Chandra Rajan

Chandra Rajan's translation is titled Kalidasa: The Loom of Time and subtitled A Selection of His Plays and Poems. It has translation of the whole of Abhijnanasakuntalam , Meghadutam and Ritusamharam . Educated in India with degrees in English and Sanskrit, Chandra Rajan is a good representative of the post-colonial Indian who straddles two cultures. She taught English in India and Canada. In her acknowledgements she thanks an eclectic mix – Indians for their help with the text and the foreigners for being the first readers and giving their response as “readers outside the culture” (9). This is indeed the empire writing back. Published by Penguin, its readers can be identified as both outside and inside India who are very definitely unfamiliar with Sanskrit and the Sanskritic tradition. She too has a lengthy introduction which introduces the reader to the world of Sanskrit drama and Kalidasa. The translation is not a word-to-word literal translation, but more of a sense-for-sense one that glosses over awkward structures and words. She has four appendices, which try to place Kalidasa in history, explains the lineage of Dushyanta and deals with passages in the poem Meghadutam that have been incorporated in other versions. Like the Kale translation, this too is scholarly, but much more streamlined to meet the demands of a receptor culture that is not familiar with the source text or culture. Consequently this is a smoother translation.