Abhijnanasakuntalam

Abhijnanasakuntalam, commonly known in English as Shakuntala or The Recognition of Shakuntala, is a Sanskrit play by the poet and dramatist Kalidasa, generally dated to around the fourth or fifth century CE, though the exact date remains uncertain. Drawing on an episode from the Mahabharata, the play tells of King Dushyanta, who while hunting meets and secretly marries Shakuntala, a young woman raised in a forest hermitage, before duty calls him back to his capital; before he can send for her, the irascible sage Durvasa curses Shakuntala, unheard, so that Dushyanta will forget her entirely unless she can show him a token of their union, and when she later travels to court, pregnant, to claim her place as his queen, the king fails to recognize her because she has lost the ring that was to prove her identity. Only after a fisherman recovers the ring from inside a fish does Dushyanta's memory return, and the play resolves with the couple's reunion and their son Bharata, who Indian tradition holds became an ancestor of the Kaurava and Pandava lines of the Mahabharata itself. Widely regarded as Kalidasa's finest work and the summit of classical Sanskrit drama, the play became known in Europe after Sir William Jones's 1789 translation, which influenced Goethe and inspired numerous later operatic, balletic and theatrical adaptations.