Appointment with Kalidasa

Author(s): G K Bhatt
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 55

Appointment with Kalidasa
unrivalled eminence in handling successfully such diverse literary forms as lyric, epic and drama, which no other poet in Sanskrit literature could do. That is why, we would have liked to know something about the personal life and personality of this great poet.
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Since Kalidasa is completely silent about himself, the unsuppressible curiosity must have led to the rise of several legends about his personal life, aided by the dazzling fame the poet seems to have acquired in his own life-time. The legendary stories look like the creations of imagination; they cannot have any historical truth in them. But if tradition raised these stories, making a mountain of a mole-hill, they deserve a critical analysis in order to discover the basic personal detail or quality the mole-hill-which may have provided the foundation for raising superstructure of imagination,
the
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According to one such legend, Kalidasa was born in a Brahmin family but was an orphan. A family of cowherds looked after the boy and raised him. The boy grew up till 16 or 18 years of his age in the company of cowherd boys, illiterate and uneducated; but he was very handsome and fair and a picture of perfect health. It so happened that the king of that country had a daughter who was very beautiful (as heroines of stories are expected to be !). She was also educated in all the fästras and trained in all the arts. When she came of age, she declared that she would choose her husband after testing him in sciences and arts, a whim though, quite consistent with the daughter of a king. But no young man could satisfy the princess who was herself a trained scholar and an accomplished artist. The king lost all hope for getting this girl ever married; and his minister too was frustrated and desperate. The minister wished to teach the obstinate princess a lesson. In his search for a suitable bridegroom, the minister chanced to see this handsome, healthy boy, Kalidasa, and decided to work up a plot to hoodwink and outwit the princess.
Another version of the story gives a varying detail. The king of Banaras wanted his daughter to marry the famous grammarian Vararuci. The princess refused. Vararuci felt humiliated and insulted. He hatched a plot to punish the princess using a cowherd boy.
The minister, in our story, brought Kalidasa secretly to his residence, kept him happy with good food, clothes and ornaments, gave him a little idea of what he intended to accomplish through him, and gave him a strict warning that he must not open his mouth to speak under any circumstances. Having thus prepared the boy the minister managed to bring from Kas a band of young boys trained in different sastras and arts, and sent word to the king and princess for a meeting. Kalidasa was posed as a young scholar who had arrived to woo the princess and