents finally agreed to the couple's engagement. However, two days after her fifteenth birthday, Sophie died, while Novalis was still in Weissenfels. Four months later, Novalis's brother Erasmus, who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, also died. These tragedies affected Novalis deeply. Sophie's death became the central inspiration for one of the few works Novalis published in his lifetime, Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night). Inspired by Kalidasa, he lamented in Hymns to the Night:

What yet doth hinder our return
To loved ones long reposed?
Their grave limits our lives.
We are all sad and afraid.
We can search for nothing more —
The heart is full, the world is void.

Infinite and mysterious,
Thrills through us a sweet trembling —
As if from far there echoed thus
A sigh, our grief resembling.
Our loved ones yearn as well as we,
And sent to us this longing breeze.

Kalidasa, the greatest Sanskrit poet of ancient India, became known in Europe in the last decade of the 18th century, through a translation of William Jones. At that time the English colonial rulers controlled more than half of all of India.

Sir William Jones (1746-1794) took over the post of puisne judge in the Supreme Court of Bengal in 1783 and founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. In 1789, just at the outbreak of the French Revolution, he published an English prose translation of Kalidasa’s Sanskrit drama Abhinjana Sakuntalam. Jones translated Sakuntalam into English as Shakuntala or the Fatal Ring. An astonished Europe, which knew only of the Greek tragedy, realised that ancient India had known the stage play, from ancient times. Jones called Kalidasa the Indian Shakespeare—a lame comparison because Kalidasa preceded him by at least more than ten centuries.

Jones actually completed his first translation of Kalidasa’s drama in Latin. He then rendered it word for word into English, without suppressing any material sentence and disengaged it from the stiffness of a foreign idiom and prepared the faithful translation. (2)

From then on India’s eternal spiritual values expressed through her immortal Sanskrit literature conquered the great creative minds in the West. The Abhijnana Sakuntalam of the fourth-century poet Kalidasa was in demand in the West for India’s eternal values. The influential French Indologist Sylvian Levi (1863-1935) wrote: (3)

"The name of Kalidasa dominates Indian poetry and epitomizes it brilliantly. The drama is a grand and scholarly epic, a truly classical masterpiece, which India admires and humanity recognizes. The praise which is saluting the birth of Shakuntala at Ujjayini has existed over long centuries, bringing illumination from one world to the other since William Jones revealed it to the West."

Lévi's book Théâtre Indien is an important work on the subject of Indian performance art.

Will Durant took note of the event thus: "In 1789 Sir William Jones opened his career as one of the greatest Indologists by translating Kalidasa’s Sakuntala; this translation, re-rendered into German in 1791, profoundly affected Herder and Goethe, and through the Schlegels (Friedrich and August)- the entire Romantic movement." (4)

Thus, Kalidasa’s play Sakuntalam made huge waves in Germany. In fact, so impressed was Goethe with Sakuntala that he decided to learn Sanskrit. Goethe also became acquainted with Kalidasa’s poem, Meghdootam (The Cloud Messenger). Kalidasa’s Vikramōrvaśīyam (Urvashi Won By Valour), as well as Malavikagnimitram, were all translated into German between 1827 and 1856, while Kumara Sambhavam (The Birth of the War God) was translated into German prose in 1913.

Goethe

It was when he attended a lecture by German Indologist Christian Lassen (1800-1876) expounding the Sakuntalam that another German Indologist Paul Jakob Deussen was fired up by Sanskrit and Hinduism.

Influence on Goethe

In 1791, as the Jacobins-the revolutionary democrats-began to extend the revolution against the wealthy in France, Georg Forster, the Mainz Jacobin, produced his German prose translation of Jones’ English version of Sakuntalam.

He sent a copy to Goethe, who was so enthusiastic about the drama that he sang its praises in two couplets:

If in one word of blooms of early and fruits of riper years,

Of excitement and enchantment I should tell,

Of fulfilment and content, of Heaven and Earth;

Then will l but say Sakuntala and have said all. *

Goethe had the lines printed in the Deutsche Monatsschrift (German Monthly Journal) the same year. Goethe wrote later: “Recalling the enthusiasm with which we Germans welcomed this translation of Sakuntala we can attribute the pleasure it gave us to the prose in which it came to us”. (5)

In Goethe’s correspondence and diaries, it is revealed that it held a special place in Goethe’s heart. (6)

French Scholar Antoine Leonard de Chezy presented Goethe with his French edition of Sakuntalam. In a letter of gratitude to Chezy, Goethe opened up himself before the European world: "The first time I came upon this inexhaustible work, [Sakuntala] it aroused such enthusiasm in me and so held me that I could not stop studying it. I even felt impelled to make the impossible attempt to bring it in some form to the German stage. These efforts were fruitless but they made me so thoroughly acquainted with this most valuable work, it represented such an "epoch in my life", I so absorbed it, that for thirty years I did not look at either the English or the German version. It is only now that I understand the enormous impression that work, made on me at an earlier age."

German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who was also living in Weimar at that time, set Goethe's couplet at the head of his article, On the Eastern Drama (1792). He said about the text, “I cannot find a product of the human mind more pleasant than this, a real blossom of the Orient, the first and most beautiful of its kind.” He also said that India was a holy land he yearned for.

He mentioned Sakuntalam again in 1798: “Since Sakuntala is unfortunately still the only example of her (India’s) perfected culture, one lingers with pleasure over it. We must have more Sakuntalas shortly, for they are the finest contributions to the cultural history of the peoples”. (7)

In 1803, Herder published Forster’s translation of the drama again and added a dedication to which he gave renewed his admiration for Kalidasa. Friedrich Schlegel came to know Forster’s first edition at the Leipzig Fair, and he wrote to his brother and poet August Schelegel about Sakuntala. He went later to Paris to learn Sanskrit and introduced the study of Indology into Germany.

Forster’s work had a very considerable influence on German middle-class society.

Friedrich Rueckert translated the drama directly from Sanskrit into German again in 1855, but it was only published in 1867, after his death.

The publication of Heinrich Heine’s posthumous works in 1869 brought to light that Heine had noticed something very special about Indian drama. In the chapter entitled Thoughts and Ideas he wrote: “Goethe made use of Sakuntalam at the beginning of Faust." (8) Goethe conceived the idea of the Vorspiel auf dem Theater (Prelude) in Faust from the prologue to Sakuntalam. All Sanskrit dramas will have a prayer in the beginning. In Sakuntala, an actor appears first on the stage and prays to Siva. Indian drama was part of a long religious ceremony filling several hours. Then the stage director comes on and informs the heroine that Kalidisa’s drama Sakuntalam is to be performed before an enlightened audience. The stage director then calls on the leading actress to sing a strophe in praise of the prevailing summer.

In Goethe’s prologue, the director comes out on the stage with the poet and the comedian and asks both for their help. He is embarrassed, for his audience is enlightened. The poet thinks only of posterity. The comedian will hear nothing of posterity and wants only to amuse contemporaries. The director demands an impressive spectacle. “Plunge into the fullness of life”, the comedian advises the poet; “everybody lives it, but few know it. And wherever you seize upon it, it is amusing.”

The poet speaks of “the urge towards truth and the joy of deceiving”. The three thus discourse on the deepest problems of art. Kalidasa followed the old Indian custom of composing a short prologue which introduces the audience to the poet and the title of the play. He used it to flatter his audience, composed of just a small group of gentlemen, nobles and Brahmans, higher officials, and perhaps a few wealthy merchants, who gathered on some festive occasion in a comparatively small theatre or the king’s court. The mass of the people was not even speaking chaste Sanskrit. They did not even understand the play. Thus, while the two prologues are different, the fact is that Kalidasa inspired Goethe to experiment with the alienation technique in drama, much much before the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht tried it.

Forster

Goethe also became acquainted with Kalidasa’s play Meghadootam, the Cloud Messenger, from H. H. Wilson's translation into English. In 1811 Wilson was appointed First secretary to the newly founded Asiatic Society in Bengal, and in 1813 he published the text and translation of the Meghadootam in Calcutta. In this poem, a spirit banned from its world sends a message through a cloud to his beloved in his homeland. Goethe wrote an epigram on this: (9)

What more pleasant could man wish?

Sakontala, Nala, these must one kiss;

And Megha-Duta, the cloud messenger,

Who would not send him to a soul sister!

In his “Notes to the West-East Divan,” Goethe recorded: “The first meeting with a work such as this is always an event in our lives”. (10)But he also criticised Wilson’s translation as too smooth. In 1826 Wilhelm von Humboldt praised this play for its wonderful description of the beginning of the rainy season when the first clouds come up from the South.

After C. Schuetz published the first prose translation of Sakuntalam in 1859 in Bielefeld, several others followed, some of them in verse.

In 1827 H H Wilson’s English translation of Kalidasa’s drama Urvasi Won by Valour (Vikramorvaseeyam) and a short summary of his third drama Malavika and Agnimitra became known in Europe. Malavika Agnimitram was translated into German by Berlin Indologist A. Weber in 1856. No less a man than prominent German Jew novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger prepared it for the German stage in 1917 under the title, The King and the Dancer.

Vikramorvaseeyam was published in 1814 by Bollensen in a German translation. Rueckert had only included a few translated Verses in his summary of 1834. In 1833 Rueckert also translated a few verses from Kalidasa’s epic poem, The Line of Raghu (Raghu Vamsa)—the section containing Aja’s mourning for his dead wife Indumati. A free metric translation appeared in German done by A. F. Von Schack in 1890 and in prose by O. Walter in 1914.

Kalidasa’s sixth work, The Birth of the War God (Kumara Sambhavam), was translated by Griffith into English in 1879 and by O. Walter into German prose in 1913.

Herder

Thus, it took over a hundred years for all six of Kalidasa’s works to reach Germans in translations. In 1921, Indologist Alfred Hillebrandt (1853-1957) first published his work, Kalidasa: An Attempt at a Literary Appraisal, in Breslau. It was written in 1918, during the war. 

Studies on Kalidasa

Hillebrandt studied Sanskrit and comparative linguistics at the University of Breslau as a student of Adolf Friedrich Stenzler, then continued his studies at the University of Munich under Martin Haug. In 1883 he became an associate professor at Breslau, where in 1887 he attained a full professorship. 

His speciality was Vedic mythology. Varuna und Mitra, ein Beitrag Zur Exegese des Veda (Varuna and Mitra, a contribution to the exegesis of the Veda, 1877) was a prologue to his great work Vedische Mythologie (1891-1902), which was later translated into English and published as "Vedic mythology". Hillebrandt also wrote:

Das altindische Neu- und Vollmondsopfer (The ancient Indian New and Full Moon Sacrifices, 1880), Vedachrestomathie (Vedic chrestomathy, 1885), A section on religious antiquities in Georg Bühler's Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde (Outline of Indo-Aryan Philology and Archaeology, 1897), Alt-Indien, Kulturgeschichtliche Skizzen (Historical Culture Sketches of Ancient India, 1899), and translation of Vishakadatta's play Mudrarakshasam Part-I )

In the study on Kalidasa, he describes the times, works and art of the poet in 166 pages and comes to the conclusion that “Kalidasa can never approach the popularity of our ancient classics amongst us.” Indian Literature is “too far removed from our sensitivity to competing with Homer or with the poet of the Antigone, or to hold permanently the interest of educated persons in the way Shakespeare or Dante does …. We find too little manly strength, too little dramatic élan, too little inner struggle and revolt against fate… We demand deeper problems." (11)

But no one can accept Hillebrandt’s shoddy judgment. Hillebrandt wrote for a narrow circle of educated persons who were searching for a way out of Germany’s post-war misery in world literature. Germany cannot demand a “revolt against fate” etc. from an Indian classical poet. Kalidasa wrote for the peace-loving Indian people, who never wanted a tragedy in theatre, and Sage Bharata prohibited tragedies in Indian theatre in his treatise, Natya Shastra. Except for a couple of tragedies, Indian theatre is generally for happy endings. Germans have to try to understand Kalidasa in his own background-Goethe and Herder had found a great poet in Kalidasa, who loved his fellowmen and gave vent their passions, joys and sorrows vividly, and he had a critical attitude towards the weaknesses of the ruling elite of his time.

Kalidasa‘s world is strange to Europeans. But Germans, and Europe for that matter, need to understand this world. Once through the strange outer boundaries, they quickly find the general human content within. The European world will be poor if they remain confined to their own German or European culture.

The German naturalist, traveller and statesman Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) wrote about Indian poetry and observed that Kalidasa is a masterly describer of the influence which Nature exercises upon the minds of lovers. This great poet flourished at the splendid court of Vikramaditya, and was, therefore, contemporary with Virgil and Horace. Tenderness in the expression of feeling, and richness of creative fancy, have assigned to him his lofty place among the poets of all nations. (12)

Hillebrandt

Georg Forster, the Jacobin, wrote in his introduction to his translation of Sakuntalam (1791): “Every country has its peculiarities, which influence the spiritual powers and the organisations of its people. If we compare these varying individualities and separate the general from the local, we shall arrive at the right understanding of mankind... Here an entirely new vista opens up before our feelings and our imagination, an extraordinarily beautiful individuality of the human character... It is necessary to set out clearly how the differences between Indian mythology, history and customs and the Greek, for instance, lend the artworks of that country an unusual form and appearance to us, but also to show how the significant thing about such works is not whether they consist of five or seven scenes, but that the most delicate feelings which the human heart can sense can be just as finely expressed on the Ganges by dark brown people as on the Rhine, the Tiber or the Ilissus by our white races”. (13)

Walter Ruben's Views

Acknowledging this view, Walter Ruben (1899-19820, a renowned German Marxist Indologist studied Kalidasa in detail and produced an important book in German, Kalidasa Die menschliche Bedeutung seiner Werke (Kalidasa and the Human Meaning of His Works -1957). Ruben belonged to the ranks of the great German Indologists such as Max Muller, Hermann Oldenberg, Hermann Jacobi and Heinrich Luders, who devoted their lives to building up intellectual relations between Germany and India. To Ruben, the studies of Indian history and languages were not an end in itself but an endeavour to find things from the point of view of continuity in India’s historical progress through various social formations. (14) Thus, he studied Kalidasa from a historical perspective.

He alludes to Kalidasa's death in Sri Lanka. King Kumaradasa of Ceylon wrote one day on the wall of a courtesan’s room the beginning- of a verse (he was himself a poet) and offered gold as a prize for anyone who completed the verse. Kalidasa did so, but the courtesan, greedy for gold, killed him, buried him and herself took credit for the poem. Of course, the King detected the deception, for he was familiar with Kalidasa’s art.

King Kumaradasa of Ceylon is said to have ascended the throne in 515, and this seems to fit in with Kalidasa’s time, even though dates are often contradictory. Presumably, Kalidasa was already well known in 473, for at that time a poet in Mandasor (which is near Kalidasa’s home) caused an inscription to be carved on the sun temple, some of whose verses are modelled on Kalidasa’s. Others assert that Kalidasa can only have composed one part of his “Line of Raghu” after 455. In this part, he praises the mythical King Raghu on account of a victory he won over the Huns. Th^ oldest victory of an Indian king over the Huns known to us, however, was that of King Skandagupta of the glorious Gupta dynasty, who ascended the throne in 455.

So, Kalidasa would have lived between Skanda Gupta’s time (approximately 455-467) and Kumaradasa’s (515) but was already being imitated in 473. Other Indologists think that Kalidasa had already lived under Samudragupta and (or) Chandragupta II (375-375 or 375— 413), that he praised the victories of these in his works, and also that these two kings had taken the additional name of Vikrama, at whose court Kalidasa is traditionally supposed to have lived.

If these chronological assumptions are correct, Kalidasa lived in the times of the famous Gupta kings, between 320 and 455 which is generally regarded as India’s golden age. In the times of the above-mentioned Chandragupta II — perhaps also in Kalidasa’s time — a Chinese Buddhist, Fa Hsien, lived for about ten years in the Kingdom of the Guptas and left an enthusiastic description of conditions there.

Ruben

Fa Hsien praised the government for its generosity for instance, that no passes were needed, that there was no death penalty and that rebels only suffered punishment by having the right hand chopped off, that the people lived pious Buddhist lives, ate no meat, drank no wine, that there were no wine shops and no butchers’ shops and so on. But he also mentions that Candalas, as “untouchables”, lived apart from “clean” persons and, when they passed along crowded roads, has to tap a warning of their approach with a stick.

Buddhism plays but a small role in Kalidasa’s work, and the ascetic life none at all. The young queen in “Malavika and Agnimitra” even comes on to the stage in the third act in a slightly drunken condition, and is pleased about it, without being criticised by anyone on that account. And at the beginning of Act II of “Sakuntala,” the comic Brahman complains that there is practically nothing but meat roasted on the spit at the King’s hunting excursion.

There can be no doubt that Buddhism was a living religion during this period in India, and that about that time the Buddhists developed a system of logic which is generally placed on a level with Aristotelian logic. Thus it can be assumed that the Buddhist pilgrim Fa Hsien saw only the Buddhist India of that period and Kalidasa, as Sivaite, only the Brahman India. It should, however, be noted that Fa Hsien mentions the sad fate of the “untouchables”. We may conclude from this that the glory of the Gupta court was to a great extent built on human misery.

The Gupta kings ruled over a mighty kingdom which included almost all of northern India, the broad Ganges basin between the Himalayas and the mountains of the Deccan, the northern area of which belongs to the West-East Narbada line. In northern India, the first States existed before 2000 BC. Here the primitive forests of the Ganges valley were almost all cut and ploughed in Kalidasa’s time. Here the Videha tribe, in the last stages of the decline of the gentile society, was mentioned for the last time in the history of northern India at the beginning of the Gupta period. Here, shortly after the invasion of Alexander of Macedon in 326 BC, there had a mighty kingdom which, however, existed only for four generations of its dynasty, the Maurya, similar to the Gupta kingdom itself, which began to decline in its fifth generation under Skandagupta.

Ujjain was at that time not only the centre of the Gupta power but also of Indian astronomy. Since about the third-century old Indian astronomy had received powerful impetus through Alexandrian scholars. Greek-Roman astronomical works were revised by Indians, and Ujjain was the Greenwich at that time for the Hindus, for, according to the Greek tradition through Alexandria, their meridian ran through this city. This scientific contact and development should be highly valued, and occasional references in Kalidasa’s works indicate the influence of Greek-Roman astronomy.

Mathematics is closely connected with astronomy in India. The famous mathematician and astronomer Aryabhatta lived and worked approximately in Kalidasa’s time. He is said to have been born in 476 and to have taught that the earth revolves around its own axis. 

Logic, as already indicated, was an essential subject of study at that time. Of the Brahmans, mention should be made of Vatsyayana in the Gupta period, who was the first to advance from evidence to conclusion, and of the Buddhists mention should be made of Dignaga, who made a systematic investigation of the possibilities of compulsive, probable and false conclusions. Grammar had already been brought to completion about five hundred years previously, and all aspects of the Sanscrit language had been interpreted in rules. At the latest half a millennium before Kalidasa’s time Sanscrit had ceased to be a living language and was spoken only by scholars and poets — who were of course also scholars.

Indians of Kalidasa’s time also made a study of love, which seems to us an unusual subject of scientific study. This was an investigation of the strategy and economics of the forces in the love conflict between the sexes. This “science”, as contained in the textbook of Vatsyayana available to us, had probably been set down sometime before Kalidasa’s day. Many believe that Kalidasa himself paid careful attention to the details of this teaching. In his epic, The Birth of the War God, during the wedding of the two gods, the man’s hand perspires from excitement; in his other epic, The Line of Raghu, the wife’s hand perspires during the wedding of Aja and Indumati. The second description follows the instructions on love, and it was therefore cleverly supposed that the latter work was written later and that the poet here wished to correct the “mistake” he had made in the earlier work. It is of course not certain that the poet actually was such a “scholar” or pedantic. Perhaps, on the contrary, he wished in his later epic to break away from his earlier slavish adherence to the tradition of love teachings. The order in which the two works were written is in fact not certain, and such arguments based on comparison are therefore not conclusive. 

Myths, sagas and semi-historical happenings must have been sung in epic form amongst the peoples in very early times; more than 500 years before Kalidasa Brahmans must have created the two great Indian epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, in this way. They modified them according to Vishnu traditions, but Siva also plays a considerable role in the Mahabharata. Later poets took most of their subject matter from these epics. Kalidasa took the subject of his Line of Raghu from the Ramayana and of his Sakuntala, Urvasi and The Birth of the War God from the Mahabharata.

So when Kalidasa, for example, in his Line of Raghu, deals with the ancestors and descendants of the mythical hero Rama, he did not take their order entirely from the Ramayana, the old epic of that hero, nor entirely from the Vishnu Purana, or from any other surviving Purana, but his material is certainly of Purana origin and so is the poet’s religion. There were certainly remains of the Vedic religion in his time. In the fifth act of Sakuntala, for instance, the king permits a delegation of forest hermits to be received by his teacher and palace priest Somarata. He then has them led into the hall of the Vedic fire cult, receives them there himself and finally acts on the advice of his palace priest. 

In Manu Smrithi VII, 58 it is further stated that the king should discuss all important political questions with a learned Brahman as the most worthy of his ministers. The kings in Kalidasa’s Malavika and Sakuntala do actually consult with a minister over certain questions — in Malavika even with a council of ministers, but not especially with a learned Brahman. On the other hand, Kalidasa’s kings have a Brahman as a comic figure near them, according to the custom of the Indian theatre.

Reuben points out that Rabindranath Tagore’s book Shipwreck (1906), is convincing evidence of Kalidasa’s living influence. Here Tagore himself refers to The Birth of the War God, and a comparison of the two works shows that Tagore was considerably influenced by the older work. Tagore had occupied himself since the early 1890s with Kalidasa’s verse and prose works, but especially with Sakuntala, Meghaduta and Kumarasambhava.

Tagore has, so to say, translated the old Siva fable into the modem form, using it as one thread running through his novel. In both Kalidasa’s Birth of the War God and Tagore’s Shipwreck we find a widower who practices yoga rites and retreats from this world, but Tagore’s figure works as a doctor. In 1886 — when Tagore was 25 — the first part of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita was published in Bengal. Swami Vivekananda, taught in Bengal during the 1890s a new interpretation of the Gita, its yoga in action and its other forms of yoga.

Sakuntala, the Marvel 

Sakuntala became one of the most circulated Indian masterpieces- it was reprinted five times in England between 1790 and 1807 and it was retranslated and published many times throughout Europe. (15) The century after Jones translated it, Shakuntala appeared in forty-six translations in twelve different languages in Europe. (16)

Jones went on to translate another of Kalidasa’s poems, Ritusamhara, in 1792. He published it in Calcutta as The Seasons, A Descriptive Poem. (17) His English translation of Shakuntala, together with his Hymns to Narayana, were studied with fond devotion by Percy Bysshe Shelly(1792-1822), Robert Southey(1774-1843), Thomas Moore(1779-1857), Alfred Tennyson(1850-1892) and other nineteenth-century English poets. (18) Thanks to the influence of Jones’ Shakuntala and Hymns to Narayana, Shelly was able to overcome his atheistic and materialistic tendencies. (19)

Sophie, fiance of Novalis

In 1853, the Sanskrit-English lexicographer, Sir Monier Monier-Williams(1819-1899) came under the eternal charm of Sanskrit. In his Sakoontala or The Lost Ring: An Indian Drama, Translated into Prose and Verse from the Sanskrit of Kalidasa, Monier Williams presented the English public with a free translation of Shakuntala. It was published in 1855 followed by a second edition in 1876. In his Introduction he wrote:

"The most celebrated drama of the great Indian Shakespeare. The need felt by the British public for such a translation as I have here offered the most popular of the Indian dramas, in which the customs of the Hindus, their opinions, prejudices, and fables; their religious rites, daily occupations, and amusements are reflected as in a mirror."(20)

Monier Williams highly appreciated Kalidasa’s use of eleven different varieties of meter in the first thirty-four verses of the poem… He chose to employ in his translation both blank verse and rhyming stanzas. (But) He felt his own meters to be prosaic and was aware that he might not have expressed in language as musical as his(Kalidasa’s) own. (21) He humbly acknowledged, "I have done all in my power to avoid substituting a fictitious and meagre poem of my own and that œno metrical system in English could give any idea of the almost infinite resources(of Sanskrit)". (22)

During the 1790s, Oriental research in Jena, Weimar and Heidelberg and then at Bonn, Berlin and Tubingen was established. German translations and re-translations of Sakuntalam, along with the Laws of Manu and the Gita Govinda were studied in depth and ignited a fervid intensity in receptive German minds. (23)  Their contact with India’s original and universal religion through its literature gave them a sense of enlightenment.

_________________________________

1. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, New York, Oriental Renaissance, p 53

2. Dorothy Matilda Figueira, Translating the Orient, The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Albany, 1991, p 26

3. Quoted in Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, Calcutta 1946, p 175

4. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, p 391-2

5. Walter Ruben, Kalidasa: The Human Meaning of His Works, trans. Joan Becker,
People's Publishing House, New Delhi, 1984, p 2

6. J.W. von Goethe, Werke, Weimar ed.(W.A), Weimar, 1887-1912, cited from Translating the Orient, 215,p 5

7. Ruben, p 1

8. Ibid, p 2

9. Ibid, p 5

10. Ibid, p 5

11. Ibid, p 4-5

12. Quoted in the Introduction, Monier Williams, Sakoontala: or the Lost Ring, Hertford, 1855, x

13. Ruben, p 7

14. Abanti Kumar Sanyal, A Tribute, Walter Ruben, Kalidasa: The Human Meaning of His Works, trans. Joan Becker, People's Publishing House, New Delhi, 1984

15. Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, New York, p 51,53

16. Dorothy, Translating the Orient, p 12

17.Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p 31

18. Marie E.D.Meester, Oriental Influence in the English Literature of the Early Nineteenth Century, p10

19. P.V. De Sola, Sir William Jones and English Literature, p 694

20. Moniere Williams, Sakoontala, p xi-xii

21. Ibid, p xiii

22. Ibid, p xii

23. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p 53

* Translation by E.B.Eastwick:

Wouldst thou the young year's blossoms and the fruits of its decline,

And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed,
Wouldst thou the earth and Heaven itself in one sole name combine?
I name thee, O Sakuntala! And all at once is said.

© Ramachandran