your bridge home
Saints and Poets
Sita is standing in the forest watching her husband grieve for her, and she cannot say a word.
Bhavabhuti wrote a line about you.
Not about you personally. About whoever was going to understand him, whenever that turned out to be, because he had concluded it was not going to be anybody in the room.
The verse says roughly this: those who sneer at this, let them. This was not made for them. Somebody will be born, some day, who thinks as I do, for time is long, and the world is wide.
That is one of the most quoted things in Sanskrit, and it was written by a man who was not having a good time.
Bhavabhuti lived around 680 to 750 CE, born at Padmapura in Vidarbha, in what is now Maharashtra. He was a brahmin, and by the internal evidence a very learned one, the plays carry philosophy, grammar and Mimamsa in them, worn lightly but there.
He worked, at least for a time, at the court of Yashovarman of Kannauj.
And that is essentially the biography. No anecdotes, no legend of divine intervention, no romance of the kind attached to Kalidasa. He gives a little information about his own family in his prologues, in the conventional way, and otherwise leaves nothing.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.