Selected Episodes From Raghuvamsam of Kalidasa

Valmiki, Vyasa, and Kalidasa are the three greatest poets of India, and one cannot have a living experience of Indian culture without some direct experience of the works of these three great poets. Kalidasa is the reputed author of Raghuvamsh Ritusamhara, Meghaduta and Kumarasambhavam Apart from these four poetical works, three dramatic works have been universally attributed to Kalidasa, viz., M a l a v I k a g n I m I t r a m,V I k r a m o r v a s h I y a m , Abhijnanashakuntalam.

In Raghuvams the poet describes a number of kings that belong to the House of Raghu, from Dilipa to Agnivarna Only a few episodes have been selected for this compilation, just enough to introduce to the reader a few glimpses of the idealism of the heroic qualities of kings like Dilipa, Aja, and Sri Rama. The victory of Raghu, the lamentation of Aja, the hunting expedition of Dash ratha and four chapters devoted to Sri Rama may be regarded as perhaps the best portions of Raghuvams

In all the works of Kalidasa we find a majestic style, charming suggestion, apt similes, beautiful ornamentation and colourful descriptions of nature as also the description of human happiness and suffering. It has been said that Poetry unveiled herself in all her beauty in the presence of Kalidasa.

[KALIDASA) is a true son of his age in his dwelling on the artistic, hedonistic, sensuous sides of experience and pre-eminently a poet of love and beauty and the joy of life. He represents it also in his intellectual passion for higher things, his intense appreciation of knowledge, culture, the religious idea, the ethical ideal, the greatness of ascetic self-mastery, and these too he makes a part of the beauty and interest of life and sees as admirable elements of its complete and splendid picture. All his work is of this tissue. His great literary epic, the “House of Raghu’ treats the story of a line of ancient kings as representative of the highest religious and ethical culture and ideals of the race and brings out its significances environed with a splendid decoration of almost pictorially depicted sentiment and action, noble or beautiful thought and speech and vivid incident and scene and surrounding. Another unfinished epic, a great fragment but by the virtue of his method of work complete in itself so far as the tale proceeds, is in subject a legend of the gods, the ancient subject of a strife of Gods and Titans, the solution prepared here by a union of the supreme God and the Goddess, but in treatment it is a description of Nature and the human life of India raised to a divine magnitude on the sacred mountain and in the homes of the high deities.