KĀLIDĀSA - SELECTED POETRY
AND DRAMA
(HarperCollins India, 2025)

Mani Rao's Kalidasa brings together a range of poetry and drama by the greatest poet and dramatist of Sanskrit literature and revitalizes them for the modern reader. 

Through her remarkable translations, Mani evokes in all its richness the vibrant montage of life in ancient India that Kalidasa depicted in his works: one replete with kings-queens-jesters-sages and abounding in romantic intrigues and promises, misunderstandings and betrayals; where humanity and nature intertwine, and characters negotiate their freedom within the framework of duty and destiny. She weaves into the renditions textual interludes for clarity, restores the names of personas otherwise denoted by their roles in the plays, and uses contemporary language to help the reader relate to the characters and contexts, while faithfully capturing the lyrical beauty in the texts in all its charm and intricacy. In doing so, she refreshes the tradition of Kalidasa's translations, and invites one and all to savour these absolute literary delights. 

In the end, as we enter the world of Kalidasa, his world too enters ours.

“Poet Mani Rao is Kalidasa's new cloud-messenger. Sharp and concise in her renditions, she makes Kalidasa's works live and breathe linguistically in our own time. In the process she creates, with rare skill, a new lyricism, makes the terse speak with unusual depth and feeling. As we go further away from our inheritances, translations like Rao's will help open up the extraordinary multiverse that is our past.”
– Sharmistha Mohanty

”Mani Rao's translations of Kalidasa are enormously respectful of the great poetry of the original and also enjoyable for their contemporary interventions and segues into our times. This is a must-read for anyone who is interested in poetry, drama, translation and Indic literary traditions.”
– Jerry Pinto

"Mani Rao's Kalidasa adds her own poetic voice to his classic works as she pulls them firmly forward into our times. She is neither afraid nor in awe of the texts she translates and renews them for all of us to enjoy. Rao's work, here and elsewhere, shows us that a classic can never be exhausted by multiple translations, it can only be enriched."
- Arshia Sattar