New Delhi, June 25
The Ministry of External Affairs received a request from China last year which flummoxed the Government of India and experts alike.
Beijing wanted a bust of celebrated Sanskrit poet-dramatist Kalidas to be installed by Shanghai Municipal Corporation which proposes to have a Shanghai Theatre Street shortly in downtown Shanghai to promote cultural awareness of its people.
The problem was that no photograph or sketch of Kalidas is available. Not even an authentic description of Kalidas is to be found anywhere.
The MEA sent the Chinese request to the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) for doing the needful. The ICCR got in touch with the Madhya Pradesh Government, which in turn established contact with the Kalidas Academy in Ujjain. The 6th century ad (circa) poet- dramatist is believed to have lived in Ujjain.
A panel of experts was formed for psychoanalysing works of Kalidas and on the basis of this psychoanalysis a sketch of Kalidas was made.
The experts came to the conclusion that Kalidas was a very good looking man- something which literary and historical anecdotes corroborate.
A 30-inch bust of Kalidas was
made. This may be the first incident of a well-known but never-sketched Indian literary giant’s statue being made on the basis of psychoanalysis of his works.Finally, the bust was made, approved by the ICCR Sculpture Committee and dispatched to China a fortnight ago, well in time for the Chinese requested deadline of June 2006.
The Shanghai Theatre Street is going to have busts of 19 internationally-acclaimed dramatists, including Shakespeare (UK), Aristophanes, Aeschylus (Greece), Moliere, and Jean Paul Sartre (France).
