4th century single mom

With a series of stage and screen adaptations of Kalidasa’s Abhijnanashakuntalam set to greet audiences, creators and scholars ponder questions about this ancient text’s enduring popularity and universal appeal

For Bengaluru-born Dushyanth Sridhar, who has learnt Sanskrit and its allied scriptures for over 15 years, regularly delivering lectures on the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Srimad Bhagavatam and Vishnu Purana among other texts, Kalidasa’s Sanskrit play Abhijnanashakuntalam wasn’t new. Even his name, he shares, derives from that of the play’s hero—King Dushyanta of Hastināpura, who falls in love with Shakuntala but fails to recognise her later until a ring breaks his spell of amnesia. Sridhar points out that the play is a quintessentially Indian text, bringing together a medley of emotions like love, loss, longing, pity and humour—the 4th-5th century CE playwright’s exploration of the nuances of passion and compassion highly laudable. What also makes Shakuntala relatable to the modern audience is her predicament as a single mother bringing up her son Bharata, the ancestor of the lineages of the Kauravas and Pandavas, and after whom India was given the name Bhāratavarsha.

Moreover, the work has been tried, tested and acclaimed throughout the world, having been adapted six times already in Indian cinema. The novelty then lay in attempting a Sanskrit screen adaptation of the film. Filmmakers like Mani Ratnam and Sanjay Leela Bhansali, while unmistakeably creative, have chosen the safer route by presenting films in languages that are spoken and have a seasoned industry, feels Sridhar, there being a 30-crore audience for Hindi and an eight-crore audience for Tamil films. “But most of our scriptures have come to us in Sanskrit,” says Sridhar, who believes the educated population, aware of the language’s ancient roots, would be keen to seek content in it. “Imagine Romeo and Juliet or Othello being made in Mandarin, Marathi, Maithili and Tamil, but not English. Kalidasa’s Abhijnanashakuntalam has been made in every possible language except Sanskrit.”

Amanda Culp

Sridhar’s upcoming film  Shaakuntalam which is slated for an OTT streaming app release soon, and for which the new director fortified himself with a distinguished team comprising the likes of editor B Lenin and music producer Sai Shravanam, offers glimpses of Chalukyan, Hoysala, Vijayanagara and Pallava architecture. Given the project’s cultural orientation, in this 75th year of Indian Independence, the Archaeological Survey of India, offered its sites for shooting for free. The film also uses Hindustani and Carnatic classical music, older instruments like the flute, veena, tabla and mridangam, along with Bharata Naytam, Odissi and Yakshagana dance styles, and handwoven khadi costumes, dyed with natural colours. According to its maker, the film has become “a fulcrum of national integration”.

Besides Sridhar’s production, a Telugu film, also titled Shaakuntalam, starring Samantha Ruth Prabhu in the lead role is expected to release next year. For Prabhu, switching from the ruggedness of her character in The Family Man 2 to the pristineness of Shakuntala’s form and nature presented a new challenge. She points out that besides the love story’s universal appeal, what drew her to it was its heroine’s individuality. “Initially it’s all about her exquisite features and delicate nature, but then you realise that she’s a strong woman and selfless mother. Women are often judged by their appearance, but [she is] so much more than what meets the eye.”
Playwright-director Isheeta Ganguly’s NCPA production Shakuntala Awaits will see an off-Broadway run in New York City in January 2022 at the HERE Theatre, and is also in development to get a Hollywood turn. The play, set in 2020, sees Shakuntala and Dushyant meet and fall in love at a Jackson Heights bookstore after which Dushyant returns to his professorship and life in Palo Alto, thereby setting its mythic cycle in motion. It ponders how love between two strangers is different today from that of the play’s original period and how two people can “see” each other if they never effectively “see” each other. Ganguly traces her interest in the text to the nightly stories her grandmother would tell her during her visits to Kolkata from the US. “The notion of a beautiful princess being accidentally discovered in a forest fed my imagination vividly. The ‘what is she like’, ‘does she wear jewels like a princess’ and ‘will she ultimately be able to take the ring back to the king’ shaped my ideas of mystery and romance,” she says. While navigating different cultural contexts, socio-economics, geographies and complex dating expectations, the play also, in this 21st century retelling, alters its meeker ending. “The traditional Kalidasa play has a somewhat regressive ending with Shakuntala succumbing to the peanut gallery of patriarchy by leaving the palace forlorn when the king can’t recognise her... My ending in the modern adaptation is hugely different where Shakuntala assumes agency of her fairy tale on her own terms.”

Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Dushyanth Sridhar and Isheeta Ganguly

For Dr Amanda Culp, visiting Assistant Professor of Drama at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, specialising in intercultural performance and Sanskrit drama, what is interesting about Kalidasa’s play is its many recirculated histories. “Obviously, there are the mythological connections to the story’s origins in the Mahabharata, making Kalidasa’s play itself a retelling, but the story of the play has also been told and retold for generations. It is, in many ways, the iteration of the story most well-known. It has been performed in every Indian performance tradition, from classical stage play to Sangeet Natak to Bharata Natyam to Kudiyattam. There is comfort and familiarity in such a story, but also a great opportunity for re-invention. If everyone knows the plot of the play already, an artist has a lot of flexibility in terms of adaptation and intentional changes to the story. To use the story, in other words, to reflect on the present day,” she points out. While her research suggests that interest in the play has never quite waned, it is this familiarity, she observes, that might be behind the recent resurgence of interest in the play. “So perhaps we could say that there is renewed attention to productions of this phenomenal play!”

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