A History of Sanskrit Literature c11.s6: 6. The Kumārasambhava

A History of Sanskrit Literature c11.s6

Language: English

6. The Kumārasambhava

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High as Indian opinion ranks the *Meghadūta*, which won also the commendation of Goethe,³ to modern taste the *Kumārasambhava*⁴ appeals more deeply by reason of its richer variety, the brilliance of its fancy, and the greater warmth of its feeling. The *Meghadūta* has, with reason, been ascribed the merit of approaching more closely than any other Indian poem to the rank of an elegy; the *Kumārasambhava* varies from the loveliness of the spring and the delights of married love to the utter desolation induced by the death of the beloved. The subject is unquestionably a daring one, the events which bring about the marriage of the highest god Çiva to Umā and the birth of Skanda, the war god, and Ānandavardhana⁵ tells us that there were critics who deemed it wrong to depict the amour of two deities. Still less permissible does the subject naturally appear to modern taste, unless we realize that as in the *Meghadūta* we must see the poet's power of suggestion; the wedlock of Çiva and Umā is no mere sport, no episode of light love such as that of Zeus with Danae or many another. From this union springs a power destined to perform the slaying of the demon Tāraka, who menaces the world with destruction; moreover, their nuptials and their love serve as the prototype for human marriage and human love, and sanctify with divine precedent the forces which make the home and carry on the race of men.

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³ Cf. von Schroeder, *Indiens Lit. und Cultur*, p. 548.

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⁴ Ed. NSP. 1906; i–viii, TSS. 1913–14; i–vii, trans. R. H. Griffith, London, 1879.

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⁵ iii. 6, p. 137. Mammaṭa disagrees.

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The poem begins with a brilliant piece of description of the Himālaya, the abode of Çiva. Kālidāsa, unlike many a classical and even modern poet, had no hatred of mountains; his fancy makes them the dwelling of merry sprites who play in their caves, round which eddy the clouds, affording welcome screens for the maidens when they undress; the wind, wet with the drops of the streams of the Ganges as it descends from heaven, beats on the trunks of the deodars, and bends the peacock feathers, the scanty dress of the gnomes who chase the antelope. In marked contrast to this innocent frolic sits Çiva, sunk in deepest meditation, and on him with other maidens waits Umā, born of the mountain god himself, plucking flowers to offer to him, and fetching water and grass for his service. Canto ii shows us the gods in deep distress, for a demon Tāraka has arisen to menace them, and Brahman himself can afford no aid, for he has accorded him his protection, and even a poison tree cannot be cut down, if one has reared it oneself. Only Çiva can aid, Çiva who surpasses Brahman and Viṣṇu in glory, and, if Umā can win him, from them will spring a deliverer. Indra then seeks the aid of Kāma, god of love, to win Çiva’s heart for Umā. The next Canto shows Kāma ready and willing to effect the end desired if Spring will be his comrade as well as his dear wife Rati. There follows a brilliant picture of the new life and love awakened in nature by the advent of Spring with Kāma, but the sight of Çiva seated still as a flame when no wind blows, a cloud without rain, daunts even Kāma’s heart and he quails. But Umā with her friends appears, and Çiva is begged to hearken to their devotions; he feels himself strangely moved, and glancing sees Kāma on the point of discharging at him his deadly arrow. One fiery glance from the god’s eye reduces him to ashes. Then follows (iv) a brilliant and touchingly pathetic picture of the lament of Rati for her dead husband; she will not accept the consolation urged on her by Spring; instead she bids him heap the pyre so that she may follow him in death. But her fatal purpose is stayed by a voice from on high, which assures her of reunion with her beloved when Çiva shall have relented and taken Umā to spouse. In sorrowful hope Rati continues her life.

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The first throw has failed and Umā is bitterly disappointed, bitterly ashamed. She determines, despite all protests, to perform asceticism until she wins her desire; in summer she exposes herself to the appalling heat and smoke of four fires, in winter lies in icy water, in the rains sleeps on the naked rock. As she is engaged in these acts a hermit appears before her and questions her; from her sighs he learns that she loves, and from her maids who that lover is. He proceeds to depict in appalling colours the god of her desire, but she fiercely and bitterly rebukes his attacks; delighted he reveals himself as Çiva incarnate (v). All now is ripe for the wedding, but Kālidāsa detains us with a gay picture of the solemn scenes which lead up to it. The Seven Seers themselves with Arundhatī come as wooers from Çiva to seek the maiden’s hand; she stands, eyes downcast, counting the leaves on the lotus in her hand, at her father’s side, while his eyes wander to the face of his consort, for in matters affecting their daughters householders are wont to obey their wives’ desires (vi). The wedding follows, described, doubtless from the model of imperial ceremonies, with rich abundance of detail; the mother, in her excitement between joy and sorrow, cannot see to place correctly the painted mark on her daughter’s forehead, and misplaces the woollen marriage thread which the nurse, more calm and practical, sets aright.

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With this ends the poem in many manuscripts; others add ten cantos. Of these Canto viii describes, according to the principles of the Kāmaçāstra, the joys of the wedded pair; doubtless such frankness is abhorrent to western taste, but the doubts of its genuineness which have been expressed are clearly groundless; it seems certainly¹ to have been known to Bhāravi, to Kumāradāsa, and to Māgha, and quotations from it occur in the writers on poetics. Nor in poetic skill is it in the least inferior to Kālidāsa’s work. The case² is other with the following cantos. They tell of Agni’s approach, first in dove shape, then in his proper person, to Çiva as he prolongs for centuries the joys of dalliance, begging his aid. From the seed of Çiva, cast in the Ganges and shared by the six Kṛttikās, Pleiades, Kumāra is miraculously born, and grows up delighting his parents by his childish play. But the gods are in terror, the city of the gods is dismayed through Tāraka; Indra comes to demand help; Çiva grants his prayer and assigns Kumāra to the task. The great host of Tāraka is described in Canto xiv, then the portents which warn him not to war (xv). Blinded by pride he refuses, bids his young opponent go back to his father and mother rather than fight, assails him with his whirlwinds and magic fire, until pierced to the heart he falls dead. The poem thus goes far beyond the birth of Kumāra as its title promises, and the inferiority of the new cantos is obvious on every ground. The metre is carelessly handled; in five cases caesura is neglected at the end of the first and third verses of the Çloka, a negligence quite foreign to Kālidāsa; the same carelessness is seen six times in Upajāti stanzas, where too weak caesuras—at the end of a compound, not of a word—are used far more often than by Kālidāsa. In order to manage his metres the poet has to resort to versefillers, abhorred of really good writers; *su* is repeatedly thus used, as well as *sadyaḥ* and *alam*; the constant use of periphrasis is doubtless due to the same cause: the writer expends much ingenuity in coining new designations for his characters, and is so fond of the superfluous *anta* at the end of compounds—which we have seen in Vatsabhaṭṭi—that Jacobi has conjectured that he was a Marāṭha, in view of the Marāṭhī locative *ānt*. In the later manner is the free use of prepositional compounds and the impersonal passive with subject in the instrumental; the former use just appears in Kālidāsa, the latter is common from Bhāravi onwards. Moreover, save occasionally, as in the battle scene, the poetical value of the cantos is small, and in confirmation of the internal evidence it may be added that neither commentators nor writers on poetics cite them nor are imitations found in later poets.

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¹ See Walter, *Indica*, iii. 21, 25 f., who suggests use of viii. 63 in *Vikramorvaçī*, iii. 6.

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² Jacobi, OC. V. ii, 2. 133 ff. i–viii are used in the *Çaṅkarasaṁhitā* of the *Skanda Purāṇa*, but it in ix–xvii; Weber, ZDMG. xxvii. 179 ff., 190 ff.; *Pandit*, iii. 19 ff., 85 ff.

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Of Kālidāsa's model for his poem we know nothing, but we can trace in it the influence of Vālmīki. In the *Rāmāyaṇa*¹ we have a brilliant picture of the contrast of the beauty of spring in the Kiṣkindhā forest as contrasted with the ceaseless sorrow of Rāma, bereft of Sītā, nor can we doubt that this has influenced Kālidāsa to draw the wonderful picture of Spring's advent and the revival of the youth and life of the world. There is a parallel too for Rati's despair¹; when Vālin falls Tārā addresses him with words not less sincere because they bear the stamp of the classic style: 'Why dost thus speak no more to thy beloved? Arise and share this fair couch with me; the best of men lie not, as thou, on the ground. Too dear dost thou hold, o lord, the earth even in death, since me thou dost leave alone and her hast clasped in thine embrace. Ended our days of joy together in the fair forest; sunken am I in a deep sea of sorrow, without joy, without sustenance, since thus hast departed. Hard my heart that it can see thee stretched on the ground and yet not break from sorrow.' Hints too for the demon Tāraka are clearly taken from the description of Rāvaṇa in the *Rāmāyaṇa*.² There are doubtless reminders here and there of Açvaghoṣa,³ as in the description of the actions⁴ of the women of the city on the advent of Çiva and Pārvatī, which has a prototype in the description in the *Buddhacarita*⁵ of the entrance of the prince, and which is taken up again in the description in the *Raghuvaṇça*⁶ of the entry of Aja and Indumatī.

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¹ iv. 1.

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¹ iv. 23; cf. vi. 111 (of Rāvaṇa).

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² Cf. also *Rām.* vi. 124. 45 with xiii. 36.

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³ Cf. Walter, *Indica*, iii. 11 ff.

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⁴ vii. 56-69.

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⁵ iii. 13-24.

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⁶ vii. 5-16.

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The problem why the poem was never finished by its author remains insoluble. The loss of the last pages of a solitary manuscript may be the explanation, but it is far more likely that the poet, deterred either by contemporary criticism of his treatment of the divine pair, or by the feeling that the legend of the birth with its strangeness and miracles was not a true theme for poetry, abandoned the purpose and left his work unfinished. It can hardly be claimed that death intervened, for there can be no doubt that the *Raghuvaṇça* is a later work. This shows itself both in the graver tone, in the references to the Yoga philosophy and the less personal conception of the universe as compared with the magnification of Çiva in the *Kumārasambhava*, and in the growing pedantry seen in the use of similes derived from grammar, of which we have only modest suggestions in the *Kumārasambhava*.⁷ Thus Rāma's army follows him to serve his purpose as the prefix *adhi* is followed by the root *i* to make the word *adhyayana*; Sugrīva is put in Vālin's place as king as a substitute replaces the root, and husband and wife are theme and suffix. Moreover, in the constant parallels between the two poems, as in the description of the marriage rites, the priority seems to belong to the *Kumārasambhava*; it is curious that Kālidāsa shows a distinct love of using the same metre for the same theme; thus in both we have the Çloka used in prayers,¹ death is described in the Viyoginī,² a ruined state in the Upajāti.³

Linked texts (4)

Kumārasaṃbhava — Kālidāsa, Sanskrit
Vālmīkirāmāyaṇa — Vālmīki, Sanskrit
Meghadūta — Kālidāsa, Sanskrit
Skandapurāṇa — Vyāsa, Sanskrit