Kalidasa meditated on goddess Kali, gained enlightenment and returned to his wife who, in a beautiful turn of Sanskrit phrase, asked, “Asti kashchit wagvisheshah?' (Is there something special in your words?) The rest, as they say, is history.

When the newly wed princess discovered that her husband was a dunce, she threw him out. They helped him defeat the princess in a debate and she was honour-bound to marry him. Most agree that he was a village idiot who won the hand of Gupta princess Vidyotama because two scheming scholars presented Kalidasa as a learned man. Some say he is from Ujjain others say that he roamed Nagpur some say that he died in Sri Lanka, poisoned by a courtesan. I had assumed he was from Kolkata, but apparently not. Historians are in two minds about everything about him. In its form, it resembles prose but has the rhythmic gait of poetry. It is composed in a manner called Dandakam, which means it has more than 26 syllables per sentence.

Judged simply as one of Kalidasa’s minor compositions, this is a masterwork. For the moment, forget that it is in praise of goddess Saraswati who, in my mind, is not as interesting a god as the conflicted Rama, volatile Shiva or mischievous Krishna. For the moment, forget that this is a verse composed by the poet in a moment of religious fervour-something that I am deeply uncomfortable with. Kalidasa, arguably India’s greatest poet, wrote this verse in praise of goddess Saraswati.

Shyamala dandakam meaning word by word