Kālidāsa

Indian poet and dramatist

• Born: c. 340
• Birthplace: West-central India
• Died: c. 400
• Place of death: West-central India

Recognized as the author of no more than three plays and four poems, which fuse together themes of nature and love within the framework of Hinduism, Kālidāsa is generally regarded as India’s greatest poet and dramatist.

Early Life

The playMālavikāgnimitra (c. 370 c.e.; English translation, 1875) by Kālidāsa (KAL-ee-DAS-uh) has as its hero Agnimitra, a historical king of the Śunga Dynasty who reigned from 151 to 143 b.c.e. In addition, inscriptions found in the Deccan at Mandasor (dated 473 c.e.) and Aihole (dated 634 c.e.) quote from Kālidāsa’s poetry and laud his genius. These firm evidences are all that establish a chronological range for Kālidāsa’s life. The rest is conjecture. Though the Śunga was an important successor to the great Maurya Dynasty and led a cultural revival, opinion holds that Hindu culture had not sufficiently developed and the times were too disturbed to accommodate a talent such as that of Kālidāsa. Thus scholars suggest that the Gupta Dynasty (c. 321-c. 550 c.e.), the golden age of India, marked by serenity and sophistication, was more in line with the spirit and style of Kālidāsa. It is quite possible that Kālidāsa flourished during the reign of Chandragupta II (r. c. 380-413), with whom a congenial relation of court poet to patron can be readily conceived. Still, students of Kālidāsa tend to attach two date ranges to his works to acknowledge the uncertainty.

Just as little is known of his dates, little is known of Kālidāsa’s life—except by inference from his writings and the legends concerning him. Identified in various stories as an orphan, idiot, laborer, and shepherd, Kālidāsa may have had a difficult early life. His knowledge of religion, philosophy, the sciences, and Sanskrit probably marks him as a Brahman and a devotee of the cult of Śiva. (Indeed, his name means “servant of Kali,” one of the consorts of that god.) His aristocratic sensitivity, grasp of court etiquette, and familiarity with Indian geography suggest that he was not only a court poet to Vikramāditya I, his patron at Ujjain, but also a traveler and an ambassador (possibly to Kuntala, a kingdom inland from the Malabar coast). The erotic overtones in his works make it easy to accept the legend of a princess as his lover and spouse. It is not difficult to believe that his life ended, at sixty or eighty years of age, by foul play at the hands of a courtesan in Sri Lanka, as another legend would have it.

The order of his works (rejecting the twenty or so spurious works sometimes attributed to him) is unknown. Hypothetical reconstructions have been made, even to the degree of correlating the writings to his biography, but the writings are too impersonal to do this with any accuracy. Perhaps the two lyrics are early, the two epics somewhat later, while the plays are scattered at different phases of his life—Abhijñãānaśākuntala (c. 395 c.e.; Śakuntalā: Or, The Lost Ring, 1789) being the product of maturity.

Life’s Work

Nearly all Kālidāsa’s works were written in Sanskrit, a highly inflected language learned by an aristocratic elite—the word literally means “perfected.” Sanskrit was written as poetry (kavya), either lyric or epic, according to precise rules of grammar. The poetry, combined with other factors, created the visual immediacy of drama. Kālidāsa, using twenty-six different meters, was the king of similes, drawing from religion and nature in a style distinguished by a grace and economy that made music.

The Rtusamhāra (c. 365 c.e.; English translation, 1867) is a pastoral poem mirroring a newly married man’s joy of nature during the six Indian seasons (summer, the rains, autumn, early winter, winter, and spring); it is composed of 140 stanzas divided into six cantos. Though popular with the young, it is regarded as a piece of juvenilia, generally neglected by the literary critics. Yet this “lover’s calendar,” because of its romance, may have been innovative at its first appearance.

The Meghadūta (c. 375 c.e.; The Cloud Messenger, 1813), much adored by the German Romantic poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is an elegiac monody of 111 to 127 verses, according to various recensions; it is cast in a series of seventeen-syllable quatrains in a single meter. A yaksa, a sensual demigod, separated from his wife for a year by a curse, asks a rain cloud to transmit a love message to her. The first part of the poem contains a sweeping and detailed picture of the subcontinent via the hypostatized cloud; the second part focuses on its delivery to the wife in a celestial city of the Himalayas. The lyric plays on the pathos of love with full intensity of mood. The travels of the cloud and its detour over Ujjain lend credence to the idea of Kālidāsa as a traveler and diplomat. The poem is original and subjective; indeed, Kālidāsa pioneered a new genre. The traditional court epic (Mahākāvya) Kālidāsa found riddled with stereotype and convention. However, he was able to condense, deepen, and stylize his works into epics of aristocratic appeal, combining elevated themes with emotional verity.

The epic Kumārasambhava (c. 380 c.e.; The Birth of the War-God, 1879) is incomplete at eight cantos, covering the courtship and marriage of Śiva and Pārvatī only. (The birth of their son Kumāra, and his exploits, are recounted in ten additional cantos that were found not to be Kālidāsa’s work.) The material is drawn from the Purāṇas (the epic elaborating and expanding on the great epic Mahābhārata). Mount Himalaya’s daughter Pārvatī falls in love with the meditative Yogi god Śiva. Menaced by the demon Taraka, the gods determine that only a son by Śiva and Pārvatī can defeat the demon; they send Kāma, the god of love, to bring about the union, but Śiva burns Kāma with his third eye. Pārvatī then abandons sensuality for spiritualism, emaciating herself. Śiva, in disguise, dissuades her from her course, and they come lovingly together. Thematically, self-abnegation leads to the highest form of love. Symbolically, Śiva, who is Truth, combines with Pārvatī, Beauty, to produce Kumāra, Power. The risqué depiction of the lovers’ honeymoon led to the charge that canto 8 is sacrilegious.

In the epic Raghuvamśa (c. 390 c.e.; The Dynasty of Raghu, 1872-1895), Kālidāsa traces a line of kings descended from the sun god over nineteen cantos, dwelling on the varying aspects of the ideal king in terms of dharma (moral duty): Dilipa, the ascetic; Raghu, the warrior; Aja, the lover; and Rāma, the avatāra (incarnation) of Vishnu. Yet the line ends with Agnivarna, the consumptive voluptuary: Does this reflect the poet’s tragic vision of lost ideals, or is the epic merely incomplete? Much of the poem is a brilliant summary of the classical epic Rāmāyana. The first nine cantos of that classic deal with Rāma’s forebears, cantos 10 through 15 with Rāma, and cantos 16 through 19 with his descendants. One critic wonders whether Kālidāsa preferred Raghu to Rāma, who shuns the pregnant Sītā as unclean after her abduction by Rāvana the demon. When one compares these epics, The Birth of the War-God has singleness of legend, theme, structure, and philosophy, while The Dynasty of Raghu is a multifaceted pageant and chronicle.

The Mālavikāgnimitra, a spirited, musical harem intrigue for a spring festival, involves the love of Agnimitra, a historical figure, for a princess disguised as a maiden, Mālavikā, against the opposition of his two queens, the mature Dhārinī and the accomplished Iravati. In winning her in this parallelogram of relationships, Agnimitra has the aid of a jester, a nun, and good luck, as well as an Aśoka tree that responds to those that touch it by flowering or not. Perhaps the key element of the plot is Dhārinī’s final acceptance of Mālavikā into the harem.

Vikramorvaśiya (c. 384 c.e.; Vikrama and Urvaśī, 1851), probably intended to be sung at a royal coronation, concerns the love of a semidivine hero, Purūravas, for an immortal nymph, Urvaśī, a tale drawn from Vedic legend. Though their love is opposed by Purūravas’s queen and subjected to a divine curse that separates them, the gods bring the couple together in the end. Thus, love (kāma), supported by wealth (artha), issues in progeny (dharma, moral duty). Act 5, in which the grief-maddened king wanders in the woods apostrophizing nature, is a famous scene.

It was the eighteenth century Calcutta judge Sir William Jones, the founder of comparative philology by his “discovery” of Sanskrit, who brought Kālidāsa to the attention of the West by rendering the first English translation of Abhijñãānaśākuntala in 1789. The play remains one of the world’s masterpieces. Its story of love spanning Earth and Heaven must have appealed to Europeans, as the Romantic movement was then in its infancy. Drawn from the Mahābhārata, the play centers on star-crossed lovers: the tender, tortured ruler Dushyanta and the natural, selfless Śakuntalā, daughter of a sage and a nymph. Their match is destroyed by a curse that erases the king’s recognition of his spouse when she comes to him at his palace after a separation. Only his ring, lost and swallowed by a fish, can recover his memory of love. When the ring is found, the lovers are reunited via the aerial chariot of the god Indra, and they live happily together with their child Bharata, the first legendary emperor of India. Throughout, the play contrasts the demands of public life and the sorrow of frustrated love to the serenity of simple values and the conception of ideal love.

Significance

The drama of Kālidāsa can only be understood within its own cultural context. The theater was part of the palace complex, playing to sensitized aristocratic audiences. It combined poetry, music, dance, song, mime, and characterization in a highly stylized presentation shorn of scenery and props, with most actions occurring offstage. The absence of evil—indeed, the fusing of Heaven and Earth into a happy ending—is unique to Indian thought. The transmigration of souls, the demand of moral duty, and the consequences of fate make the cosmos ultimately moral and purposeful and eliminate the role of chance. The plays are dominated by psychological rather than plotting factors, by the power of a basic mood, or emotion (rasa), and the characters fill roles assigned by the cosmos rather than marked by individualism. Thus, Kālidāsa was actually a traditionalist, a believer in a finally beneficent world order (politically, he subscribed to benevolent monarchy). With such ideals as maya (illusion of reality), mokśa (enlightenment), and santa (tranquillity) and a view of love encompassing sensual, aesthetic, and spiritual levels in different lives and worlds, Kālidāsa contributed to literature an elucidation of the cosmic pervasiveness of love.

Bibliography

Dimock, Edward C., Edwin Gerow, C. M. Naim, A. K. Ramanujan, Gordon Roadarmel, and J. A. B. van Buitenen. The Literatures of India: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. This critical study complements historical and sociological approaches of earlier Orientalists. It was a cooperative venture mostly of University of Chicago faculty for the Asia Society. Covers full sweep of Indian literature. See especially sections on the epic, drama, poetics, and the lyric. Scholarly, invaluable insights.

Horrwitz, E. P. The Indian Theatre: A Brief Survey of the Sanskrit Drama. 1912. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967. An old but evocative description of the Indian theater. A court theater of Ujjain and imaginary performances of Kālidāsa’s plays are especially well described.

Kālidāsa. Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kālidāsa. Translated by Edwin Gerow, David Gitomer, and Barbara Stoler Miller. 1984. Reprint. Columbia, Mo.: South Asian Books, 1999. Contains three brilliant chapters: “Kālidāsa’s World and His Plays” (by Miller), “Sanskrit Dramatic Theory and Kālidāsa’s Plays” (by Gerow), and “Theater in Kālidāsa’s Art” (by Gitomer). The texts of the three plays are freshly translated and accompanied by copious annotations. Most valuable.

Krishnamoorthy, K. Kālidāsa. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972. Literary and scholarly introduction by an Indian scholar, written in the light of both Indian and Western criticism. The author attempts a biographical analysis based on a supposed order of the works. Comprehensive but tends toward the Romantic-Victorian school of literary appreciation and consequently suffers from Kālidāsian hagiography. Includes full references to translations of all of his works.

Shastri, Satya Vrat. Kālidāsa in Modern Sanskrit Literature. Columbia, Mo.: South Asian Books, 1992. Explores the influence of Kālidāsa on later writers.