In Fluence of Kalidasa on Rabindranath Tagore

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About the Book This book unfolds before the scholarly world many interesting aspects relating to the works of two celebrated poets of our land, Kālidāsa and Rabindranath Tagore. Dr. Chinmoy Howlader has treated the subject from some newer angles. He has very dispassionately put some new lights on his theme examined from linguistic, literary aesthetic and philosophical viewpoints. Hopefully the book would contribute a great deal to the study of these two renowned poets as a viable interdisciplinary approach.

About the Author Dr. Chinmoy Howlader is a writer, journalist and a radical thinker. He did his M.A. in Sanskrit from the University of Dhaka in 1994. Then he worked for his Ph.D. degree on Kalidasa and Rabindranath Tagore with ICCR Scholarship at the University of Pune (1996-2002). He has written quite a good number of essays and articles in Bengali and English published both in Bangladesh and India. His novel Crisis In Heaven (in Bengali) was published under the auspices of Bangla Academy, Dhaka, 1996. He writes in an easy to understand way. Presently he is working on his next fiction.

Foreword Kalidasa and Rabindranath Tagore were two great poets of two different ages in India. Although the former belonged to the ancient epic genre and latter to lyrics, they had certain common qualities of looking at things and treating them in a poetic manner. The present book, which emanates from a doctoral dissertation, is intended to bring out the influence of Kalidasa on Rabindranath Tagore from a mumber of thematic and stylistic features.

The young scholar Dr. Chinmoy Howlader has painstakingly mapped out examples after examples from different levels of forms and contents of the two poetic giants. He has also made use of a quite good number of references from diverse sources of literary importance and marshaled his thoughts in a scholarly manner with a view to substan tiating his proposition. Suitable and convincing illustrations from original works of both the poets have helped him put his decisions on strong grounds.

In fact the music and rhythm of the ancient Sanskrit poetry attained its perfection in the hand of Kalidasa, which had been a great cause for attraction to Tagore and naturally exerted a tremendous influence on him.

Anyway the scholar's analysis of the comparison and contrast between the two great poets of India distinguished by centuries of time and difference of language is very interesting and revealing. Again for human society's being in a state of flux, men's conception of the earth and the universe had undergone revolutionary changes.

Preface With a scholarship provided by the Government of India to pursue Ph.D.. I came to University of Pune, in September 1996. I was earlier prompted to work on Kalidasa specially by Mr. Ahmed Sofa, a distinguished author in Bangladesh. I chose to work on Influence of Kalidasa on Rabindranath Tagore and got myself registered as a Ph.D. research student under the guidance of Dr. Ujjwala Panse, Reader, Centre of Advanced Study In Sanskrit(CASS), University of Pune. As to my subject, I would like to say that some comparative studies between the works of Kalidasa and those of Rabindranath Tagore have been done by several scholars of Bengal. But these have not brought out the influence of Kalidasa on Tagore particularly at language and thought level. Similarly, a study on the influence of Kalidasa's concept of beauty, view of life, philosophy etc. on Tagore has not been found out. Thus there was a need and scope of doing research on this topic. Moreover, what is the relation of Tagore, as a modern seer, with his predecessor Kalidasa and how does he differ form him is also an interesting issue of study.

Introduction Kalidasa and Rabindranath Tagore are the two outstand ingly great poets born in India. In the history of the world literature, they have earned for themselves an ever-lasting position by their towering genius and marvellous literary achievements.

Kalidasa was born in ancient India and used to write in Sanskrit language. After Välmiki and Vyasa, the two great epic poets, it is Kalidasa who draws our attention most among the poets of Indian classical Sanskrit literature. He became well known to the literary world when his play Sakuntalam was published in various European languages in the last decade of the 18th century. First in 1789, Sir William Jones (1746-94) published Sakuntala's (The Fatal Ring) English prose translation in Kolkata. Two years later, George Foster produced German prose translation of Jones' English version of Sakuntalam which was published on 17th May, 1791.

**Contents and Sample Pages**