raghuvamśam of kālidāsa - Pre content

 Published by

 Shubhra Ketu Foundation

and The Mother's Institute of Research

This monograph is part of a series on Value-oriented Education centered on three values : Illumination, Heroism and Harmony. The research, preparation and publication of the monographs that form part of this series are the result of the work and cooperation of several research teams of the Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER) at Auroville.

      General Editor: KIREET JOSHI

      Author of this monograph: Prof. G.C.Nayak,

M.A.(Alld.), PH.D. (Bristol)

      Art work: Auroville Press Publishers

Printed at Auroville Press, 2010

© Shubhra Ketu Foundation

and

      The Mother's Institute of Research

mothersinstitute@gmail.com

ISBN 978-81-89490-13-4

Illumination, Heroism and Harmony

Selected Episodes Form

  Raghuvarhsam

      of

      Kalidasa

      General Editor: Kireet Joshi

On 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.

 

      — Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture,

     SABCL, Volume 14, pp. 300-1