Śakoontalá Act 1

King Dushyanta, prince of Puru’s lineage, proposes Śakoontalá, daughter of the sage Vishwamitra and nymph Menaka and raised up by Rishi Kanwa, in his hermitage, as a fawn looks up. Painting by Raja Ravi Varma. Sourced from ‘Wellcome Images’ in the United Kingdom. Library Reference Number: ICV No 45729, Photo number: V0045115.

The Cosmographia Podcast season 3 is out now! Listen to Śakoontalá Act 1 - Part 1 from the album ‘Cosmographia: The Graeco-Romans, the Egyptians and Us - season - 3’ on Gaana, JioSaavn, Apple, Spotify, and a host of other worldwide streaming platforms! Herein Season-3, Episode-1, is a translation of Kalidasa’s famous literary masterpiece Abhijnanam Shakuntalam, probably the best work produced in the Sanskritic literature, by Sir Monier Williams, the second Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford, as done in the early 19th century. Innumerable archaic English words have been used in this play but they only add to the beauty of it, rather than making it what one may deem difficult. The act has been narrated until Dushyanta’s entry into the hermitage of Saint Kanwa and the remaining part of the Act 1 will be out in the next episode. Since the drama Śakoontalá entails a total of 7 acts, it would take 14 episodes to complete the entire literary masterpiece in its translated version. Till then, stay tuned to Cosmographia! Link to the podcast episode is at: https://lnkd.in/eUP3g6iN

Alberuni’s India: The Reign of the Hindu-Shahis of Kabul

This extract taken from Alberuni’s India by Dr. Sachau tells us about the ruling Shahis of Kabul, their origin, the benevolence they possessed and the dynasty’s end. Traveller Alberuni, having been someone in the service of Mahmud, was aware of the Shahis for quite sometime since it were the Shahis who had been contending against the prince Mahmud for time immemorial, and this is why it is no longer a surprise that Alberuni wrote about the Shahis of Kabul in the very first chapter of his work ‘Tarikh-i-Hind’ the English translation of which has, in this episode, been narrated.

The Yoga Darshana: A Soteriological Epistemology

Way back in time when man had not yet cultivated the senses of religion as they are today, and philosophy was but barred to the study of the Vedic hymns and other such venerated but secondary (to the Vedas) scriptures (the Upavedas, the Puranas, the Upanishads, Brahmans, Aranyakas and Samhitas), Indian seers had derived distinct sayings on life (from what they had primarily been shown in the Vedas) and how living was to be formulated. It is from this difference in interpretation of the Vedic hymns and a parallel analysis of the pseudoscientific karmic manifestation in a human, that the Shad Darshana schools of ancient Indian philosophy gradually stemmed out.

Cosmographia Ep. 5: Ovid and his ‘Ages of Mankind’

To classify Ovid as one of the elegiac successors in Latin litterateur irradiance, after Callimachus, Virgil or Lucretius would be an erroneous interpretation, since critic James Henry, someone who had entirely analysed Virgil’s Aeneid has said that Ovid was in his own terms, “'a more natural, more genial, more cordial, more imaginative, more playful poet... than [Virgil] or any other Latin poet.” Publius Ovidius Naso, better known by the abbreviation ‘Ovid’ and popularly through his work entitled “Metamorphoses” was a Latin poet who lived during the times of Augustus, the Roman Emperor who had banished him towards Tiempo, a small island on the Black Sea, which he himself had termed as a ‘carmen et error’ or "a poem and a mistake". This podcast episode is on the ‘Ages of Mankind’ as told by Ovid (Gold, Silver, and Iron) and is an audio retelling of my article of the same name on ScrollStack (souhardya.scrollstack.com)