by Kalidasa
Yama and Soma: the God of Death, and the divine personification of the plant whose juice was central to Vedic sacrifice.
made her my daughter: v. 13 omitted:
The law, as you know, defines three kinds of father:
The child’s maker,
The one who rescues her,
And the one who succours her.
Called her ‘Śakuntalā’: śakunta = ‘bhd’; cf. The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p.97.
descended from princes …: and so eligible to marry him, her real father, Viśvāmitra, having been a member of the warrior class. See note on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 13.
the gāndharva rite: see note on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 40.
Will give me away: in Jamison’s words, ‘[Śakuntalā] immediately counters with an appeal to conventional, parentally controlled marriage’: Stephanie W. Jamison, Sacrificed Wife/Sacrificer’s Wife: Women, Ritual, and Hospitality in Ancient India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 249.
give yourself away: the king claims that ‘she can act simultaneously as the bride and the giver of the bride, i.e. her father’: Jamison, Sacrificed Wife/Sacrificer’s Wife, 249.
Prescribed for princes: these two lines summarize vv. 8b–14 (on the eight types of marriage), which are omitted. On the gāndharva rite, see note on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 40; on the eight forms of marriage, see Jamison, Sacrificed Wife/Sacrificer’s Wife, 210–12.
world-emperor’s wheel: concludes a list of physical indicators of a cakra-vartin or universal emperor; cf. notes on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, pp. 9, 95.
called into question: cf. Śārṇgarava’s verse in The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 63.
Hastināpura: see The Recognition of Śakuntalā, note to p. 47.
Law, love, or profit: the three legitimate worldly pursuits; see Introduction, section on ‘Aesthetic Theory and the Meaning of Śakuntalā’.
burst into a hundred pieces: for an analysis of this threat as a means to tracing the origins of the Mahābhārata’s version of the Śakuntalā story, see Stanley Insler, ‘The Shattered Head Split and the Epic Tale of Śakuntalā’, Bulletin d’Etudes Indiennes, 7–8 (1989–90), 97–139.
who enters her: van Buitenen translates this (āgamavatahḥ) as ‘who follows the scriptures’.
ancestors who died before: see note on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 86.
Svayamṣbhū … Put: a pseudo-etymology of the Sanskrit word for son. Svayamṣbhū is a name for the first Creator.
ritual duty: a man could not set up the fire necessary for orthodox domestic rituals, or indeed perform them at all, without being married.
grubby kisses?: cf. Duṣyanta’s verse in The Recognition of Śakuntalā, pp.95f.
sacrifice the horse: the horse sacrifice was the most elaborate of the Vedic rituals, and only performed by the most powerful kings. That he would be thought capable of performing a hundred such sacrifices indicates the boy’s extraordinary power.
thirty gods: a rounding down of the Vedic thirty-three; relatively minor deities, such as the Ādityas; see note on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 101.
Indra, Kubera, Yama, and Varuna: the lord of the gods, the God of Wealth, the God of Death, and the god associated with celestial order and duty.
milk from water: see note on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 88.
out of hell: by keeping them fed in the afterlife through the offerings of the śrāddha ritual; see note on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 86.
the entire Veda: the sacred texts of brahminical Hinduism, orally transmitted between brahmins, and regarded as revelation.
life-giving water: this seems to refer to the sac that receives the father’s seed.
“Bharata”, “Sustained”: usually known, actively, as the ‘Sustainer’; see note on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 104.
Dakṣa … a sacrifice: Dakṣa is one of the ādityas (see note on The Recognition of Śakuntalā, p. 101) and a legendary sacrificer. The cows are the fee, paid to KAṆVA and other officiating brahmins for their technical services.
Truth-telling kings: a compression of vv. 50–1, eulogizing the Bharata line, and leading into the next episode in the Mahābhārata.
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1 For the principal secondary sources for this Introduction, see the studies by Goodwin, Gerow, Miller, Gitomer, and Keith listed in the Select Bibliography.
2 Raghuvaṅśa (The Dynasty of Raghu), Kumārasambhava (The Birth of the War God), and Meghadūta (The Cloud Messenger). Ṛtusaṃhāra (The Gathering of the Seasons) may also be genuine.
3 We can only be certain that he lived some time between the beginning of the second century BCE and 634 CE.
4 ‘Kālidāsa’ means ‘servant of Kālī’, a fierce form of the Goddess, who is Śiva’s consort.
5 The title of the play is not concisely translatable in a literal way, but may perhaps be rendered as: ‘The Play About Śakuntalā Remembered Through the Ring of Recognition’ or ‘Recollection’ (see Barbara Stoler Miller (ed.), Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kālidāsa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 337, for a more detailed explanation).
6 If we are making a comparison with Shakespeare, Śakuntalā bears some surface resemblance to the late romances such as The Winter’s Tale—a play with which an enterprising producer might fruitfully pair it.
7 Edwin Gerow, ‘Plot Structure and the Development of Rasa in the Śakuntalā’, Pts. I and II, Journal of the American Oriental Society,99: 4 (1979); 100:3 (1980), Pt. I, 564.
8 See section on ‘Kālidāsa’s Sources’, below, for a brief discussion of this and other possible sources.
9 There are, of course, many other differences as well: Kālidāsa’s king’s duty-bound destruction of local and global demons, for one.
10 These have been been discussed by a number of commentators, although seldom with total agreement about how and where they occur. See, e.g. Edwin Gerow’s articles listed in the Select Bibliography.
11 In this, and what follows, I do not give detailed correspondences. Readers will discover these for themselves: for instance, in the first act, Duṣyanta conceals himself to watch Śakuntalā and her friends, then intervenes to remove a threat (the bee); a similar pattern of concealment and intervention takes place in relation to the child in the final act.
12 This is also true of a number of characters throughout the play: for instance, the two charioteers may be paired, as may Kaṇva and Mārīca. Directors could obviously make creative use of such doublings in production.
13 For a detailed description, see Nīṭyaśāstra, Chs. 6–7; also A. B. Keith, The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; repr. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), passim, and Robert E. Goodwin, The Playworld of Sanskrit Drama (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998), 177–84.
14 Not to be confused with the Bharata who appears in the Śakuntalā episodes.
15 Those requiring a more detailed view of Sanskrit theatrical practices and aesthetic theory are referred to works cited in the Select Bibliography, especially translations of the Nīṭyaśāstra itself.
16 Cf. Sanskrit poetry’s other major form: mahākāvya or ‘court epic’.
17Nīṭyaśāstra, chs. 6–7.
18 Literally, ‘flavour’ or ‘savour’.
19 Goodwin, The Playworld of Sanskrit Drama,177.
20 See, e.g. Raniero Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, 2nd revised edn. 1968).
21 Theoretically enumerated as eight emotions: (1) love, (2) laughter, (3) sorrow, (4) energy, (5) anger, (6) fear, (7) disgust, and (8) amazement; which engender eight corresponding rasa: (1) erotic, (2) comic, (3) pathetic, (4) heroic, (5) furious, (6), fearful, (7) grotesque, and (8) wondrous.
22 At the level of plot-structure, itself carefully analysed in The Drama Manual(Nīṭyaśāstra, eh. 21), Edwin Gerow has attempted to demonstrate in great detail how the plot of Śakuntalā is crucial to the realization of its aesthetic effect or rasa. Interested readers are referred to his ‘Plot Structure and the Development of Rasa in the Śakuntalā’, Pts. I and II.
23 Quoted in Goodwin The Playworld of Sanskrit Drama, p. x. One wonders where this definition of drama leaves Waiting For Godot, a play in which, famously, ‘nothing happens, twice’. But, of course, things do happen in Godot, and they happen in Śakuntalā; and Greek-derived models of what constitutes action, conflict, and ‘drama’ may not be appropriate in either case.
