Abhijnanasakuntalam of Kalidasa: Edited with Exhaustive Introduction, Translation and Critical & Explanatory Notes

Kalidasa is admired for the portrayal of human emotion on the canvas of natural loveliness. Based on an anecdote mentioned in the Mahabharata, the simple tale of Sakuntala and Dushyant has been turned into poetical painting of picturesque scenery through his wonderful imagination. No poet had a richer and fuller sense of sensuous loveliness or a more masterly command of the resources of suggestive incidents, imagery and pictorial phrasing such as would reveal that loveliness in words.

Tagore remarks there are two unions in Sakuntalam and the central motif of the play is the progress from the earlier union of the first three acts with its youthful beauty and romance

through an interval of separation and intense and speechless agony to the ultimate union in

the Elysian regions of eternal bliss described in the last act. The play, therefore, naturally

falls into three divisions each having a distinct atmosphere of its own-the first four acts

constituting the first division, the fifth and sixth the second, and the seventh act the last.

For the first four acts the scene is laid in the hermitage. The poet has already in the prelude intimated that it was the time of pleasant summer, and even within the precincts of the sacred grove every tree and plant is touched by its magic fingers so that “the wild-wood bloom outglows the garden flowers.”

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