01Seven works
Three plays: Malavikagnimitram, Vikramorvashiyam and Abhijnana Shakuntalam. Two mahakavyas: Raghuvamsham, nineteen cantos on the kings of Rama’s line, and Kumarasambhavam, on Parvati’s tapas and her marriage to Shiva. Two shorter poems: Ritusamharam on the six seasons and Meghadutam, in which a yaksha exiled to Ramagiri asks a monsoon cloud to carry his message north to Alaka, describing every hill, river and city the cloud will pass, Ujjain above all. Indian tradition says ‘upama Kalidasasya’, for simile, Kalidasa.
02Shakuntala in Europe
His date is not fixed. Tradition links him to Vikramaditya of Ujjain, and many scholars to the Gupta king Chandragupta II, who took that title. The outer limit is certain: the Aihole inscription of Pulakeshin II, dated 634 CE, says its poet Ravikirti has reached the fame of Kalidasa and Bharavi. In 1789 William Jones published an English Shakuntala in Calcutta. Georg Forster turned it into German in 1791, and Goethe wrote a quatrain in praise of it; the prologue of his Faust follows the pattern of Kalidasa’s prologue.
