About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Shakuntala* by Mirza Kazim Ali Jawan. It is a prose tale, with verses, made from the story of Kalidasa's famous Sanskrit play *Shakuntala*: the love of King Dushyanta and Shakuntala, the daughter of the fairy Menaka, their parting through a sage's curse, and their reunion through a lost ring.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page سکنتلا, downloaded in October 2026. The Wikisource note on the work says that Kazim Ali Jawan put it into Urdu in 1801 at the request of John Gilchrist, that it was first printed in 1804 in the Roman alphabet, and that Gilchrist printed it in the Urdu script in 1826. The text includes Jawan's own preface, written when the book was revised for a new printing.

What is left out and what was changed: every part of the author's text is given, in his order, including his preface. The online text is one continuous page with only one heading, "The Beginning of the Tale"; it has been divided here into seven chapters at natural breaks in the story, and the chapter titles (except that one) are new, added only to help the reader. The verse lines, which the online text sets one per line, have been paired into couplets, and two lines broken in the middle have been joined. One modern footnote mark has been removed. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: the book was written in 1801, and the author died early in the nineteenth century, long before 1961. The text is therefore in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Names are given in one spelling throughout: Shakuntala, Dushyanta, Vishvamitra, Menaka, Raja Indra, Kanva Muni, Gautami, Anasuya, Priyamvada, Durvasa, Som Raj, Chatri, Matali, Kashyapa Muni, Hemkut, Bharat. Urdu and Hindi terms kept in the English are printed in italics, explained where they first appear, and listed in the glossary at the end of the book.

Introduction

Jawan tells us in his preface how the book came to be written. In 1800 Colonel Scott, the British Resident at Lucknow, sent several poets to Calcutta at the request of the Governor General, and Jawan was given work in the Hindustani department under John Gilchrist. The very next day Gilchrist asked him to translate *Shakuntala*, and the poet Lallu Lal was told to write it out. Jawan worked from a version in Braj verse made by Nawaz Kishor in the reign of the emperor Farrukh Siyar, and he admits that turning *kabit* and *dohra* into prose was hard.

The story begins with the sage Vishvamitra, whose penance alarms Raja Indra, the king of the gods. Indra sends the fairy Menaka to break it; she bears a daughter and leaves her in the forest, where a bird shades her and the sage Kanva finds her and names her Shakuntala. King Dushyanta, out hunting, sees her watering the trees with her friends Anasuya and Priyamvada, and they marry by the *gandharva* rite. The angry sage Durvasa then curses Shakuntala, so that the king forgets her; she loses his ring on the way to his court, and he turns her away.

The rest of the story tells how a fisherman finds the ring, how the king remembers and grieves, and how Raja Indra calls him to heaven to fight the demons. On the way he stops at the hermitage of Kashyapa, sees a boy playing with a lion cub, and finds his son Bharat and Shakuntala. Jawan tells the tale in simple, lively Urdu, mixing Hindi words of the forest and the court with Urdu verse, and ends by giving the date of the book in the word *Rekhta* itself.