Abhijnanashakuntalam (Devanagari: à ¤ à ¤Âà ¤¿à ¤Âà ¥Âà ¤Âà ¤¾à ¤¨à ¤¶à ¤¾à ¤Âà ¥Âà ¤¨à ¥Âà ¤¤à ¤²à ¤®à ¥Â, IAST: AbhijñÃÂnaà ÂÃÂkuntalam), also known as Shakuntala, The Recognition of Shakuntala, The Sign of Shakuntala, is a Sanskrit play by the ancient Indian poet Kalidasa, dramatizing the story of Shakuntala told in the epic Mahabharata and regarded as the best of Kalidasa's works. Its exact date is uncertain, but Kalidasa is often placed in the 4th century CE.
Plots similar to the play appear in earlier texts. There is a story mentioned in the MahÃÂbhÃÂrata. A story of similar plot appear in the Buddhist JÃÂtaka tales as well. In the MahÃÂbhÃÂrata the story appears as a precursor to the PÃÂá¹Âá¸Âava and Kaà «rava lineages. In the story King Duá¹£yanta and à Âakuntalàmeet in the forest and get estranged and ultimately reunited. Their son Bharata is said to have laid the foundation of the dynasty that ultimately led to Kauravas and PÃÂá¹Âá¸Âavas.
Manuscripts differ on what its exact title is. Usual variants are AbhijñÃÂnaà ÂakuntalÃÂ, AbhijñÃÂnaà ÂÃÂkuntala, AbhijñÃÂnaà Âakuntalam and AbhijñÃÂnaà ÂÃÂkuntalam. The Sanskrit title means pertaining to the recognition of à ÂakuntalÃÂ, so a literal translation could be Of à Âakuntalàwho is recognized. The title is sometimes translated as The token-for-recognition of à Âakuntalàor The Sign of à ÂakuntalÃÂ. Titles of the play in published translations include Sacontalá or The Fatal Ring and à Âakoontalá or The Lost Ring.
Characters reciting the benediction are:
Characters of the play listed in order of their appearance:
The protagonist is à ÂakuntalÃÂ, daughter of the sage Vià ÂvÃÂmitra and the apsara MenakÃÂ. Abandoned at birth by her parents, à Âakuntalàis reared in the secluded hermitage of the sage Kaá¹Âva, and grows up a comely but innocent maiden.
While Kaá¹Âva and the other elders of the hermitage are away on a pilgrimage, Duá¹£yanta, king of HastinÃÂpura, comes hunting in the forest. Just as he was about to slay a deer, VaikhÃÂnasa, a sage obstructs him saying that the deer was from the hermitage and must not be slain. He politely requests the king to take his arrow back, to which the king complies. The sage then informs him that they are going to collect firewood for the sacrificial fire and asks him to join them. They then spot the hermitage of Sage Kaá¹Âva and decide to pay the hermits a visit. However the king decides to go to this penance grove dressed up as a commoner. He also stops the chariot farther away to not disturb the hermits. The moment he enters the hermitage and spots à ÂakuntalÃÂ, he is captivated by her, courts her in royal style, and marries her. Soon, he has to leave to take care of affairs in the capital. The king gives her a ring which, as it turns out, will eventually have to be presented to him when she appears in his court to claim her place as queen.
One day, the anger-prone sage DurvÃÂsa arrives when à Âakuntala is lost in her thoughts, and when she fails to attend to him, he curses her by bewitching Duá¹£yanta into forgetting her existence. The only cure is for à Âakuntala to show the king the signet ring that he gave her.
She later travels to meet him, and has to cross a river. The ring is lost when it slips off her hand as she dips it in the water playfully. On arrival the king is unable to recognize the person he married and therefore refuses to acknowledge her. Ã Âakuntala is abandoned by her companions who declare that she should remain with her husband. They then return to the hermitage.
Fortunately, the ring is discovered by a fisherman in the belly of a fish, and presents it in the king's court. Duá¹£yanta realizes his mistake - too late. The newly wise Duá¹£yanta is asked to defeat an army of Asuras, and is rewarded by Indra with a journey through heaven. After returning to Earth years later, Duá¹£yanta finds à Âakuntala and their son by chance, and recognizes them.
In other versions, especially the one found in the 'MahÃÂbhÃÂrata', à Âakuntala is not reunited until their son Bharata is born, and found by the king playing with lion cubs. Duá¹£yanta meets young Bharata and enquires about his parents, and finds out that Bharata is indeed his son. Bharata is an ancestor of the lineages of the Kauravas and PÃÂá¹Âá¸Âavas, who fought the epic war of the MahÃÂbhÃÂrata. It is after this Bharata that India was given the name "BhÃÂratavarsha", the 'Land of Bharata'.
By the 18th century, Western poets were beginning to get acquainted with works of Indian literature and philosophy. Shakuntala was the first Indian drama to be translated into a Western language, by Sir William Jones in 1789. In the next 100 years, there were at least 46 translations in twelve European languages.
Sacontalá or The Fatal Ring, Sir William Jones' translation of KÃÂlidÃÂsa's play, was first published in Calcutta, followed by European republications in 1790, 1792 and 1796. A German (by Georg Forster) and a French version of Jones' translation were published in 1791 and 1803 respectively. Goethe published an epigram about Shakuntala in 1791, and in his Faust he adopted a theatrical convention from the prologue of KÃÂlidÃÂsa's play. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel's plan to translate the work into German never materialised, but he did however publish a translation of the MahÃÂbhÃÂrata version of à ÂakuntalÃÂ's story in 1808. Goethe's epigram goes like this:
Raja Ravi Varma was widely praised for his ability to merge the Western academic painting style with Indian themes. In the 1870s, as he began creating narrative paintings, he drew inspiration from IndiaâÂÂs classical heritageâÂÂdrawing upon the epics, Puranas, and KalidasaâÂÂs plays. His first major work featuring Shakuntala, Shakuntala Patralekhan (Shakuntala Writing a Love Letter to Dushyanta), was painted for the 1876 Madras exhibition. The painting, which depicted Shakuntala lying on the forest floor in a yellow sari, surrounded by her friends and animal companions, won a gold medal and garnered widespread acclaim. It was immediately purchased by the Duke of Buckingham, then Governor of Madras. Though the location of the original painting remains unknown, it was widely reproduced in books and lithographs, including the 1903 publication Ravi Varma: The Indian Artist. Given the colonial fascination with the Abhijnanasakuntalam narrative at the time, Varma was encouraged to create multiple renditions of Shakuntala. His later works included Shakuntala (1888, Maharaja Fatehsingh Museum, Baroda), Shakuntala (1898, Government Museum, Madras), and Shakuntala Looking for Dushyanta (1898, Shri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum). One of his Shakuntala paintings was even selected as the frontispiece for Monier-Williams' 1887 edition of KalidasaâÂÂs play. His most famous painting, Shakuntala Looking for Dushyanta captures the moment when she feigns removing a thorn from her foot while actually glancing back to see if Dushyanta notices her.
VarmaâÂÂs works were equally admired by Orientalists and Indian nationalists. In 1895, VarmaâÂÂs first lithographic print, The Birth of Shakuntala, won the "Best Lithograph" prize at the Bombay Art SocietyâÂÂs annual exhibition.
Shakuntala was disapproved of as a text for school and college students in the British Raj in the 19th century, as popular Indian literature was deemed, in the words of Charles Trevelyan, to be "marked with the greatest immorality and impurity", and Indian students were thought by colonial administrators to be insufficiently morally and intellectually advanced to read the Indian texts that were taught and praised in Britain.
When Leopold Schefer became a student of Antonio Salieri in September 1816, he had been working on an opera about Shakuntala for at least a decade, a project which he did however never complete. Franz Schubert, who had been a student of Salieri until at least December of the same year, started composing his Sakuntala opera, 701, in October 1820. Johann Philipp Neumann based the libretto for this opera on KÃÂlidÃÂsa's play, which he probably knew through one or more of the three German translations that had been published by that time. Schubert abandoned the work in April 1821 at the latest. A short extract of the unfinished score was published in 1829. Also Václav TomÃ¡à ¡ek left an incomplete Sakuntala opera.
KÃÂlidÃÂsa's à Âakuntalàwas the model for the libretto of Karl von Perfall's first opera, which premièred in 1853. In 1853 Monier Monier-Williams published the Sanskrit text of the play. Two years later he published an English translation of the play, under the title: à Âakoontalá or The Lost Ring. A ballet version of KÃÂlidÃÂsa's play, Sacountalâ, on a libretto by Théophile Gautier and with music by Ernest Reyer, was first performed in Paris in 1858. A plot summary of the play was printed in the score edition of Karl Goldmark's Overture to Sakuntala, Op. 13 (1865). Sigismund Bachrich composed a Sakuntala ballet in 1884. Felix Weingartner's opera Sakuntala, with a libretto based on KÃÂlidÃÂsa's play, premièred the same year. Also Philipp Scharwenka's Sakuntala, a choral work on a text by Carl Wittkowsky, was published in 1884.
Bengali translations:
Tamil translations include:
Felix Woyrsch's incidental music for KÃÂlidÃÂsa's play, composed around 1886, is lost. Ignacy Jan Paderewski would have composed a Shakuntala opera, on a libretto by Catulle Mendès, in the first decade of the 20th century: the work is however no longer listed as extant in overviews of the composer's or librettist's oeuvre. Arthur W. Ryder published a new English translation of Shakuntala in 1912. Two years later he collaborated to an English performance version of the play. The work was staged at the Greenwich Village Theatre in New York in 1919 with Beatrice Prentice as à ÂakuntalÃÂ, Frank Conroy as Kaá¹Âva (also director for the production), Joseph Macauley as King Duá¹£yanta, Grace Henderson as Gautami, and Harold Meltzer as Matali.
Italian Franco Alfano composed an opera, named La leggenda di Sakùntala (The legend of Sakùntala) in its first version (1921) and simply Sakùntala in its second version (1952).
Chinese translation:
Fritz Racek's completion of Schubert's Sakontala was performed in Vienna in 1971. Another completion of the opera, by Karl Aage Rasmussen, was published in 2005 and recorded in 2006. A scenic performance of this version was premièred in 2010.
Norwegian electronic musician Amethystium wrote a song called "Garden of Sakuntala" which can be found on the CD Aphelion. According to Philip Lutgendorf, the narrative of the movie Ram Teri Ganga Maili recapitulates the story of Shakuntala.
In Koodiyattam, the only surviving ancient Sanskrit theatre tradition, prominent in the state of Kerala on India, performances of KÃÂlidÃÂsa's plays are rare. However, internationally recognised Kutiyattam artist and Natyashastra scholar NÃÂtyÃÂchÃÂrya Vidà «shakaratnam Padma Shri Guru MÃÂni MÃÂdhava ChÃÂkyÃÂr has choreographed a Koodiyattam production of The Recognition of Sakuntala.
A production directed by Tarek Iskander was mounted for a run at London's Union Theatre in January and February 2009. The play is also appearing on a Toronto stage for the first time as part of the Harbourfront World Stage program. An adaptation by the Magis Theatre Company featuring the music of Indian-American composer Rudresh Mahanthappa had its premiere at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York February 11âÂÂ28, 2010.
It is one of the few classical Sanskrit plays that have been adapted to the silver screen in India and of them the most adapted (another being the Má¹Âcchakatikàby Shudraka). These films mostly under the title of the heroine (Shakuntala) include ones in: 1920 by Suchet Singh, 1920 by Shree Nath Patankar, 1929 by Fatma Begum, 1931 by Mohan Dayaram Bhavnani, 1931 by J.J. Madan, 1932 by Sarvottam Badami, 1932 Hindi film, 1940 by Ellis Dungan, 1941 by Jyotish Bannerjee, 1943 by Shantaram Rajaram Vankudre, 1961 by Bhupen Hazarika, 1965 by Kunchacko, 1966 by Kamalakara Kameswara Rao, and 2023 by Gunasekhar. A television film, titled Shakuntalam, was an adaptation of the play by Indian theatre director Vijaya Mehta.
Bharat Ek Khoj, a 1988 Indian historical drama television series by Shyam Benegal based on Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India (1946), included a two part adaptation of the play and Kalidasa's life which aired on DD National. A television series adaptation of the same name was produced by Sagar Arts and aired on the Indian television channel Star One in 2009. It was adapted as Shaakuntalam in 2023 as a Telugu film.