The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory & Practice c12.s2: 2. The Three Dramas of Kālidāsa

The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory & Practice c12.s2

Language: English

2. The Three Dramas of Kālidāsa

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The *Mālavikāgnimitra*² is unquestionably the first dramatic work³ of Kālidāsa; he seeks in the prologue to excuse his presumption of presenting a new play when tried favourites such as Bhāsa, Saumilla, and the Kaviputras exist, and in the *Vikramorvaçī* also he shows some diffidence, which has disappeared in the *Çakuntalā*. The great merits of the poet are far less clearly exhibited here than in his other plays, but the identity of authorship is unquestionable, and was long ago proved by Weber against the doubts of Wilson.

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² Ed. F. Bollensen, Leipzig, 1879; trs. A. Weber, Berlin, 1856; V. Henry, Paris, 1889; C. H. Tawney, London, 1891. The existence of a variant recension is shown by the divergence of a citation from it in comm. on DR. iii. 18 from the manuscript tradition.

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³ That the *Meghadūta* is younger is suggested, not proved, by the lesser lyric power shown (Huth, p. 68). The *Ṛtusaṃhāra*, however, is doubtless earlier; its authenticity is demonstrated by me in JRAS. 1912, pp. 1066 ff.; 1913, pp. 410 ff. The relation of the *Kumārasambhava* and *Raghuvaṃśa* to the two later dramas is uncertain.

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The play, performed at a spring festival, probably at Ujjayinī, is a Nāṭaka in five Acts, and depicts a love drama of the type seen already in Bhāsa's plays on the theme of Udayana. The heroine Mālavikā is a Vidarbha princess, who is destined as the bride of Agnimitra; her brother, Mādhavasena, however, is captured by his cousin Yajñasena; she escapes and seeks Agnimitra, but *en route* to his capital in Vidiçā her escort is attacked by foresters, perhaps by order of the rival Vidarbha prince; she escapes again, however, and reaches Vidiçā, where she finds refuge in the home of the queen Dhāriṇī, who has her trained in the art of dancing. The king happens to see a picture in which she is depicted, and falls in love with her. To arrange an interview is not easy, but Gautama, his Vidūṣaka, provokes a quarrel between two masters of the dance, who have recourse to the king to decide the issue of superiority. He in turn refers the matter to the nun Kauçikī, who is in reality a partisan of Mālavikā, who had been in her charge and that of her brother, who was killed when the escort was dispersed. She bids the masters produce each his best pupil; Gaṇadāsa brings out Mālavikā, whose singing and dancing delight all, while her beauty ravishes the king more than ever. She is victorious.

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In Act III the scene changes to the park, whither comes Mālavikā at the bidding of Dhāriṇī to make the Açoka blossom, according to the ancient belief, by the touch of her foot. The king hidden with the Vidūṣaka behind a thicket watches her, but so also does Irāvatī, the younger of Agnimitra’s queens, who is suspicious and jealous of any rival in the king’s love. The king overhears Mālavikā’s conversation with her friend, and realizes that his love is shared; he comes forth and embraces her, but Irāvatī springs out of her hiding-place and insults the king. Dhāriṇī has Mālavikā confined to prevent any further development of the intrigue. The Vidūṣaka, however, proves equal to the occasion with the aid of Kauçikī; he declares himself bitten by a snake; the only remedy proves to require the use of a stone in the queen’s ring, which is accorded for that purpose, but employed for the more useful end of securing the release of Mālavikā, and the meeting of the lovers, which Irāvatī, who has excellent grounds for her vigilance, again disturbs. The king’s embarrassment is fortunately mitigated by the necessity of his going to the rescue of the little princess Vasulakṣmī, whom a monkey has frightened. Act V cuts the knot by the advent of two unexpected pieces of news; envoys come bearing the report of victory over the prince of Vidarbha and conveying captives; two young girls introduced before the queen as singers recognize both Kauçikī and their princess Mālavikā among the queen’s attendants, and Kauçikī explains her silence on the princess's identity by obedience to a prophecy. Further, Puṣyamitra, Agnimitra's father, sends tidings of victory from the north; the son of Dhāriṇī, Vasumitra, has defeated the Yavanas on the bank of the Indus, while guarding the sacrificial horse, which by ancient law is let loose to roam for a year unfettered before a king can perform rightfully the horse sacrifice, which marks him as emperor. Dhāriṇī already owes Mālavikā a guerdon for her service in causing the Aṣoka plant to blossom; delighted by the news of her son's success, she gladly gives Agnimitra authority to marry Mālavikā, Irāvatī begs her pardon, and all ends in happiness.

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Puṣyamitra, Agnimitra, and Vasumitra are clearly taken from the dynasty of the Çuṅgas, formed by the first through the deposition of the last Maurya in 178 B. C.¹ Contact with Yavanas in his time is recorded and the horse sacrifice is doubtless traditional, but equally it may reflect the sacrifice of Samudragupta, the most striking event of the early Gupta history, since it asserted the imperial sway of the family. The rest of the play is based on the normal model.

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¹ For the history, see CHI. i. 519 f.

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The Vikramorvaçī,² by many reckoned as the last work³ in drama of Kālidāsa, seems rather to fall in the interval between the youthful Mālavikāgnimitra and the mature perfection of the Çakuntalā. The theme is that of the love of Purūravas, a king, and Urvaçī, an Apsaras, or heavenly nymph. The prologue, which has been unjustly suspected of being proof of the incompleteness and therefore later date of the drama, is followed by screams of the nymphs from whom Urvaçī on her return from Kailāsa has been torn away by a demon; the king hastens to her aid, recovers her, and restores her first to her friends, and then to the Gandharva king, but not before both have fallen desperately in love. In the entr'acte a servant of the queen extracts cleverly from the Vidūṣaka the secret of the change which has come over the king, his love for Urvaçī. The king himself then appears; in conversation with the Vidūṣaka he declares his love, to meet with scant sympathy; Urvaçī and a friend appear in the air, and Urvaçī drops a letter written on birch bark breathing her love; the king reads it and gives it to the Vidūṣaka; Urvaçī’s friend appears, and finally Urvaçī herself, but after a brief exchange of love passages Urvaçī is recalled to play a part in heaven in a drama produced by Bharata. The message, unluckily, falls into the queen's hands, and she refuses to be appeased by Purūravas's attempts to soothe her. In the entr'acte before Act II we learn from a conversation between two pupils of Bharata that Urvaçī was so deeply in love that she played badly her part in the piece on Lakṣmī's wedding; asked whom she loved, she answered Purūravas instead of Puruṣottama, Viṣṇu's name, and Bharata cursed her; but Indra intervened and gave her leave to dwell on earth with her love until he had seen the face of her child. The Act that follows shows the king, anxious to please the queen, engaged with her in celebrating the festival of the moon's union with Rohiṇī; Urvaçī and her friend, in disguise and unseen by the king in a fairy mist, watch his courtesy which fills the nymph with anguish, though her friend assures her that it is mere courtesy. To her joy she finds that the queen has decided to be reconciled, and to permit the king the enjoyment of his beloved; pressed to stay with the king, she refuses, and Urvaçī joins Purūravas, her friend leaving her, bidding Purūravas to care for her so that she may not miss her friends in the sky.

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² Ed. F. Bollensen, Leipzig, 1846; S. P. Paṇḍit, Bombay, 1901; M. R. Kale, Bombay, 1898; trs. E. B. Cowell, Hertford, 1851; L. Fritze, Leipzig, 1880 E. Lobedanz, Leipzig, 1861. The Bengālī recension is ed. Pischel, *Monatsber d. kgl. Preuss. Akad. d. W.* 1875, pp. 609 ff.

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³ Cf. Huth, *op. cit.*, pp. 63 ff.

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The prelude to Act IV tells us of misfortune; the nymphs who mourn by the sea her absence learn that, angry at her husband for some trivial cause, she had entered the grove of Kumāra, forbidden to women, and been turned into a creeper. In distraction¹ the king seeks for her; he deems the cloud a demon which has stolen her away, demands of the peacock, the cuckoo, the flamingo, the bee, the elephant, the boar, the antelope what has become of her; he deems her transformed into the stream, whose waves are the movements of her eyebrows while the rows of birds in its waters are her girdle; he dances, sings, cries, faints in his madness, or deems the echo to be answering him, until a voice from heaven tells him of a magic stone, armed with which he grasps a creeper which in his embrace turns into Urvaçī.

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¹ The prototype here is clearly Rāma's search for Sītā; *Rāmāyaṇa*, iii. 60. The *Sudhanāvadāna*, cited by Gawroński (*Les sources de quelques drames indiens*, pp. 19, 29) draws probably from the same source.

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From this lyric height the drama declines in Act V. The king and his beloved are back in his capital; the moon festival is being celebrated, but the magic stone is stolen by a vulture, which, however, falls pierced by the arrow of a youthful archer; the arrow bears the inscription, ‘the arrow of Āyus, son of Urvaçī and Purūravas’. The king had known nothing of the child, but, while he is amazed, a woman comes from a hermitage with a gallant boy, who, educated in the duties of his warrior caste, has by his slaying the bird violated the rule of the hermitage and is now returned to his mother. Urvaçī, summoned, admits her parentage, but, while Purūravas is glad, she weeps to think of their severance, now inevitable, since he has seen his son. But, while Purūravas is ready to abandon the realm to the boy and retire to the forest in grief, Nārada comes with a message of good tidings; a battle is raging between the gods and the demons; Purūravas’s arms will be necessary, and in reward he may have Urvaçī’s society for his life.

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The play has come down in two recensions, one preserved in Bengālī and Devanāgarī manuscripts and commented on by Raṅganātha in A.D. 1656, and the other in South Indian manuscripts, commented on by Kāṭayavema, minister of the Reḍḍi prince, Kumāragiri of Koṇḍavīḍu about A.D. 1400. The most important among many differences is the fact that in Act IV the northern manuscripts give a series of Apabhraṅça verses, with directions as to the mode of singing and accompanying them, which are ignored in the southern manuscripts. The northern text calls the play a Troṭaka, apparently from the dance which accompanied the verses, the southern a Nāṭaka which it in essentials is. The arguments against the authenticity of the verses are partly the silence of the theorists, the fact that the existence in Kālidāsa’s time of Apabhraṅça of the type found is more than dubious,¹ that there is sometimes a degree of discrepancy between the verses and the prose of the drama, and that in the many imitations of the scene (*Mālatīmādhava*, Act IX, *Bālarāmāyaṇa*, Act V, *Prasannarāghava*, Act VI, and *Mahānā-* taka, Act IV) there are no similar verses. These reasons are on the whole conclusive, and the problematic fact that the Prākrit of the northern recension is better is not of importance.

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¹ Jacobi, *Bhavisattakaha*, p. 58; Bloch, *Vararuci und Hemacandra*, pp. 15 f.

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The *Çakuntalā*¹ certainly represents the perfection of Kālidāsa's art, and may justly be assumed to belong to his latest period of work. The prologue with his usual skill leads us up to the picture of the king in swift pursuit of an antelope entering the outskirts of the hermitage; warned of the sacred character of the spot, the king alights from his chariot and decides to pay his respects to the holy man whose hermitage it is; he is absent, but Çakuntalā, his foster-daughter, is there with her friends; pursued by a bee she calls for help; they reply that Duḥṣanta the king should aid as the hermitage is under his protection, and the king gallantly comes forward to help. From the maidens he elicits the tale of Çakuntalā's birth; she is daughter of Viçvāmitra and Menakā, and is being reared not for the religious life but for marriage to some worthy one. The king loves and the maiden begins to reciprocate his affection, when the news that a wild elephant is menacing the hermitage takes him away. Act II reveals his Vidūṣaka groaning over the toils of the king's hunting. But the king gives order for the hunt to end, not to please the Vidūṣaka but for Çakuntalā's sake, and, while he recounts his feelings to his unsympathetic friend, receives with keen satisfaction the request of the young hermits to protect the hermitage against the attacks of demons. The Vidūṣaka he gets rid of by sending him back to the capital to take part in a festival there, assuring him, in order to prevent domestic trouble, that his remarks about Çakuntalā were not serious. In the entr'acte before Act III a young Brahmin praises the deeds of Duḥṣanta, and we learn that Çakuntalā is unwell, and her maidens are troubled regarding her state, as she is the very life breath of Kaṇva. The Act itself depicts Çakuntalā with her maidens; she is deeply in love and writes a letter at their suggestion: the king who has overheard all comes on the scene and a dialogue follows, in which both the king and the maiden express their feelings; the scene is ended by the arrival of the nun Gautamī to fetch away her charge. The entr'acte that follows tells us from the conversation of Priyamvadā and Anasūyā, Çakuntalā’s dear friends, that the king after his marriage with Çakuntalā has departed and seems to have forgotten her; while Kaṇva is about to return and knows nothing of the affair. A loud cry interrupts them; Çakuntalā in her love-sickness has failed to pay due respect to the harsh ascetic Durvāsas, who has come to visit the hermitage: he curses her, and all the entreaties of her friends succeed in no more than mitigating the harshness of his curse; she will be forgotten by her husband, not indeed for ever, but until she presents to him the ring he gave her in token of their union. The curse is essential; the whole action of the play depends on it. The Act itself tells us that the difficulty regarding Kaṇva has been solved; a voice from the sky has informed him at the moment of his return of the marriage and Çakuntalā’s approaching maternity. He has decided to send her under escort to the king. Then follows a scene of intense pathos; the aged hermit unwillingly parts with his beloved foster-daughter, with words of advice for her future life, and Çakuntalā is desolated to leave him, her friends, and all that she has loved at the hermitage.

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¹ Bengālī recension, R. Pischel, Kiel, 1877; M. Williams, Hertford, 1876, and M. R. Kale, Bombay, 1908, represent the Devanāgarī version, and so mainly S Ray, Calcutta, 1908; C. Cappeller, Leipzig, 1909. There are South Indian edd., Madras, 1857, 1882. See also Burkhard, *Die Kaçmīrer Çakuntalā-Handschrift*, Vienna, 1884.

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Act V shows us the king in his court, overwhelmed with the duties of office, for Kālidāsa takes care to show us Duḥṣanta as the great and good monarch. News is brought that hermits with women desire an interview, while a song is heard in which the queen Haṃsavatī laments the king’s faithlessness to her; the king dispatches the Vidūṣaka to solace her, and receives in state the hermits. They bring him his wife, but, under the malign influence of the curse, he does not recognize her and cannot receive her. The hermits reprove him, and insist on leaving her, refusing her the right to go with them, since her duty is by her husband’s side. The king’s priest is willing to give her the safety of his house till the babe be born, but a figure of light in female shape appears and bears Çakuntalā away, leaving the king still unrecognizing, but filled with wonder. In the entr'acte which follows a vital element is contributed; policemen mishandle a fisherman accused of theft of a royal ring found in a fish which he has caught; it is Duḥṣanta’s ring which Çakuntalā had dropped while bathing. The Act that follows tells us of the recognition by the king of the wrong unwittingly done and his grief at the loss of his wife; he seeks to console himself with her portrait, when he is interrupted by a lady of the harem, and then by the minister, who obtains from him the decision of a law case involving the right of succession; the episode reminds the king of his childlessness. From his despair the king is awakened by the screams of the Vidūṣaka who has been roughly handled by Mātali, Indra’s charioteer, as an effective means of bringing the king back to the realization that there are duties superior to private feeling. The gods need his aid for battle. In Act VII Duḥṣanta is revealed victorious, and travelling with Mātali in a divine car high through the air to Hemakūṭa, where dwells in the place of supreme bliss the seer Mārica and his wife. Here the king sees a gallant boy playfully pulling about a young lion to the terror of two maidens who accompany him in the dress of the hermitage; they ask the king to intervene with the child in the cub’s interest, and the king feels a pang as he thinks of his sonlessness. To his amazement he learns that this is no hermit’s son, but his own; Çakuntalā is revealed to him in the dress of an ascetic, and Mārica crowns their happiness by making it clear to Çakuntalā that her husband was guiltless of the sorrow inflicted upon her.

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A drama so popular has naturally enough failed to come down to us in a single recension.¹ Four are normally distinguished, Bengālī, Devanāgarī, Kāçmīrī, and South Indian, while a fifth may also be traced. There are, however, in reality, two main recensions, the Bengālī, with 221 stanzas, as fixed by the commentators Çañkara and Candraçekhara, and the Devanāgarī, with 194 stanzas, of Rāghavabhaṭṭa; the Kāçmīrī, which supplies an entr’acte to Act VII, is in the main an eclectic combination of these two representatives of North Indian texts, and the South Indian is closely akin to the Devanāgarī; Abhirāma and Kāṭayavema among others have commented on it. The evidence of superior merit is conflicting; Pischel² laid stress on the more correct Prākrit of the Bengālī and the fact that some readings in the Devanāgarī are best explained as glosses on the Bengālī text, while Lévi¹ proved that Harṣa and Rājaçekhara knew the Bengālī recension in some shape. On the other hand, Weber² contended for the priority of the Devanāgarī; certainly some readings there are better, and some of the Bengālī stanzas are mere repetitions of others found in both texts. Unless we adopt the not very plausible view of Bollensen that the Devanāgarī version is the acting edition of the play revised for representation, we must hold that neither recension is of conclusive value: the argument from the Prākrit is not conclusive, for it may merely rest on the superior knowledge of the copyists from whom the Bengālī original ultimately issued.³

Linked texts (2)

Vālmīkirāmāyaṇa — Vālmīki, Sanskrit
Abhijñānaśākuntala — Kālidāsa, Sanskrit