Author: Kalidasa
Biography:
KALIDASA (fl 5th century)
Kalidasa, a celebrated and semi-legendary Indian poet, is associated with three plays, two epic poems, and two long lyric poems. The 1813 edition of one of those Sanskrit lyric poems with an accompanying English verse translation was the work of a young surgeon in the employ of the EIC, Horace Hayman Wilson, of whom a brief biography follows. Kalidasa is believed to have been a court poet though there is some disagreement about the period in which he lived and hence about whose court he was at. The present consensus suggests the fifth century. Nothing is known of his personal life. His translator, Wilson, was according to ODNB born in London on 26 Sept. 1786, the illegitimate son of an EIC employee, George Paterson, Jun., and a Miss Woolston or Wilson. (No public records have been found to confirm either this or competing Ancestry parentages.) He trained as a surgeon and went out to India in 1809, beginning his study of Indian languages on the voyage out. During the 24 years he spent in India, he had three sons with two women before he married Frances Sarah Parr Siddons (1808-78) at the Anglican cathedral in Calcutta on 11 Mar. 1829. The couple had seven daughters, six of whom grew to maturity. Wilson had a prodigious career as an Orientalist and advocate for reforms in Indian education. Apart from his official duties as an assay master at the Calcutta mint from 1816, he was secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, published in its journal, and took an active part in Calcutta theatre. In 1832 he was appointed the first professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, and returned with his family to England in 1833. He was awarded an MA by decree in 1833 and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1834. Besides a Sanskrit-English dictionary (1819) and translations of plays (1826-7) that he had published in India, he produced further literary translations and lectures on Indian history and religion. In 1836 he moved to London to become the Librarian at East India House. He died at his London home on Upper Wimpole St, Marylebone, on 8 May 1860, leaving an estate valued at under £12,000. (EB 29 June 2024; Encyclopedia Britannica [1911] 13: 641; “Wilson, Horace Hayman,” ODNB 29 June 2024; Alumni Oxonienses; GM Aug. 1860, 196-8)
Other Names:
- Calidasa