Folk tale · 3 tellings · Central India, East India, North India
The fool who became Kalidasa
A fool is married by trick to a learned princess, is found out, and gains speech and poetry from a goddess: Kali at Benares or Ujjain in the older legend, Saraswati on Vasant Panchami in the festival telling.
Vidyottamathe learned princess who marries and rejects him
Saraswatithe goddess who gives him speech in the Vasant Panchami telling
The story, beat by beat
A learned princess vows to marry only the man who beats her in debate, and humbles every scholar who tries.
Scholars she has shamed find a handsome fool (sawing off the branch he sits on) and present him as a great scholar under a vow of silence.
Her questions in hand-signs are answered with gestures the scholars read as profound, and she marries him.
She soon finds he cannot read, and sends him away.
In despair he goes to the goddess: to Kali's temple, offering his tongue, in the Ujjain telling; to the river, meaning to drown, where Saraswati appears, in the Vasant Panchami telling.
The goddess gives him learning and the gift of poetry; he becomes Kalidasa.
The ox-driver legend as Ryder records it (Benares, Kali)
North India · BenaresFolk
A Brahmin's child, orphaned at six months, is raised by an ox-driver. A counsellor whom the learned princess of Benares has rejected disguises the youth as a scholar and tricks her into marriage. In the wedding temple he notices the image of a bull and his ignorance comes out. The angry princess tells him to pray to the goddess Kali; Kali gives him learning and poetry, and he takes the name Kalidasa, servant of Kali. He vows to honour the goddess only as his teacher, and she foretells that a woman will cause his death. Later a king offers a reward to whoever can complete a half-stanza; Kalidasa does, and a woman he loves kills him for the reward. Ryder: no grain of historic truth; Kalidasa certainly lived at Ujjain.
Handsome and a complete dunce, he is found sawing off the branch he sits on by scholars whom the proud princess Vidyottama had humbled. She has vowed to marry only the man who beats her in debate. They present him as a scholar under a vow of silence; her hand-sign questions get gestures that the scholars interpret as deep answers; they marry; she discovers the truth and throws him out. Distraught, he goes to the Kali temple of Ujjain and offers to cut out his tongue; the goddess, appeased, grants him deep wisdom, and he is Kalidasa. Gadhkalika Mandir, a Shakti Peetha near the Bhartrihari caves, renovated by Harshavardhana in 606, is held to be that temple; students pray there before examinations. One temple page makes him an uneducated shepherd who prayed there and was blessed.
What is different here:
Ujjain, not Benares; the princess is Vidyottama with her vow of debate; the tongue offered; no death story.
The Vasant Panchami telling (Saraswati at the river)
East India · Told with Saraswati Puja, especially in BengalFolk
Vidyottama, who had beaten many scholars and vowed to wed only someone cleverer than herself, is tricked by the scholars she had shamed into marrying the man they found cutting the branch he sat on. When she discovers the deception she banishes him. In despair he resolves to end his life, and Saraswati stops him, in some tellings rising from the river and sending him to bathe in it; when he comes out he is no longer the fool, but the poet. This change is said to have happened on Vasant Panchami, which is why devotees pray to her for the same gift that day.
What is different here:
Saraswati, not Kali; a river, not a temple; the day is named; no tongue, no death.
Sources: Arthur W. Ryder, Kalidasa: Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works (1912), introduction (sacred-texts mirror); Finding Kalidasa, Ujjain's poet laureate (Outlook Traveller); Gadhkalika Temple, Ujjain (Behind Every Temple); Kalidasa (Wikipedia); Basant Panchami: the significance and history behind it (Exotic India blog)