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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
This verse comes at the end of the 2nd Act of Kālidāsa's Vikramorvaśīya (hereafter V). It is spoken by the royal hero Purūravas moments after his wife Auśīnarī has left the scene in a jealous pique, refusing to accept his anunaya, his attempt at conciliation. Auśīnarī had confronted him with evidence of his affair with the apsaras Urvaśī, a love-verse that the nymph had inscribed on a piece of birch-bark. Urvaśī had by then already left the lovely palace garden where she had appeared to him beyond his hopes (for how can a mortal expect a liaison with a divinity?), called back to Indra's palace to act the principal role in a play called Lakṣmī's Svayaṃvara. The King had entrusted the piece of bark to the Vidūṣaka's safekeeping, but of course the latter—true to his name of “spoiler”—had dropped it, leaving it to be discovered by Auśīnarī and her maid. At first the hero tries to deny that the inscribed message has anything to do with him, but this is hardly convincing. Furthermore, the Vidūṣaka's attempts at camouflage only succeeded in underscoring his friend's guilt. But “No,” Ausmari responds, “you haven't transgressed. It is I who transgress with my disagreeable presence. I'll go!” With this she plays her trump card, and Purūravas can only play his. He admits his guilt, but only formulaically, only by invoking a gallant convention: he is and has always been her slave, and when the mistress is angry then surely the slave is guilty. Saying this, he falls at her feet, but she turns her back on him and leaves. The Vidūṣaka remarks that this is all to his favour since he will no longer have to camouflage his affair, but Purūravas rejects this callous notion. His respect (bahumāna) for Auśīnarī is genuine. He does not want to hurt her and regrets that his gallantry cannot soothe her. Thus he utters the lines I have quoted above.
1 2.21 in Velankar's edition: The Vikramorvaśīya of Kālidāsa, ed. Velankar, H. D. (New Delhi, 1961)Google Scholar. All citations are from this edition. Of the other plays discussed in this paper the editions I use are as follows. Abhijñānaśakuntala (Ś): Kālidāsa's Śakuntala, ed. Pischel, Richard, 2nd ed., Harvard Oriental Series 16 (Cambridge, MA, 1922)Google Scholar. Mālavikāgnimitra (M), ed. anon. (Srirangam, 1908)Google Scholar. Svapnavāsavadatta (SV): The Svapnavāsavadatta of Bhasa, ed. Sastri, T. Ganapati (Trivandrum, 1924)Google Scholar.
2 The title of the play already indicates the heroine's character as a Śri-figure, a matter I will discuss below.
3 The latest discussion of the meaning of vidūṣaka occurs in Kuiper, F. B. J., Varuṇa and Vidūṣaka (Amsterdam, 1979) pp. 208 et al.Google Scholar
5 V 2.20
aparādhī nāmāhaṃ prasida rambhoru virama saṃrambhāt|
sevyo janaś ca kupitaḥ kathaṃ nu dāso niraparādhaḥ‖
Just now tittle this means is revealed in contrast by a variant on the motif in 3.19:
sāmantamaulimaṇirañjitaśāsanāṅkam
ekātapatram avaner na tathā prabhutvam|
asyāḥ sakhe caraṇayor aham adya kāntam
ājñākaratvam adhigamya yathā kṛtārthaḥ‖
Purüravas here is speaking to the Vidūṣaka about his love for Urvaśī: “My sovereignty, wherein a single umbrella is held over the earth and edicts are coloured by (the rays of) my vassals' crest-jewels, does not satisfy me as much as beloved servitude at her feet, my friend!” The words of this verse will be vivified by the anguish of the 4th Act, in which the hero has indeed abandoned his kingdom and wanders half-crazed through the forest seeking his beloved, while the words of the former verse have no counterpart in emotion. See also verses 4.26 and 55, which again use the language of mistress and servant during the forest-wandering soliloquy, and those cited in note 5, which occur in the 3rd Act. The point is: sincerity or insincerity can not be detected in the formulaic words themselves. Rather, they are only revealed by actions and emotional responses that can be verified by the audience.
5 3.13–14 (which compare to those cited in note 4 above):
anena kalyāṇi mrṇālakomalamⅠ
vratena gātraṃ glapayasy akāraṇam|
prasādam ākārikṣati yas tavotsukaḥ
sa kiṃ tvayā dāsajanaḥ prasādyate‖
dātuṃ vā prabhavasi mām anyasmai kartum eva vā dāsam|
nāhaṃ punas tathā ivaṃ yathā hi māṃ śankase bhīru‖
6 3.13.2–3: ayi mugdhe anyasaṃkrāntapremāṇo nāgarikā adhikaṃ dakṣiṇā bhavanti| My practice will be to give all Prakrit passages in their Sanskrit chāyā.
7 See Scheftelowitz, Isidor, Die Apokryphen des Bgveda (1906Google Scholar; rpt. Hildesheim, 1966) pp. 3–4, 72 ff.
8 At the same time, it is hard not to see a connection between royalty's privilege of selfindulgence and the popular notion that erotic and material plenitude is a sign of divine favour. The king's fortune (Srī) is—in Peirce's terms—an indexical sign of divine blessing upon the whole society.
9 A valuable sourcebook on the complete legend of Udayana and Vāsavadattā is Niti Adaval, The Story of King Udayana, as Gleaned from Sanskrit Pali and Prakrit Sources (Varanasi, 1970)Google Scholar.
10 See the prologue to Act 4, in which her former companions are discussing the lovers' parting, esp. 4.2.19–20: asahanā khalu sāⅠ dūrārudhaś cāsyāḥ praṇayaḥⅠ tad bhavitavyatatra balavatī| The theme is taken up numerous times by Purūravas in the course of the Act (e.g., 4.9, 4.26, 4.55, 4.66). Urvaśīs first words to him upon being released from her spell are a plea for forgiveness (cited infra). She also echoes her friends' words exactly in attributing her hasty departure to a mind clouded by a guru's (Bharata's) curse (guruśāpasaṃmūḍhahṛdayā, 4.2.21 and 4.71.9).
11 Many critics have recognized Kālidāsa's sensitivity to women's emotions. For instance, Ingalls commends Ruben for sensing Kalidasa's sympathy for Sita and lack of it for Rāma in the Raghuvaṃsa: Ingalls, D. H. H., “Kālidāsa and the attitudes of the Golden Age,” JAOS 96.1 (1976) pp. 15–26Google Scholar.
11 M 4.14:
dākṣiṇyaṃ nāma bimbiṣṭhi baimbikānāṃ kulavraram|
tan me dīrghākṣi ye prāṇās te tvadāśānibandhanāḥ‖
Mālavikā had not been on stage when Agnimitra fell at Irāvatī's feet, etc., but we are obviously to understand that sehe knows all about it from what she says in this passage.
13 These and other of the hero's characteristics are conveniently codified in the first verses of Daśarūpaka 2. For an extensive list of sources see Rakesagupta (sic), Studies in Nāyaka-Nāyikā-Bheda (Aligarh, 1967) pp. 385–94Google Scholar (= Appendix A).
14 Both Śaṅkara's and Rāmānuja's comments on Brahmasūtra 2.1.33 (lokavat tu līlākaivalyam) liken the free creation of Isvara to the (ostensibly) unmotivated sport of a prince. The theologians must preserve the absolute from the taint of causality, which implies necessity and contingency. True freedom and autonomy consist in play for its own sake. The analogy tells us as much about the psychology of the play-ideal as it does about God's relation to the world of appearances.
15 The perfect example of this occurs in V 4, e.g., verse 4.49:
api vānāntaram alpakucāntarā śrayati parvata parvasu sannalā|
idam anaṅgaparigraham aṅiganā pṛthunitamba nitambavati tava‖
This is untranslatable in the intricacy of its verbal play, and yet it is intended, as far as rasa is concerned, to reveal the depths of Purūravas' anguish in love-separation. Also noteworthy is the fact that, despite Purūravas' great affliction, his words evoke nothing more than Urvasl's physically erotic features (full breasts, rounded limbs and buttocks; also the expression anangaparigraham surely refers to her, as well as the forest, as the “abode of love”): we are kepton the level of sexual sport (mirrored in linguistic sport) even in its excruciating absence. Yet the two—emotional intensity and playful detachment—can exist simultaneously and infuse each other with greater value. This is precisely the paradox of kāvya's effectiveness.
16 It is one of the great limitations of the rasa scheme that it does not acknowledge the emotional value of friendship even between men, though it is one of the more important themes of drama (e.g., the sneha theme of Mudrārākşasa, Mṛcchakaṭika, and Pratijñāyaugandharāyand). For attempts to fill this obvious gap, see Chapter 6 of Raghavan, V., The Number of Rasas, 3rd rev. ed. (Madras, 1975)Google Scholar. The major article on the Vaiṣṇava schematization of the bhakti rasas (śānta, dasya, sākhya, vātsalya, and mādhurya), all versions of śṛṅgāra in effect, is De, S. K., “The Bhaktirasaśāstra of Bengal Vaisnavism,” Indian Historical Quarterly 8 (1932): pp. 643–88Google Scholar.
17 The device in the play that makes this possible is the hero's finding of the gem-of-union (saṃtgamaniya maṇī), derived from the dye (rāga) on Gaurī's feet. (It can be no accident that rāga is often used as a synonym for rāga, as it is in the verse that heads this paper and, for example, in Ś 1.4.1: rāgāpahrtacittavṛttir ālikhita iva bhāti sarvato raṅgaḥ.) The jewel is delivered to him by an ascetic, who is also part of that vague sentience forming the background to the hero's mime. A full attempt at interpretation of this play would have to take into account the significance of the axis formed by the male authority figuresassociated with the curse and its resolution: Bharata, Kumāra, and the ascetic (who is a stand-in for §iva), and (though of a different type) Indra. Here I am only concerned with the direct relationship of hero and heroine. In a sense, Gauri is the archetypal enhancement of Urvasl. When Purūravas has suffered enough, when he has proven his case, he wins the favour of this larger feminine principle acting in concert with the male ascetical power which intervened to separate Urvaśī from Purūravas in the first place. No longer needing to impose a tapas on her lover by withdrawing behind the veil of an ascetical curse, Urvaśī can appear as a sympathetic fellow victim in perfect correspondence with the hero's desires.
18 4.70.1–2: marṣayatu marfayatu mahārājaḥ| yan mayā kopavaśaṃ gatayāvasthāntaraṃ prāpito mahārāja|
19 SV 4.5:
padmāvatī bahumatā mama yadyapi rūpaśīlāmādhuryaiḥ|
vāsavadattābaddham na tu tāvan me mono harati‖
20 SV 1.12.47, 2.0.26–7: Udayana is a romantic figure to the maiden Padmāvatī because his grief makes him sānukroṡa. At this point in the play she has not even seen him: he is simply a hero in a romantic tale.
21 V 1.2:
praṇayiṣu vā dākṣinyād athavā sadvastupuruṣabahumānāt|
śⅠṇuta manobhir avahitaiḥ kriyām imāṃ kālidāsasyai‖
22 Whatever the (e.g. ritual) origins of kāvya—and particularly nāⅡya—may have been, whatever its original inheritance was, the form was perpetuated because it continued to appeal to the taste of the community of rasikas that stretched over many centuries. Its thematic invariance tells us not simply that it was a conventional poetry, but that its conventions corresponded to an emotional configuration that was likewise invariant and which demanded mythic expression.
23 I have dealt with the issue of the rasika's identification with the nāyaka in another paper (“Kalidasa's metadrama,” forthcoming in Journal of South Asian Literature). Here let me say in the wayof justification within Indian poetics that the notion of sādhāraṇikarana demands identification. More than this, it is understood to have practical effects on the rasika's life: see Gnoli, R., The Aesthetic Experience according to Abhinavagupta, 2nd ed. (Varanasi, 1968) pp. 12–3, 52–3Google Scholar, which discusses the Mīmāmsaka origins of the idea; and pp. 89–90,97–8, where RG shows that the reader/spectator models his behaviour on the characters he has identified with. In other words, despite the theory of impersonal aesthetic emotion, Indian aestheticians did covertly acknowledge identificatory links between fictive character and observer that are not disinterested.
24 Gerow, Edwin, A Glossary of Indian Figures of Speech (The Hague, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Introduction. In fact, Gerow offers a healthy, and realistic, corrective to the quasi-mystical poetics that modern scholars have tended to regard as exclusively characteristic of Indian aesthetics.
25 I need to make it clear that I am not arguing against the accepted judgment of Ingalls and many others that Sanskrit drama is really not dramatic but a spectacle-poetry (dṛýa kāvya) whose purposes are principally lyrical. It is unarguably true that with very few exceptions drama (and a fortiori the rest of kāvya)is not interested in character motivation and moral ambivalence, at least on the surface. But I am interested in what is below the surface, in the vital emotional questions with which kāvya as a whole is concerned. Here I detect genuine dilemma and ambivalence. In this paper I have focused on the dilemma created by the lyrical aesthetic in confrontation with a more urgent emotionality. The impressive serenity of kāvyic līlā has a less Apollonian aspect as well. See An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyākara's “Subhāşitaratnakosa”, trans. Ingalls, Daniel H. H. (Cambridge, MA, 1965) pp. 38–9.Google Scholar
26 I feel it is necessary to offer a partial defence of the much maligned Keith, who is seen as having no poetic sensibility and no appreciation of indigenous poetics, in his judgment of the insufficiency of Sanskrit poetry. I do not believe that the shibboleth of “Indian standards” has really met Keith's objection that an essentially sentimental and melodramatic poetry cannot satisfy us (as moderns, not just as Westerners) on a profound level. As limited as he was as a literary critic, he nevertheless did not evade the question of kāvya's moral and psychological impact and its ability to transcend its own cultural conditions. On the whole I believe his attitude is healthier for its acceptance in the context of world literature than the opposite attitude of sheltering it from frank criticism. His objections have to be “worked through” rather than dismissed as irrelevant. See Keith, A. B., The Sanskrit Drama (London, 1924) pp. 276–88;Google Scholar and Ingalls, D. H. H., An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry, p. 50Google Scholar.
27 Tagore, Rabindranath, “Sakuntala: its inner meaning,” introductory essay in Sakuntala, ed. and trans, by Binyon, Laurence and Gupta, K. N. Das (London, 1920) pp. xiii–xxix (translated from the Bengali by Jadunath Sarkar)Google Scholar.