A History of Sanskrit Literature c21.s5.8

c21.s5.8

King Cintāmaṇi has a beautiful son, Kandarpaketu, who in a dream beheld a girl of beauty exceeding his own; sleep leaves him and with his friend Makaranda he sallies forth to seek the unknown. In the Vindhya as the prince lies sleepless he overhears the curtain-lecture of an indignant Maina bird to her husband, who defends himself for late hours by telling how the monarch Çṛṅgāraçekhara has a peerless daughter, Vāsavadattā, who in a dream has seen the lovely vision of a youth, of whom she is deeply enamoured. She has sent her confidante Tamālikā to bear to the youth an assurance of her deep love. There is no difficulty in securing the meeting of the two at Pāṭaliputra, but the prince learns to his horror that the king, wearied of her unwedded state, means forthwith to marry her to the Vidyādhara chief Puṣpaketu. The lovers therefore flee by means of a magic steed to the Vindhya where they fall asleep. Awakened, the prince finds to his sorrow that the maiden has departed, and in his despair he is only kept from self-destruction by a voice from the sky promising him reunion. After long wandering he finds a statue which at his touch awakens to life as his beloved, and in reunion they live in great happiness in Kandarpaketu's capital. The plot it will be seen is negligible, not even worth serious criticism, but it would be quite unjust to accuse Subandhu of indecency or savagery as one distinguished editor did. To apply mid-Victorian conceptions of propriety to India is obviously absurd and wholly misleading. Indian writers, not excluding Kālidāsa, indulge habitually *con amore* in minute descriptions of the beauty of women and the delights of love which are not in accord with western conventions of taste. But the same condemnation was applied by contemporaries to Swinburne, and Shakespeare’s frankness is more resented by English than by German taste. What is essential is to repel the connexion of such descriptions with immorality, and to assert that they must be approved or condemned on artistic grounds alone. There is all the world of difference between what we find in the great poets of India and the frank delight of Martial and Petronius in descriptions of immoral scenes.