Kalidasa

Kalidasa is a great Sanskrit poet and playwright, in the 4th century BCE. His play Abhijnana Shakuntalam# is used as a commentary in the making of the Critical Edition

#Abhijnana Shakuntalam
- Abhijnana Shakuntalam translates as “the Recognition of Shakuntala”. It is a play written by #Kalidasa on the story of Shakuntala and Dushyanta. It is significantly different from how Vyasa depicts the characters in the Mahabharata.

Lecture 2: The Mahakavya of the Mahabharata
- I will not touch on whether the Mahabharata is history or not. We can say definitively that the Kuru clan existed. The places mentioned in the epic are still there. How much of the epic is hearsay and how much is historicity, no one can tell. Any writer, knowingly or unknowingly, reflects the socio-cultural ethos of their time in the work. For example, in #Kalidasa, we find the values espoused by the Manusmriti all the time. The compilation period of the Mahabharata is thought to be 300-400 BC to 300-400 AD, which is a very long time! In this period, we saw: