Shakuntala

by Kalidasa

  In Sita's very presence told

  Her birth—love made her overbold:

  For mighty passion, as a rule,

  Will change a woman to a fool.

  Scorned by Rama, laughed at by Sita, she becomes furious and threatening.

  Laugh on! Your laughter's fruit shall be

  Commended to you. Gaze on me!

  I am a tigress, you shall know,

  Insulted by a feeble doe.

  Lakshmana thereupon cuts off her nose and ears, rendering her redundantly hideous. She departs, to return presently at the head of an army of giants, whom Rama defeats single-handed, while his brother guards Sita. The giantess then betakes herself to her brother, the terrible ten-headed Ravana, king of Ceylon. He succeeds in capturing Sita by a trick, and carries her off to his fortress in Ceylon. It is plainly necessary for Rama to seek allies before attempting to cross the straits and attack the stronghold. He therefore renders an important service to the monkey king Sugriva, who gratefully leads an army of monkeys to his assistance. The most valiant of these, Hanumat, succeeds in entering Ravana's capital, where he finds Sita, gives her a token from Rama, and receives a token for Rama. The army thereupon sets out and comes to the seashore, where it is reinforced by the giant Vibhishana, who has deserted his wicked brother Ravana. The monkeys hurl great boulders into the strait, thus forming a bridge over which they cross into Ceylon and besiege Ravana's capital. There ensue many battles between the giants and the monkeys, culminating in a tremendous duel between the champions, Rama and Ravana. In this duel Ravana is finally slain. Rama recovers his wife, and the principal personages of the army enter the flying chariot which had belonged to Ravana, to return to Ayodhya; for the fourteen years of exile are now over.

  Thirteenth canto. The return from the forest .—This canto describes the long journey through the air from Ceylon over the whole length of India to Ayodhya. As the celestial car makes its journey, Rama points out the objects of interest or of memory to Sita. Thus, as they fly over the sea:

  The form of ocean, infinitely changing,

  Clasping the world and all its gorgeous state,

  Unfathomed by the intellect's wide ranging,

  Is awful like the form of God, and great.

  He gives his billowy lips to many a river

  That into his embrace with passion slips,

  Lover of many wives, a generous giver

  Of kisses, yet demanding eager lips.

  Look back, my darling, with your fawn-like glances

  Upon the path that from your prison leads;

  See how the sight of land again entrances,

  How fair the forest, as the sea recedes.

  Then, as they pass over the spot where Rama searched for his stolen wife:

  There is the spot where, sorrowfully searching,

  I found an anklet on the ground one day;

  It could not tinkle, for it was not perching

  On your dear foot, but sad and silent lay.

  I learned where you were carried by the giant

  From vines that showed themselves compassionate;

  They could not utter words, yet with their pliant

  Branches they pointed where you passed of late.

  The deer were kind; for while the juicy grasses

  Fell quite unheeded from each careless mouth,

  They turned wide eyes that said, "'Tis there she passes

  The hours as weary captive" toward the south.

  There is the mountain where the peacocks' screaming,

  And branches smitten fragrant by the rain,

  And madder-flowers that woke at last from dreaming,

  Made unendurable my lonely pain;

  And mountain-caves where I could scarce dissemble

  The woe I felt when thunder crashed anew,

  For I remembered how you used to tremble

  At thunder, seeking arms that longed for you.

  Rama then points out the spots in Southern India where he and Sita had dwelt in exile, and the pious hermitages which they had visited; later, the holy spot where the Jumna River joins the Ganges; finally, their distant home, unseen for fourteen years, and the well-known river, from which spray-laden breezes come to them like cool, welcoming hands. When they draw near, Prince Bharata comes forth to welcome them, and the happy procession approaches the capital city.

  Fourteenth canto. Sita is put away .—The exiles are welcomed by Queen Kausalya and Queen Sumitra with a joy tinged with deep melancholy. After the long-deferred anointing of Rama as king, comes the triumphal entry into the ancestral capital, where Rama begins his virtuous reign with his beloved queen most happily; for the very hardships endured in the forest turn into pleasures when remembered in the palace. To crown the king's joy, Sita becomes pregnant, and expresses a wish to visit the forest again. At this point, where an ordinary story would end, comes the great tragedy, the tremendous test of Rama's character. The people begin to murmur about the queen, believing that she could not have preserved her purity in the giant's palace. Rama knows that she is innocent, but he also knows that he cannot be a good king while the people feel as they do; and after a pitiful struggle, he decides to put away his beloved wife. He bids his brother Lakshmana take her to the forest, in accordance with her request, but to leave her there at the hermitage of the sage Valmiki. When this is done, and Sita hears the terrible future from Lakshmana, she cries:

  Take reverent greeting to the queens, my mothers,

  And say to each with honour due her worth:

  "My child is your son's child, and not another's;

  Oh, pray for him, before he comes to birth."

  And tell the king from me: "You saw the matter,

  How I was guiltless proved in fire divine;

  Will you desert me for mere idle chatter?

  Are such things done in Raghu's royal line?

  Ah no! I cannot think you fickle-minded,

  For you were always very kind to me;

  Fate's thunderclap by which my eyes are blinded

  Rewards my old, forgotten sins, I see.

  Oh, I could curse my life and quickly end it,

  For it is useless, lived from you apart,

  But that I bear within, and must defend it,

  Your life, your child and mine, beneath my heart.

  When he is born, I'll scorn my queenly station,

  Gaze on the sun, and live a hell on earth,

  That I may know no pain of separation

  From you, my husband, in another birth.

  My king! Eternal duty bids you never

  Forget a hermit who for sorrow faints;

  Though I am exiled from your bed for ever,

  I claim the care you owe to all the saints."

  So she accepts her fate with meek courage. But

  When Rama's brother left her there to languish

  And bore to them she loved her final word,

  She loosed her throat in an excess of anguish

  And screamed as madly as a frightened bird.

  Trees shed their flowers, the peacock-dances ended,

  The grasses dropped from mouths of feeding deer,

  As if the universal forest blended

  Its tears with hers, and shared her woeful fear.

  While she laments thus piteously, she is discovered by the poet-sage Valmiki, who consoles her with tender and beautiful words, and conducts her to his hermitage, where she awaits the time of her confinement. Meanwhile Rama leads a dreary life, finding duty but a cold comforter. He makes a golden statue of his wife, and will not look at other women.

  Fifteenth canto. Rama goes to heaven .—The canto opens with a rather long description of a fight between Rama's youngest brother and a giant. On the journey to meet the giant, Shatrughna spends a night in Valmiki's hermitage, and that very night Sita gives birth to twin sons. Valmiki gives them the names Kusha and Lava, and when they grow out of childhood he teaches them his own composition, the Ramayana , "the sweet story of Rama," "the fi
rst path shown to poets." At this time the young son of a Brahman dies in the capital, and the father laments at the king's gate, for he believes that the king is unworthy, else heaven would not send death prematurely. Rama is roused to stamp out evil-doing in the kingdom, whereupon the dead boy comes to life. The king then feels that his task on earth is nearly done, and prepares to celebrate the great horse-sacrifice. 4 At this sacrifice appear the two youths Kusha and Lava, who sing the epic of Rama's deeds in the presence of Rama himself. The father perceives their likeness to himself, then learns that they are indeed his children, whom he has never seen. Thereupon Sita is brought forward by the poet-sage Valmiki and in the presence of her husband and her detractors establishes her constant purity in a terrible fashion.

  "If I am faithful to my lord

  In thought, in action, and in word,

  I pray that Earth who bears us all

  May bid me in her bosom fall."

  The faithful wife no sooner spoke

  Than earth divided, and there broke

  From deep within a flashing light

  That flamed like lightning, blinding-bright.

  And, seated on a splendid throne

  Upheld by serpents' hoods alone,

  The goddess Earth rose visibly,

  And she was girded with the sea.

  Sita was clasped in her embrace,

  While still she gazed on Rama's face:

  He cried aloud in wild despair;

  She sank, and left him standing there.

  Rama then establishes his brothers, sons, and nephews in different cities of the kingdom, buries the three queens of his father, and awaits death. He has not long to wait; Death comes, wearing a hermit's garb, asks for a private interview, and threatens any who shall disturb their conference. Lakshmana disturbs them, and so dies before Rama. Then Rama is translated.

  Cantos sixteen to nineteen form the third division of the epic, and treat of Rama's descendants. The interest wanes, for the great hero is gone.

  Sixteenth canto. Kumudvati's wedding .—As Kusha lies awake one night, a female figure appears in his chamber; and in answer to his question, declares that she is the presiding goddess of the ancient capital Ayodhya, which has been deserted since Rama's departure to heaven. She pictures the sad state of the city thus:

  I have no king; my towers and terraces

  Crumble and fall; my walls are overthrown;

  As when the ugly winds of evening seize

  The rack of clouds in helpless darkness blown.

  In streets where maidens gaily passed at night,

  Where once was known the tinkle and the shine

  Of anklets, jackals slink, and by the light

  Of flashing fangs, seek carrion, snarl, and whine.

  The water of the pools that used to splash

  With drumlike music, under maidens' hands,

  Groans now when bisons from the jungle lash

  It with their clumsy horns, and roil its sands.

  The peacock-pets are wild that once were tame;

  They roost on trees, not perches; lose desire

  For dancing to the drums; and feel no shame

  For fans singed close by sparks of forest-fire.

  On stairways where the women once were glad

  To leave their pink and graceful footprints, here

  Unwelcome, blood-stained paws of tigers pad,

  Fresh-smeared from slaughter of the forest deer.

  Wall-painted elephants in lotus-brooks,

  Receiving each a lily from his mate,

  Are torn and gashed, as if by cruel hooks,

  By claws of lions, showing furious hate.

  I see my pillared caryatides

  Neglected, weathered, stained by passing time,

  Wearing in place of garments that should please,

  The skins of sloughing cobras, foul with slime.

  The balconies grow black with long neglect,

  And grass-blades sprout through floors no longer tight;

  They still receive but cannot now reflect

  The old, familiar moonbeams, pearly white.

  The vines that blossomed in my garden bowers,

  That used to show their graceful beauty, when

  Girls gently bent their twigs and plucked their flowers,

  Are broken by wild apes and wilder men.

  The windows are not lit by lamps at night,

  Nor by fair faces shining in the day,

  But webs of spiders dim the delicate, light

  Smoke-tracery with one mere daub of grey.

  The river is deserted; on the shore

  No gaily bathing men and maidens leave

  Food for the swans; its reedy bowers no more

  Are vocal: seeing this, I can but grieve.

  The goddess therefore begs Kusha to return with his court to the old capital, and when he assents, she smiles and vanishes. The next morning Kusha announces the vision of the night, and immediately sets out for Ayodhya with his whole army. Arrived there, King Kusha quickly restores the city to its former splendour. Then when the hot summer comes, the king goes down to the river to bathe with the ladies of the court. While in the water he loses a great gem which his father had given him. The divers are unable to find it, and declare their belief that it has been stolen by the serpent Kumuda who lives in the river. The king threatens to shoot an arrow into the river, whereupon the waters divide, and the serpent appears with the gem. He is accompanied by a beautiful maiden, whom he introduces as his sister Kumudvati, and whom he offers in marriage to Kusha. The offer is accepted, and the wedding celebrated with great pomp.

  Seventeenth canto. King Atithi .—To the king and queen is born a son, who is named Atithi. When he has grown into manhood, his father Kusha engages in a struggle with a demon, in which the king is killed in the act of killing his adversary. He goes to heaven, followed by his faithful queen, and Atithi is anointed king. The remainder of the canto describes King Atithi's glorious reign.

  Eighteenth canto. The later princes .—This canto gives a brief, impressionistic sketch of the twenty-one kings who in their order succeeded Atithi.

  Nineteenth canto. The loves of Agnivarna .—After the twenty-one kings just mentioned, there succeeds a king named Agnivarna, who gives himself to dissipation. He shuts himself up in the palace; even when duty requires him to appear before his subjects, he does so merely by hanging one foot out of a window. He trains dancing-girls himself, and has so many mistresses that he cannot always call them by their right names. It is not wonderful that this kind of life leads before long to a consuming disease; and as Agnivarna is even then unable to resist the pleasures of the senses, he dies. His queen is pregnant, and she mounts the throne as regent in behalf of her unborn son. With this strange scene, half tragic, half vulgar, the epic, in the form in which it has come down to us, abruptly ends.

  If we now endeavour to form some critical estimate of the poem, we are met at the outset by this strangely unnatural termination. We cannot avoid wondering whether the poem as we have it is complete. And we shall find that there are good reasons for believing that Kalidasa did not let the glorious solar line end in the person of the voluptuous Agnivarna and his unborn child. In the first place, there is a constant tradition which affirms that The Dynasty of Raghu originally consisted of twenty-five cantos. A similar tradition concerning Kalidasa's second epic has justified itself; for some time only seven cantos were known; then more were discovered, and we now have seventeen. Again, there is a rhetorical rule, almost never disregarded, which requires a literary work to end with an epilogue in the form of a little prayer for the welfare of readers or auditors. Kalidasa himself complies with this rule, certainly in five of his other six books. Once again, Kalidasa has nothing of the tragedian in his soul; his works, without exception, end happily. In the drama Urvashi he seriously injures a splendid old tragic story for the sake of a happy ending. These facts all point to the probability that the conclusion of the epic has been lost. We may e
ven assign a natural, though conjectural, reason for this. The Dynasty of Raghu has been used for centuries as a text-book in India, so that manuscripts abound, and commentaries are very numerous. Now if the concluding cantos were unfitted for use as a text-book, they might very easily be lost during the centuries before the introduction of printing-presses into India. Indeed, this very unfitness for use as a school text seems to be the explanation of the temporary loss of several cantos of Kalidasa's second epic.

  On the other hand, we are met by the fact that numerous commentators, living in different parts of India, know the text of only nineteen cantos. Furthermore, it is unlikely that Kalidasa left the poem incomplete at his death; for it was, without serious question, one of his earlier works. Apart from evidences of style, there is the subject-matter of the introductory stanzas, in which the poet presents himself as an aspirant for literary fame. No writer of established reputation would be likely to say: