Yet through the text books he produced, the pamphlets he wrote and retelling of Kalidas’s Shakuntala and Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors he set the norm of standard Bengali prose.
Fluent in several languages, he translated to Sinhalese the Gita Govinda and in collaboration with L.C. Van Geyzel, translated most of the poems and plays of Kālidāsa in 1961.
The first play to be staged at Banga Natyalaya was Kalidas’ Mālavikāgnimitram in Sanskrit, in July 1859.
He critically studied particularly the works of Sanskrit playwrights Kalidas and Bhavabhuti; modern Marathi poets of his era Keshavasuta and Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar; Marathi poets of earlier times like Dnyaneshwar and Moropant; and English writers like Shakespeare, Percy Shelley, and Mark Twain.
K. S. Neelakantan Unni (1895–1980), Sanskrit scholar, compiled many legends about temples, famous persons, etc. and translated Kalidasa's Shakuntalam to Malayalam