Shakuntala

by Kalidasa

  It is not possible to fix the chronology of Kalidasa's writings, yet we are not wholly in the dark. Malavika and Agnimitra was certainly his first drama, almost certainly his first work. It is a reasonable conjecture, though nothing more, that Urvashi was written late, when the poet's powers were waning. The introductory stanzas of The Dynasty of Raghu suggest that this epic was written before The Birth of the War-god , though the inference is far from certain. Again, it is reasonable to assume that the great works on which Kalidasa's fame chiefly rests— Shakuntala , The Cloud-Messenger , The Dynasty of Raghu , the first eight cantos of The Birth of the War-god —were composed when he was in the prime of manhood. But as to the succession of these four works we can do little but guess.

  Kalidasa's glory depends primarily upon the quality of his work, yet would be much diminished if he had failed in bulk and variety. In India, more than would be the case in Europe, the extent of his writing is an indication of originality and power; for the poets of the classical period underwent an education that encouraged an exaggerated fastidiousness, and they wrote for a public meticulously critical. Thus the great Bhavabhuti spent his life in constructing three dramas; mighty spirit though he was, he yet suffers from the very scrupulosity of his labour. In this matter, as in others, Kalidasa preserves his intellectual balance and his spiritual initiative: what greatness of soul is required for this, every one knows who has ever had the misfortune to differ in opinion from an intellectual clique.

  III

  Le nom de Kâlidâsa domine la poésie indienne et la résume brillamment. Le drame, l'épopée savante, l'élégie attestent aujourd'hui encore la puissance et la souplesse de ce magnifique génie; seul entre les disciples de Sarasvatî [the goddess of eloquence], il a eu le bonheur de produire un chef-d'œuvre vraiment classique, où l'Inde s'admire et où l'humanité se reconnaît. Les applaudissements qui saluèrent la naissance de Çakuntalâ à Ujjayinî ont après de longs siècles éclaté d'un bout du monde à l'autre, quand William Jones l'eut révélée à l'Occident. Kâlidâsa a marqué sa place dans cette pléiade étincelante où chaque nom résume une période de l'esprit humain. La série de ces noms forme l'histoire, ou plutôt elle est l'histoire même. [4]

  It is hardly possible to say anything true about Kalidasa's achievement which is not already contained in this appreciation. Yet one loves to expand the praise, even though realising that the critic is by his very nature a fool. Here there shall at any rate be none of that cold-blooded criticism which imagines itself set above a world-author to appraise and judge, but a generous tribute of affectionate admiration.

  The best proof of a poet's greatness is the inability of men to live without him; in other words, his power to win and hold through centuries the love and admiration of his own people, especially when that people has shown itself capable of high intellectual and spiritual achievement.

  For something like fifteen hundred years, Kalidasa has been more widely read in India than any other author who wrote in Sanskrit. There have also been many attempts to express in words the secret of his abiding power: such attempts can never be wholly successful, yet they are not without considerable interest. Thus Bana, a celebrated novelist of the seventh century, has the following lines in some stanzas of poetical criticism which he prefixes to a historical romance:

  Where find a soul that does not thrill

  In Kalidasa's verse to meet

  The smooth, inevitable lines

  Like blossom-clusters, honey-sweet?

  A later writer, speaking of Kalidasa and another poet, is more laconic in this alliterative line: Bhaso hasah, Kalidaso vilasah —Bhasa is mirth, Kalidasa is grace.

  These two critics see Kalidasa's grace, his sweetness, his delicate taste, without doing justice to the massive quality without which his poetry could not have survived.

  Though Kalidasa has not been as widely appreciated in Europe as he deserves, he is the only Sanskrit poet who can properly be said to have been appreciated at all. Here he must struggle with the truly Himalayan barrier of language. Since there will never be many Europeans, even among the cultivated, who will find it possible to study the intricate Sanskrit language, there remains only one means of presentation. None knows the cruel inadequacy of poetical translation like the translator. He understands better than others can, the significance of the position which Kalidasa has won in Europe. When Sir William Jones first translated the Shakuntala in 1789, his work was enthusiastically received in Europe, and most warmly, as was fitting, by the greatest living poet of Europe. Since that day, as is testified by new translations and by reprints of the old, there have been many thousands who have read at least one of Kalidasa's works; other thousands have seen it on the stage in Europe and America.

  How explain a reputation that maintains itself indefinitely and that conquers a new continent after a lapse of thirteen hundred years? None can explain it, yet certain contributory causes can be named.

  No other poet in any land has sung of happy love between man and woman as Kalidasa sang. Every one of his works is a love-poem, however much more it may be. Yet the theme is so infinitely varied that the reader never wearies. If one were to doubt from a study of European literature, comparing the ancient classics with modern works, whether romantic love be the expression of a natural instinct, be not rather a morbid survival of decaying chivalry, he has only to turn to India's independently growing literature to find the question settled. Kalidasa's love-poetry rings as true in our ears as it did in his countrymen's ears fifteen hundred years ago.

  It is of love eventually happy, though often struggling for a time against external obstacles, that Kalidasa writes. There is nowhere in his works a trace of that not quite healthy feeling that sometimes assumes the name "modern love." If it were not so, his poetry could hardly have survived; for happy love, blessed with children, is surely the more fundamental thing. In his drama Urvashi he is ready to change and greatly injure a tragic story, given him by long tradition, in order that a loving pair may not be permanently separated. One apparent exception there is—the story of Rama and Sita in The Dynasty of Raghu . In this case it must be remembered that Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu, and the story of a mighty god incarnate is not to be lightly tampered with.

  It is perhaps an inevitable consequence of Kalidasa's subject that his women appeal more strongly to a modern reader than his men. The man is the more variable phenomenon, and though manly virtues are the same in all countries and centuries, the emphasis has been variously laid. But the true woman seems timeless, universal. I know of no poet, unless it be Shakespeare, who has given the world a group of heroines so individual yet so universal; heroines as true, as tender, as brave as are Indumati, Sita, Parvati, the Yaksha's bride, and Shakuntala.

  Kalidasa could not understand women without understanding children. It would be difficult to find anywhere lovelier pictures of childhood than those in which our poet presents the little Bharata, Ayus, Raghu, Kumara. It is a fact worth noticing that Kalidasa's children are all boys. Beautiful as his women are, he never does more than glance at a little girl.

  Another pervading note of Kalidasa's writing is his love of external nature. No doubt it is easier for a Hindu, with his almost instinctive belief in reincarnation, to feel that all life, from plant to god, is truly one; yet none, even among the Hindus, has expressed this feeling with such convincing beauty as has Kalidasa. It is hardly true to say that he personifies rivers and mountains and trees; to him they have a conscious individuality as truly and as certainly as animals or men or gods. Fully to appreciate Kalidasa's poetry one must have spent some weeks at least among wild mountains and forests untouched by man; there the conviction grows that trees and flowers are indeed individuals, fully conscious of a personal life and happy in that life. The return to urban surroundings makes the vision fade; yet the memory remains, like a great love or a glimpse of mystic insight, as an intuitive conviction of a higher truth.

  Kalidasa's knowledge of nature is not only sympathetic,
it is also minutely accurate. Not only are the snows and windy music of the Himalayas, the mighty current of the sacred Ganges, his possession; his too are smaller streams and trees and every littlest flower. It is delightful to imagine a meeting between Kalidasa and Darwin. They would have understood each other perfectly; for in each the same kind of imagination worked with the same wealth of observed fact.

  I have already hinted at the wonderful balance in Kalidasa's character, by virtue of which he found himself equally at home in a palace and in a wilderness. I know not with whom to compare him in this; even Shakespeare, for all his magical insight into natural beauty, is primarily a poet of the human heart. That can hardly be said of Kalidasa, nor can it be said that he is primarily a poet of natural beauty. The two characters unite in him, it might almost be said, chemically. The matter which I am clumsily endeavouring to make plain is beautifully epitomised in The Cloud-Messenger . The former half is a description of external nature, yet interwoven with human feeling; the latter half is a picture of a human heart, yet the picture is framed in natural beauty. So exquisitely is the thing done that none can say which half is superior. Of those who read this perfect poem in the original text, some are more moved by the one, some by the other. Kalidasa understood in the fifth century what Europe did not learn until the nineteenth, and even now comprehends only imperfectly: that the world was not made for man, that man reaches his full stature only as he realises the dignity and worth of life that is not human.

  That Kalidasa seized this truth is a magnificent tribute to his intellectual power, a quality quite as necessary to great poetry as perfection of form. Poetical fluency is not rare; intellectual grasp is not very uncommon: but the combination has not been found perhaps more than a dozen times since the world began. Because he possessed this harmonious combination, Kalidasa ranks not with Anacreon and Horace and Shelley, but with Sophocles, Vergil, Milton.

  He would doubtless have been somewhat bewildered by Wordsworth's gospel of nature. "The world is too much with us," we can fancy him repeating. "How can the world, the beautiful human world, be too much with us? How can sympathy with one form of life do other than vivify our sympathy with other forms of life?"

  It remains to say what can be said in a foreign language of Kalidasa's style. We have seen that he had a formal and systematic education; in this respect he is rather to be compared with Milton and Tennyson than with Shakespeare or Burns. He was completely master of his learning. In an age and a country which reprobated carelessness but were tolerant of pedantry, he held the scales with a wonderfully even hand, never heedless and never indulging in the elaborate trifling with Sanskrit diction which repels the reader from much of Indian literature. It is true that some western critics have spoken of his disfiguring conceits and puerile plays on words. One can only wonder whether these critics have ever read Elizabethan literature; for Kalidasa's style is far less obnoxious to such condemnation than Shakespeare's. That he had a rich and glowing imagination, "excelling in metaphor," as the Hindus themselves affirm, is indeed true; that he may, both in youth and age, have written lines which would not have passed his scrutiny in the vigour of manhood, it is not worth while to deny: yet the total effect left by his poetry is one of extraordinary sureness and delicacy of taste. This is scarcely a matter for argument; a reader can do no more than state his own subjective impression, though he is glad to find that impression confirmed by the unanimous authority of fifty generations of Hindus, surely the most competent judges on such a point.

  Analysis of Kalidasa's writings might easily be continued, but analysis can never explain life. The only real criticism is subjective. We know that Kalidasa is a very great poet, because the world has not been able to leave him alone.

  ARTHUR W. RYDER.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  On Kalidasa's life and writings may be consulted A.A. Macdonell's History of Sanskrit Literature (1900); the same author's article "Kalidasa" in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910); and Sylvain Lévi's Le Théâtre Indien (1890).

  The more important translations in English are the following: of the Shakuntala , by Sir William Jones (1789) and Monier Williams (fifth edition, 1887); of the Urvashi , by H.H. Wilson (in his Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus , third edition, 1871); of The Dynasty of Raghu , by P. de Lacy Johnstone (1902); of The Birth of The War-god (cantos one to seven), by Ralph T.H. Griffith (second edition, 1879); of The Cloud-Messenger , by H.H. Wilson (1813).

  There is an inexpensive reprint of Jones's Shakuntala and Wilson's Cloud-Messenger in one volume in the Camelot Series.

  KALIDASA

  An ancient heathen poet, loving more

  God's creatures, and His women, and His flowers

  Than we who boast of consecrated powers;

  Still lavishing his unexhausted store

  Of love's deep, simple wisdom, healing o'er

  The world's old sorrows, India's griefs and ours;

  That healing love he found in palace towers,

  On mountain, plain, and dark, sea-belted shore,

  In songs of holy Raghu's kingly line

  Or sweet Shakuntala in pious grove,

  In hearts that met where starry jasmines twine

  Or hearts that from long, lovelorn absence strove

  Together. Still his words of wisdom shine:

  All's well with man, when man and woman love.

  Willst du die Blüte des frühen, die

  Früchte des späteren Jahres,

  Willst du, was reizt und entzückt,

  Willst du, was sättigt und nährt,

  Willst du den Hummel, die erde mit

  Einem Namen begreifen,

  Nenn' ich, Sakuntala, dich, und

  dann ist alles gesagt.

  GOETHE

  FOOTNOTES:

  [1]

  These verses are translated on pp. 123, 124 .

  [2]

  The passage will be found on pp. 190-192 .

  [3]

  This matter is more fully discussed in the introduction to my translation of The Little Clay Cart (1905).

  [4]

  Lévi, Le Théâtre Indien , p. 163.

  SHAKUNTALA

  A PLAY IN SEVEN ACTS

  DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

  KING DUSHYANTA.

  BHARATA,

  nicknamed All-tamer, his son.

  MADHAVYA,

  a clown, his companion.

  His charioteer.

  RAIVATAKA,

  a door-keeper.

  BHADRASENA,

  a general.

  KARABHAKA,

  a servant.

  PARVATAYANA,

  a chamberlain.

  SOMARATA,

  a chaplain.

  KANVA,

  hermit-father.

  SHARNGARAVA

  }his pupils.

  SHARADVATA

  HARITA

  DURVASAS,

  an irascible sage.

  The chief of police.

  SUCHAKA

  } policemen.

  JANUKA

  A fisherman.

  SHAKUNTALA,

  foster-child of Kanva.

  ANUSUYA

  }her friends.

  PRIYAMVADA

  GAUTAMI,

  hermit-mother.

  KASHYAPA,

  father of the gods.

  ADITI,

  mother of the gods.

  MATALI,

  charioteer of heaven's king.

  GALAVA,

  a pupil in heaven.

  MISHRAKESHI,

  a heavenly nymph.

  Stage-director and actress (in the prologue), hermits and hermit-women, two court poets, palace attendants, invisible fairies.

  The first four acts pass in Kanva's forest hermitage
; acts five and six in the king's palace; act seven on a heavenly mountain. The time is perhaps seven years.

  PROLOGUE, ACTS I-IV.

  BENEDICTION UPON AUDIENCE

  Eight forms has Shiva, lord of all and king:

  And these are water, first created thing;

  And fire, which speeds the sacrifice begun;

  The priest; and time's dividers, moon and sun;

  The all-embracing ether, path of sound;

  The earth, wherein all seeds of life are found;

  And air, the breath of life: may he draw near,

  Revealed in these, and bless those gathered here.

  The stage-director . Enough of this! ( Turning toward the dressing-room .) Madam, if you are ready, pray come here. ( Enter an actress .)

  Actress . Here I am, sir. What am I to do?

  Director . Our audience is very discriminating, and we are to offer them a new play, called Shakuntala and the ring of recognition , written by the famous Kalidasa. Every member of the cast must be on his mettle.

  Actress . Your arrangements are perfect. Nothing will go wrong.

  Director ( smiling ). To tell the truth, madam,