For Bengaluru-born Dushyanth Sridhar, who has learnt Sanskrit and its allied scriptures for over 15 years, regularly delivering lectures on the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Srimad Bhagavatam and Vishnu Purana among other texts, Kalidasa’s Sanskrit play Abhijnanashakuntalam wasn’t new. Even his name, he shares, derives from that of the play’s hero—King Dushyanta of Hastināpura, who falls in love with Shakuntala but fails to recognise her later until a ring breaks his spell of amnesia. Sridhar points out that the play is a quintessentially Indian text, bringing together a medley of emotions like love, loss, longing, pity and humour—the 4th-5th century CE playwright’s exploration of the nuances of passion and compassion highly laudable. What also makes Shakuntala relatable to the modern audience is her predicament as a single mother bringing up her son Bharata, the ancestor of the lineages of the Kauravas and Pandavas, and after whom India was given the name Bhāratavarsha.

Moreover, the work has been tried, tested and acclaimed throughout the world, having been adapted six times already in Indian cinema. The novelty then lay in attempting a Sanskrit screen adaptation of the film. Filmmakers like Mani Ratnam and Sanjay Leela Bhansali, while unmistakeably creative, have chosen the safer route by presenting films in languages that are spoken and have a seasoned industry, feels Sridhar, there being a 30-crore audience for Hindi and an eight-crore audience for Tamil films. “But most of our scriptures have come to us in Sanskrit,” says Sridhar, who believes the educated population, aware of the language’s ancient roots, would be keen to seek content in it. “Imagine Romeo and Juliet or Othello being made in Mandarin, Marathi, Maithili and Tamil, but not English. Kalidasa’s Abhijnanashakuntalam has been made in every possible language except Sanskrit.”