The Recognition of Sakuntala (Oxford World's Classics)
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Although rasa in itself is a single, ineffable experience of entrancement or aesthetic rapture, it is subdivided for analytical purposes according to the emotions, or principal feelings, that evoke it.21 The dominant rasa in Śakuntalā is the erotic or romantic (śṛṅ̇gāra) mood, corresponding to the emotion of love (rati). This is supported by auxiliary rasa, especially the vīra or ‘heroic’ mood, evoked by the emotion of energy, and closely associated with the king in his role as protector of dharma (the social and religious order).22 This concentration on the unfolding of mood, through the interaction of stereotypes (king, beautiful woman, ascetic, etc.) rather than individual characters, has led some analysts to view plot, conflict, and character development as subordinate, not to say incidental, to rasa in the Sanskrit drama. Daniel Ingalls, for instance, chooses to stress the Sanskrit play’s characterization as a dṛśyakāvya or ‘spectacle-poem’, arguing that it cannot be a ‘drama’ because it lacks both action and the conflict of character and principle. Mood (rasa) determines the play’s content, as well as its form (a combination of speech, pantomime, dance, and music), and is likewise the vehicle of its plot development.23 Less formulaic, and more consonant with the experience of the play (whether on the page or in performance), is the suggestion that, although the characters in a Sanskrit drama may be stereotypes, they nevertheless align themselves with conflicting principles,24 in particular, the conflict or dialectic between the principles of kāma (pleasure or desire) and dharma (duty, as defined by birth and stage in life).
This may, as Miller suggests, be a ‘perennial human conflict’,25 but to grasp its full significance in the Indian context, we need to know something about a classical scheme known as the four ‘human goals’ or ‘pursuits’ (puruṣārtha). These divide into three worldly pursuits—dharma (duty), artha (material success), and kāma (pleasure or desire)—and one whose aim is liberation from worldly existence (mokṣa).26 The latter is achieved through renunciation of the other three, but especially kāma, which, from the orthodox renouncer’s perspective, is a form of ignorance. This puruṣārtha scheme overlaps with another, that of varnṣāśrama-dharma, duty according to birth and stage of life. The duties (dharma) of a king and a fisherman, for instance, are obviously quite different, but each attains the goal of dharma by following his own specific duty and not trespassing on that of others.27 All males born into the three higher classes (varnṣa)28 are, however, expected, at least in theory, to progress through four stages of life (āśrama): student (of the Veda), householder, forest-dweller, and renouncer. (In so far as they fit this scheme, the male ascetics of Kaṇva’s hermitage in Śakuntalā appear to be ‘forest-dwellers’.) Dharma or duty is also specific to these four stages. So the prime duty of a householder is to marry and produce sons, who will feed him and his ancestors in the afterlife. Only when he has achieved that aim (the goal of kāma) should he retire to the forest, as a prelude, in the classical scheme, to his full renunciation of the householder’s dharma in pursuit of mokṣa. The need for offspring explains the anguish of the king in Act 6 of Śakuntalā when he believes himself to be without an heir, and provides the main thread to Śakuntalā’s argument in the Mahāb-hārata version of the story.
The king’s dharma goes beyond this, of course: he has the primary responsibility of ensuring that conditions are right in the kingdom for the practice of all the puruṣārthas. This is why, in Kālidāsa’s play, he is constantly being called upon to protect the ascetics and their practices from disruptive demons, the forces of chaos and disorder that are dharma’s opposite (adharma).29 This duty becomes extended, in the temporal space between the final two Acts, to a cosmic battle against the demons, on behalf of Indra, the king of the gods, but for the benefit of the whole world.
In return for this protection, the ascetics in Śakuntalā underwrite the authority (dharma) of the king, and through their magical powers bless his kingdom and dynasty with prosperity (artha).30 Such gifts are granted by KAṆVA in the Mahābhārata version, and by Mārīca, Kaṇva’s celestial counterpart, in the play. When things go wrong, however, when there has been dereliction of duty, the same magical power can be used against those responsible; and this is precisely what happens when Śakuntalā and the king are cursed by the irascible sage Durvāsas in Act 4. On a strictly ethical, rather than aesthetic reading, dharma—the natural order according to Brahminical values—is threatened, that is unbalanced, by the excessive nature of the king’s kāma. This is mirrored by Śakuntalā’s neglect of her duty (engendering the curse), which is also the result of single-minded kāma31 (The king, of course, is responsible for her state, and so the curse affects them both.) Balance and resolution is only attained through the birth and recognition of a son and heir (Sarvadamana/Bharata), for a ‘householder’ the purpose of kāma. This guarantees the continuity of both order (dharma) and prosperity (artha), not just for the kingdom but for the entire world: Bharata will be a cakravartin, a world emperor. The Mahābhārata version of the story is dominated by this concern, and it is increasingly stressed by Kālidāsa in the last two acts of the play. Sarvadamana’s recognition as the true heir legitimizes kāma and reconciles it to dharma in both versions. In the words of Edwin Gerow, ‘the conditions of love and duty (kāma and dharma) develop from external and contingent opposites into necessary complementarities’.32
This reading of The Recognition of Śakuntalā is, as already mentioned, essentially ethical in perspective and outcome. From the aesthetic point of view, however, there can be no doubt that the play is dominated by the experience of the erotic mood, as mediated through and savoured in the experience of the ideal rasika or ‘man of taste’, that is, the king.33 The idea, however, that there is any one cultural or aesthetic code that will ‘crack’ the meaning of the play is to limit its effect unnecessarily. Its ambiguities and multifaceted nature are what make it a great work of art, something it has in common with the best works of Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare, Kālidāsa has generated something of an ‘industry’, and Śakuntalā’s thematic complexities have received much critical (i.e. frequently conflicting) attention. The interested reader is directed to works cited in the Select Bibliography; here I have merely signposted some of the culturally significant themes which an educated Indian spectator of Kālidāsa’s time might have been expected to recognize without reflection.
Audience and Language
It is likely that the Sanskrit dramas of Kālidāsa’s time were performed by troupes of actors and dancers supported by royal patronage. Under the Guptas (c.350–470 CE), palaces may well have included purpose-built theatres, staffed by permanent companies under the direction of an actor-manager (see the Prologue to Śakuntalā). Although it was the courtly aristocracy, the princely and brahminical classes, who would have seen their world and values reflected in the plays, the audience seems, at least initially, to have been drawn from a wider social pool, ranging from the highly educated and discerning connoisseur (perhaps Kālidāsa’s ideal spectator)34 to those who had just come to enjoy the spectacle. Giving people the opportunity to watch a play was claimed by the (admittedly biased) Drama Manual to be an act equivalent to a religious offering, and one that brought the patron great merit.35 Such opportunities would have been frequently provided, then as now, by the numerous religious festivals that punctuate the year, as well as by significant royal or political events.
The mixed nature of the audience is mirrored by a similar mixture in the languages employed by the playwright (Sanskrit and various types of Prakrit), and in the characters or types he depicts. By Kālidāsa’s time Sanskrit had been a classical language for 800 years or more, since its codification by the grammarian Pāṇini in the fourth century BCE.36 In other words, like Latin in medieval Europe, it had become an index of political, cultural, and religious authority, a language of scholarly and religious discourse that had to be learned by means of a special and exclusive education. Such learning was facilitated and guaranteed by the immense prestige attached to Sanskrit as the l
anguage of a collection of revealed religious texts known as the Veda, and it was largely controlled access to the Veda, via Sanskrit, that perpetuated the status accorded to the higher castes (particularly the brahmins). Under the Guptas, Sanskrit’s prestige and ‘refinement’ led to its adoption as the preferred language of both administration and courtly literature.
The dialects most people spoke in northern India,37 although derived from the same Vedic language as classical Sanskrit, had developed largely without codification: hence the collective noun by which the grammarians knew them, ‘Prakrit’, or ‘natural’. These too, in time, became either religious (for the Buddhists and Jains) or literary languages, ‘frozen’, as it were, in the act of being memorized or written down. Meanwhile, north Indian dialects continued to change and diversify until the situation was reached that obtains in the modern world, where they are classified as separate ‘languages’ (Gujarati, Rajasthani, etc.). At a basic level, however, these modern languages remain mutually intelligible to many of their speakers without special learning. Something akin to this level of understanding may well have been the norm for many in the audience at the original performances of Kālidāsa’s plays; that is to say, they understood little or no Sanskrit but could get by in a number of Prakrits. This understanding would have been supplemented by their reading of the third type of language employed, that of gesture.38
In Śakuntalā Sanskrit is spoken by high-caste, educated males: the king and his higher-grade officials, brahmins, and male ascetics. Females, young boys, and lower-caste men speak different kinds of Prakrit (see the List of Characters).39 In Act 1, for instance, the king speaks Sanskrit to the three women he meets in the hermitage: they, on the other hand, reply to him, and speak to each other, in Prakrit. Conventionally, a particular kind of Prakrit was put into the mouth of a certain type of character; women, for instance, would speak one type, which was considered relatively refined, while uneducated characters would use another, considered appropriately uncouth. Similarly, one type of Prakrit would be used for prose, another for songs. As Barbara Stoler Miller has pointed out, however, Kālidāsa was not wholly bound by this convention; instead, he blended various Prakrits to exploit their dramatic effect, using them ‘to complicate and enrich the verbal expressions of complex psychological states’.40 Whether or not the dramatic Prakrits had themselves been completely stylized by Kālidāsa’s time (i.e. were ‘literary’ constructions, distinct from the language people spoke in the streets), this usage nevertheless reflects and encompasses the social and gender hierarchy (‘complementary mix’) that underpins Indian society.
It is these dramatic Prakrits, however, that were vulnerable to linguistic change in a way that ‘frozen’ Sanskrit never could be. As they were left behind by the ever-changing spoken language from which they originated, commentators supplied a Sanskrit version (a chāyā or ‘shadow’) of the Prakrits for educated readers and audiences. By the end of the ninth century Sanskrit dramas were, it seems, precisely that: performed entirely in Sanskrit. The immediate consequence of this linguistic shift was to ensure that Kālidāsa’s works became entirely the preserve of a Sanskrit-speaking elite, and so equivalent, in exclusiveness of appeal, to the other genre in which he had worked, courtly poetry—a situation the playwright can hardly have anticipated.41
English translations cannot hope to reproduce what one scholar has called ‘the aesthetically significant verbal polyphony’ of the original texts.42 Partly this is because it is impossible to gauge the degrees to which the different Prakrits were intelligible to a member (which member?) of the original audience, and so find a balance of distinct equivalents. But it is also because translating Prakrits with a patchwork of English dialects inevitably triggers irrelevant and extraneous historical and social associations, certain to distract the audience from the main concerns of the drama and persistently threatening unintended comedy.
Verse, Prose, and the Nature of the Play
A structural feature of Sanskrit drama that can survive verbal translation is the constant alternation of verse with prose. This overlaps the distinction, already mentioned, between Sanskrit and Prakrit. In fact, only nine of Śakuntalā’s 194 verses (in the Devanāgarī recension)43 are in Prakrit; the rest are in variety of Sanskrit metres.44 A breakdown of the verses in Prakrit shows that all but one are recited or sung by eight different female characters (1.4, 3.14, 4.12, 4.16, 5.1, 5.16, 6.2, 6.3), the exception being an epigram by the low-caste Fisherman (6.1). Since they do not use Sanskrit, these are, of course, the only instances of female characters speaking verse in the entire play.
To take the Prologue and Act 1 as indicative: of the thirty-one verses spoken, twenty are given to the king, two to his driver, five to two male ascetics, three to the Actor-Manager, and one to the Actress (a Prakrit song). A similar ratio is maintained throughout the play: in the six acts in which he appears, the king speaks, on average, 64 per cent of the verse, peaking in Act 3 with 88 per cent, where he is virtually the only male character, and least active in Act 5 (36 per cent), where there are a considerable number of other male speakers. In the one act from which the king is absent (Act 4), the senior male figure (Kaṇva, in his only appearance in the play) speaks exactly 64 per cent of the verse, and so in a way becomes a substitute verse speaker for the king.
This is of more than just statistical significance: it gives us a clear insight into what kind of play we are being offered. The hero or nāyaka (i.e the king in Śakuntalā) is presented as the ideal man of ‘feeling’, the rasika or ‘connoisseur’ of poetry,45 also known as the sahrṣdaya, the ideal spectator ‘whose heart is at one with the author’s’.46 The moment he feels an emotion (bhāva), he distils it through a poetic utterance to its corresponding rasa or mood, and so savours it, becoming, in a sense, the spectator of his own feeling, while at the same time involving the audience in his desire and its attendant problems. Each particular instance adds to the unfolding of the mood of the piece as a whole for the audience to savour. As we know, the experience of this rasa is the principal object of the play, and the hero is the principal means by which it is activated.
Since the play is concerned to engender the erotic rasa in the audience, and kāvya is written from a male viewpoint (the king is the idealized projection of the rasika, the connoisseur), it is hardly surprising that women are presented primarily as the objects of the hero’s desire.47 This is another reason why female characters speak so little verse in the play (it is the connoisseur who savours and feels rapture, not the object of his attention), and why, when they do, it is often simply to provide an underscoring of the prevailing emotion, which is then integrated and savoured by a male character. Apart from the letter she composes in Act 3 (3. 14), which is immediately upstaged by the king’s Sanskrit verse (3.15), Śakuntalā herself (the heroine or nāyikā) speaks no verse at all in the play. It is instructive to compare this with the Mahābhārata version of the story, where she dominates the dialogue. The epic, however, is concerned with the duties of husbands and wives in a pedagogical, not to say legalistic way, reinforcing the Brahminical status quo (Śakuntalā is orthodoxy’s mouthpiece), whereas Kālidāsa’s concern is to resolve the potential conflict of duty (dharma) and kāma (love) through aesthetic means (i.e. through its enactment as a means to rasa). (If this seems to suggest that Śakuntalā is an entirely passive figure in the play, one has only to look at Kālidāsa’s distillation of her bafflement, resentment, and anger into an economic dramatic prose in Act 5 to become aware of a more complex picture.)
This aesthetic resolution is what constitutes Kālidāsa’s ‘peculiarity’—what distinguishes him from his sources, including the Mahābhārata episode.48 Virtually every difference between the epic version of the story and Kālidāsa’s play can be analysed as being at the service of rasa aesthetics, not least the major change in terms of the plot, the reason for Śakuntalā’s rejection by the king. In the play he rejects her because his memory has been erased by Durvāsas’s curse; in the epic he
does so—at least, that is his eventual excuse—as a matter of realpolitik: the people needed the security of supernatural validation. Apart from the requirement that the hero of the drama should be essentially blameless (this is part of the stereotypical nature of the king’s character), for Kālidāsa’s aesthetic to work Duṣyanta has to be in love, and never out of it throughout the play, even when he has forgotten who or what constitutes the object of his emotion.49 Indeed, it is the very enjoyment of that emotion, savoured as its corresponding erotic rasa, which, while inadvertently causing his separation from Śakuntalā, leads directly into that other dimension of love—love-in-separation. It is this change of register that allows the erotic rasa to continue to be savoured until its resolution in the final-act reunion of Duṣyanta and Śakuntalā as the parents of a son and heir.