A History of Sanskrit Literature: Classical Period, Vol. I c4.21

c4.21

It must also be noted that as the number of injunctions increased and as the *Smṛti-śāstra* demanded a complete patternisation of the conduct of all sections of people, freedom of life and behaviour gradually began to disappear. In whatever community or clan of people one may have had a chance of enquiring into, one would find the same pattern of behaviour as was running through the ages. It was an attempt towards a mummification of social life from which all novelty was gone. Even if there was anywhere any violation of the pattern, the poet could hardly utilise it without shocking the sense of decorum and religious tatse of the people. Thus, the poet had hardly any field of new experience. The freer life of older times became gradually encased within the iron casings of the laws of *Smṛti*. Thus Kālidāsa in describing his ideal king Dilīpa, says that his subjects did not deviate even by a line from the course that was followed from the time of Manu. It is thus easy to say that when life is unchangeably patternised and there is no freedom and spontaneity or change or variety in life, poetry cannot reflect any new problems of life and necessarily it must follow artificial patterns which had been current through centuries. This was further enhanced by the fact that the same tendency of working after a pattern out of a reverence for the past also intellectually compelled the poet to look for the pattern of his work to earlier poets or to generalisations made from them as recorded in the Alaṃkāra literature. I wish to affirm here that the reason why the earlier Sanskrit literature like the *Rāmāyaṇa* and the *Mahābhārata* and the works of Śūdraka, Bhāsa, etc., are more human, and the reason why poets of a later period became gradually more and more artificial, is largly due to the stagnation of society and social life. Kālidāsa, however, may be taken as an exception, but it seems that in his time the ideal of old *varṇāśrama-dharma* seemed still to inspire the ideal of the people. For this reason in two of his works, *Raghuvamśa* and *Abhijñana-śakuntala* he had taken a theme of antiquity and of history. Thus in *Raghuvamśa*, which is a history of the kings of Raghu race, he seems to have invented many episodes of the kings of the past about whom practically no record is available in Vālmīki. It is curious to note, however, that though he practically passed off the scenes of Rāma's life depicted by Vālmīki, yet he expressed his gratitude to him to the extent of comparing his work as being merely of the type of passing a thread through pearls through which holes have already been made by Vālmīki. Now, what may be the secret of Kālidāsa's feeling of greatfulness ?