ABSTRACT
It may seem curious but, among all the Indian languages, none had an indigenous term equivalent to the word 'classic' until the coming of colonialism and contact with Western literature beginning in the late eighteenth century. India's 'classical' literature is usually seen as comprising two periods: the Vedic Age, that of the mainly oral composition of the Vedas and the epics, followed by the Sanskrit Classical Age proper, which produced many kinds of literatures, authors, and theorists. The chief figure in this endeavour was Sir William Jones, a polyglot and jurist, who had already distinguished himself as a linguist at Oxford and who was appointed a judge at the Supreme Court in Calcutta in 1783. Jones' equation of Kalidasa with Shakespeare is, then, a way of familiarizing European readers with Kalidasa's stature in the Sanskrit canon, as well as a means of acknowledging both poets' similar imaginative faculties and linguistic inventiveness.
