कालिदासकोशः- Thesaurus of Kalidasa (Set of 2 Volumes)

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The Himalayas are our national mountain; the Ganges is our national river; the Gitä is our national scripture; and Kalidasa is our national poet. There is no appropriate author other than Kalidasa to be counted as the first. He is probably the first in chronological order and is so in eminence as a poet. He was recognised as the greatest poet by poets and writers of the future generations. There are statements about him that when Kalidasa is counted as the first among poets, there is no one to be counted as the second to follow him. He is placed with Veda Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, and Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana. They form a trio.
Kalidasa owes his fame to a number of factors. He is the oldest of the classical poets preserved in the school-tradition of Sanskrit. For centuries, his works Raghuvarisha, Kumāra sambhava, and Meghadata inspired Indian children to learn Sanskrit language and poetry.
These poems were taught by school-teachers verse by verse, explaining the formation of each word, furnishing the appropriate rule for each reconstruction, and defining each figure of speech. We have in manuscript-forms the lectures of some fifty of these school teachers from the 10th Century A.D. down to the present. That Kalidasa's poetry could survive such treatment is evidence of the author's invulnerable genius. For these children loved what they memorized and imitated Kalidasa when they came to write poetry of their own.
Again Kalidasa is only author of the classical tradition who wrote plays as well as poems. Other classical authors specialized in one or the other form of writing. The plays, until recently did not form part of the school-tradition; no ancient commentary on them is preserved. They were works that were read privately for pleasure or staged at courts for several textual variations. We have three plays of Kalidasa, which for 1,600 years have furnished us with models for aesthetic enjoyment, laughter, love and compassion.

The present study is the first study on Kalidasa's writings which (i) uses semiotics as a tool of lexical analysis and (ii) attempts to delineate Kalidasa's ideas so as to understand the vast design of linguistic corpus in the micro-level. This includes such factors as knowledge of pragmatic rules, the ability to use language for given communicative ends, the capacity of producing appropriate utterances to their context, awareness of social and deictic rules, and mastery of non-verbal semiotic systems necessarily involved in the communicative exchange (body language, haptics, proxemics, chronemix, etc.).
To some fortuitous writers and thinkers my work may seem to be a laborious and dreary work, but such has not been my feelings in the preparation of this work, as it has been conceived to break new ice in the field of the study of Kalidasian works.
The study of a work is virtually the study of the words used in it. Hence, this work incorporates stylo-linguistic analysis of 25.604 words, Kalidasa banked upon for his literary accomplishments, in an objective manner
Each generation discovered its own meanings in his words and accorded them to a ruthless subjective treatment. This work envisages a line of objective and scientific study by abridging generation gaps from his time to the present day. The march of the Kalidasian thought and the interpretations of his works evoked, have been presented in an unpretentious objective manner. It can serve as an eye-opener to those who still apply conventional methods to the study of his works. It may electrify their imagination to see Kalidasa in a new perspective.