The brightest star in India's literary firmament, Kalidasa has left no details about himself except the bare mention of his name in the Prologue to one of his plays. He is surrounded by a number of legends which form an important source, not utilized so far, to divine his personality. Whether true or not, they reveal something of his life, his likes and dislikes, his strong and weak points. On the basis of these the modern writers of Sanskrit have sought to draw a picture of the man that Kalidasa was.
The present study aims at finding out what kind of picture the writers have drawn and to what effect. It presents for the first time a detailed critical appraisal of as many as fourteen full-length works in the varied forms of drama, poetry and prose which help a discerning reader appreciate more forcefully than anything else the impact that Kalidasa has on the creative mind of the modern Sanskritists.
Born on 29th September, 1930, Professor Satya Vrat Shastri had his early education under his father, Professor Charu Deva Shastri. He received record marks in B.A. Hons. in Sanskrit and a First Class First in M.A. in Sanskrit from the Punjab University, and won University Medals. After doing his Ph.D. at the Banaras Hindu University he joined the University of Delhi, where during the thirty-five years of his teaching career he has held important positions as the Head of the Department of Sanskrit and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Lately he was Vice- Chancellor of Shri Jagannath Sanskrit University, Puri, Orissa. He has the distinction of having been Visiting Professor in five Universities on three Continents, Chulalongkorn and Silpakorn Universities, Bangkok, Thailand, the University of Tubingen, Tubingen, West Germany, the Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium and the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He has attended and chaired a number of national and international conferences and seminars and delivered more than a hundred lectures in universities in Europe, North America, Southeast Asia and the Far East.
Both a creative and a critical writer, Prof. Satya Vrat Shastri has to his credit in creative writing in Sanskrit three Mahakavyas of about a thousand stanzas each, one Prabandhakavya and three Khandakavyas, some of which have become subjects of research for the M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in Indian Universities, and five works in critical writing, including a pioneering one, The Ramayana - A Linguistic Study, and also one hundred research articles. He is the founding editor of two research journals, the Indological Studies and the Srijagannathajyotih.
Among the honours he has won are the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1968, an award from the Sahitya Kala Parishad, Delhi Administration, Delhi in 1974, the Medallion of Honour from the Catholic University. Leuven, Belgium in 1985, the President of India Certificate of Honour in 1985, the Siromaņi Samskrta Sahityakara Award from the Govt. of Punjab in 1985, and the Višişța Samskrta Sahitya Puraskara from the Uttar Pradesh Sanskrit Academy in 1988.
It was in August 1973 that I had been invited by the Kendriya Sans- krit Vidyapith, Tirupati for lectures under its Saradiya Jnana Mahotsava Programme. As asked, I had to write them in English. Since the audience there, as per the information conveyed to me, was not wholly to consist of traditional Sanskritists, I could not, evidently, go in for a Sastric topic. The only alternative was to think of something of general interest. In this Kalidasa readily came to my mind. But to say something original about him was by no means easy, so much having been written on him already. While analysing various possibilities, I hit upon the idea of making a try with the modern literature on Kalidasa. Nothing to my knowledge had been written on the subject so far. Some three or four works had by then crossed my eyes to suggest the topic to me but they would not suffice for the lecture series. I had to have more material. I set myself to the task in right earnest. I have a fairly large collection of modern Sanskrit writings which I have procured from various sources. I also subscribe regularly to a good number of Sanskrit magazines. Of a few of them, I have even the back volumes. I dived into this vast material and came out with a number of pearls in the form of writings on Kalidasa. To be exhaustive, I wrote to specialists on modern Sanskrit literature. None of them could add significantly to the information that I had collected through my own efforts. The existing Kalidasa Bibliographies were also not of much help in this connection.
The material available had made it clear to me that it was more than what was needed for the limited purpose of lectures. Why then not plan a book on this fascinating topic, I argued to myself. Originally I planned a single volume on it but decided later, in view of the bulk of the matter, to split it into two. The first of these is now ready for circulation. Before long the second one too would be ready similarly.
I have deliberately confined myself to only creative writings on Kalidasa. There are articles galore on Kalidasa in Sanskrit magazines. But apart from their Sanskrit medium, they, at least a majority of them, have little to commend. Much has been written on Kalidasa in English and other languages, European and Indian.
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