Gujarat professor discouvers rare works of Kalidasa in city

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangaluru, Oct 07, 2016: Reports inform that a Sanskrit scholar from Gujarat has found rare readings of Kalidasa’s manuscripts in Mangaluru city. Professor Vasanthkumar Bhatt has embarked on a mission to study the South Indian stage versions of poet and dramatist Kalidasa’s famous Sanskrit play ’Abhijnana Shakunthalam’.

The library at the University College, Hampankatta, one of the constituent colleges of Mangalore University, has in its cornucopia of collections ’Kalidasa - A complete collection of the various readings of the Madras manuscripts’ authored by Reverend T Foulkes. It was brought out in four volumes, with the first volume dating back to 1904 and printed by the Government Press, Madras (later Chennai) in Tamil Nadu.

In an interaction with media, Prof Bhatt who retired as the HoD, Sanskrit, and director of School of Languages, Gujarat University, termed Foulkes’ works in Romanised version as one of the rarest of works. Interestingly, the library at the University College has all five volumes intact while the library at Bhavan’s College, Mumbai, had only the second and third volumes.  Bhatt said, as the college was over a century old - celebrating its 150th year in 2018 - he was convinced that it will be having a repository of such tomes.

The library was already found to have a rich collection of 71,768 books to be precise, comprising Kannada, Hindi, Sanskrit, English and Malayalam works. And, his presumption turned out to be true. He has been spending most of his time in the library here, to bring out a compilation of various stage versions of ’Abhijnana...’ in another two to three years down the line.

Bhatt said, "What makes Foulkes works unique is that it is based on numerous manuscripts, which are themselves based on the works of Kalidasa. This definitely will lead to various versions of the play in gleaning more information on the same. Moreover, South Indian versions of the play in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam are distinct with their chaste approach sans titillating contents, as the later versions of the play in Bengali and Bihari is replete with such ’arousing’ contents."

Before arriving in Mangaluru, Bhatt had been to the Oriental Research Institute (ORI) in Mysuru. Yet again, Bhatt says, he could lay his hands on three palm leaf manuscripts on ’Abhijnana...’ written in ’Nandi Nagari’ script (a language prior to Hindi that does not exist).

Recalling his tryst with Kalidasa’s works that started five years ago, prior to his retirement, Professor Bhatt said his work took a turn when he visited the Alam Iqbal Library at Old Kashmir in Jammu and Kashmir.

Bhatt was awe-inspired when he found Kalidasa’s famous play, written in ’Sharada Manuscript’ which can be regarded as ’knowledge of Saraswati’. Three copies of the same have been preserved at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

It led him to Tamil Nadu, where he found the play written in ’Granth Script’ as Tamil language lacked consonants. On the basis of all these works, Bhatt could edit the Kashmiri stage version of the play that will be soon published by the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, New Delhi.

Bhatt explained that some portions of the play in Kashmir reflect the South Indian versions. Unlike other states, the South Indian versions were condensed suiting the conditions. The play was adapted into English theatre after Sir William Johns translated it to English during 1780.