by Kalidasa
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
KĀLIDĀSA
The Recognition of Śakuntalā
A Play in Seven Acts
Śakuntalā in the Mahābhārata
(Mahābhārata 1.62–9)
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
W. J. JOHNSON
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE RECOGNITION OF ŚAKUNTALĀ
KĀLIDĀSA (c. fourth to fifth century CE) was the greatest poet and playwright of the classical Indian tradition. Hardly anything is known about his life, but his works suggest that he lived in northern India, possibly under the patronage of the powerful and brilliant Gupta dynasty. His surviving output consists of three (or four) long poems in Sanskrit, and three plays in a mixture of Sanskrit and Prakrit, the best-known of which is The Recognition of Śakuntalā, a work of unrivalled aesthetic and cultural significance. Probably based on an episode in the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata (c.500 BCE to 400 CE), Śakuntalā is dominated by the erotic and heroic moods characteristic of dramas of this type. The play’s combination of poetry, action, plot, movement, sound, and gesture is designed to produce an ineffable experience of entrancement or aesthetic rapture in the audience. Its success in achieving this confirms its status as the supreme work of classical Indian literature.
From the time of Sir William Jones’s pioneering English translation of 1789, which excited and inspired many European composers and writers (including Goethe), Kālidāsa’s play has attracted considerable interest outside India, and has been translated into every major European language. It continues to be performed around the world in a variety of styles and translations.
W. J. JOHNSON was educated at the University of Sussex and Wolfson College, Oxford. He is now Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Cardiff University. His publications include new translations of The Bhagavad Gita (Oxford, 1994) and The Sauptikaparvan of the Mahābhārata (Oxford, 1998) for Oxford World’s Classics, and Harmless Souls (Delhi, 1995), a study of karma and religious change in early Jainism. He is married with two sons.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Text and the Translation
Select Bibliography
Note on the Pronunciation of Sanskrit Words
THE RECOGNITION OF ŚAKUNTALĀ by Kālidāsa
ACT 1
ACT 2
ACT 3
ACT 4
ACT 5
ACT 6
ACT 7
ŚAKUNTALĀ IN THE MAHĀBHĀRATA
Explanatory Notes
For Pat
INTRODUCTION
Kālidāsa and The Recognition of Śakuntalā
Kālidāsa is widely acknowledged as the supreme poet and playwright of the classical Sanskrit tradition, and for many, he is simply the greatest writer India has produced.1 His surviving works consist of three long poems,2 and three plays based on traditional themes: Mālavikāgnimitra (Mālavikā and Agnimitra), Vikramorvaśīya (Urvasī Won by Valour), and the famous Abhijñānaśākuntala (The Recognition of Śakuntalā). He almost certainly lived in northern India, perhaps in the late fourth to the mid-fifth century CE,3 and possibly under the patronage of the powerful and brilliant Gupta dynasty. He is likely to have belonged to the brahmin (priestly) class and, from the benedictions that open each of his plays, appears to have been a devotee of the great Hindu god Śiva, and probably of the Goddess as well;4 but nothing is known of his life and career beyond what can be inferred from his poetry and plays. These show him to have worked in what was already an established tradition of court poetry and drama, the origins of which may have pre-dated him by a thousand years or more. However, the only surviving precursors of Kālidāsa’s dramas are fragments by the Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa (c. second century CE) and, if we accept the dating given above, a number of complete plays by Bhāsa (c. fourth century CE).
The Recognition of Śakuntalā5 (sometimes known as ‘the Śākuntala’—i.e. ‘the play about Śakuntalā’—but more popularly simply as ‘Śakuntalā’, after its heroine) is generally considered to be the best of Kālidāsa’s dramas and, by consensus, the paradigmatic Sanskrit play, a work of poetic brilliance and complex structure which has provided a benchmark for all classical Indian literature. Indeed, Śakuntalā has a cultural cachet in India similar to that associated with Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the world at large, although it is a very different kind of play.6 Yet to say so h
ardly reveals the true extent of Śakuntalā’s cultural significance. In the words of one commentator, it is judged by the tradition itself to be ‘the validating aesthetic creation of a civilization’, a play whose form and content unite to ‘express persistent cultural verities’.7
From the time of Sir William Jones’s pioneering English translation of 1789, which excited and inspired so many European composers and writers (including Goethe), Kālidāsa’s play has attracted considerable interest outside India, and has been translated into every major European language. It has also been performed around the world in a variety of styles and translations. Nevertheless, Śakuntalā has not yet established a place in the wider western theatrical canon; for instance, it has not to date (2000) been produced by either of the national companies in Britain. No doubt, if they have considered it at all, they have thought it too remote in form and content from the experience of a European or American audience to be worth the risk. One ambition of the present translation is to inspire a revision of that critical and commercial judgement.
Kālidāsa’s Play: Plot and Structure
In its broad outlines the plot of Kālidāsa’s play follows an episode in the great Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata (translated here as ‘Śakuntalā in the Mahābhārata’), but with significant differences.8 Acts1–3: King Duṣyanta is hunting in the forest when he comes across an ascetic hermitage. There he meets Śakuntalā, the foster-daughter of the patriarch (KAṆVA). They fall in love and contract a gāndharva marriage (a secret ‘love match’ by mutual consent). After dispelling some troublesome demons for the ascetics, the king returns to his palace and his other wives, leaving a ring with Śakuntalā as a token of his good faith. Act 4: Meanwhile Śakuntalā, in love, and neglecting her duty of hospitality, inadvertently incurs the wrath of Durvāsas, a visiting ascetic. Without her knowledge he imposes a curse: she will remain unrecognized by the object of her passion until she can produce a token of recognition. In a famous scene, Śakuntalā bids farewell to her foster-father, friends, and the natural world of the forest hermitage, and, visibly pregnant with the king’s child, journeys to the palace. Act 5: At the palace Duṣyanta fails to recognize her, and when she tries to produce the ring she discovers it has been lost on the journey. The troubled king rejects her as an impostor. Publicly humiliated, Śakuntalā is suddenly spirited away by her mother, the nymph Menakā. Act 6: Later, the ring (the ‘recognition’ of the title) is found in the belly of a fish, and taken to the king. This causes Duṣyanta to regain his memory, and he becomes filled with remorse at the rejection and loss of his wife and child. Eventually he is called back to his duty by the arrival of the god Indra’s charioteer, who recruits him to lead the fight against a demon army. Act 7: Six years later the king is returning on an airborne chariot from his campaign against the demons. He puts down in a celestial hermitage, where he sees an extraordinary young boy playing with a lion cub. Gradually he comes to the realization that this is his son by Śakuntalā, a child called Sarvadamana (later known as Bharata) who, as foretold in Act 1, will grow up to be a world emperor. Śakuntalā herself appears; she and Duṣyanta are reunited, blessed by the gods, and prepare to return to the royal capital. The action has thus progressed from the love-permeated, natural world of Śakuntalā’s forest hermitage, through the duty-bound world of the royal court, to conclude in the celestial hermitage, where love and duty are unified in a complementary relationship.
In so far as it ends where it begins, but at a higher or more integrated level, Kālidāsa’s play has a sometimes obvious, sometimes more occluded spiral structure. This can be emphasized in a general way by noting what the playwright adds to the Mahābhārata story. The latter describes Duṣyanta on his hunting trip coming across the forest hermitage. Attempting to call on KAṆVA, he meets Śakuntalā on her own. Hearing the story of her true parentage, he persuades her to contract a gāndharva marriage and, after making love to her, returns to the court, promising that any son of theirs will be made heir to the kingdom. After three years’ gestation a son is born to Śakuntalā. When he is a young boy, KAṆVA sends mother and son to the court, where Duṣyanta refuses to recognize them. Śakuntalā berates the king at length, instructing him in the importance of sons. Duṣyanta dismisses her, but a supernatural voice intervenes to validate Śakuntalā’s story. The king formally recognizes Śakuntalā as his queen, and her son as his heir. He had only resisted because he was afraid the story of their marriage would not be believed by the people.
The crucial difference between the Mahābhārata version and the play is Kālidāsa’s addition of a curse to explain Duṣyanta’s rejection of his wife, and the related device of the ring of recognition, which eventually permits the king to regain his memory. Apart from casting the king in a morally better light, this allows the playwright to extend and effectively mirror the action from the perspective of separation and remorse in Acts 6 and 7.9 In the process, he creates complex parallelisms, inversions, and reversals. I shall limit myself to pointing out some of the more obvious here, and refer interested readers to the secondary sources, or better still their own scrutiny of the text.10
The clearest way to illustrate some of the parallels and contrasts is to consider the acts as mirrored pairs (1 and 7, 2 and 6, 3 and 5).
Act 1
Duṣyanta and his charioteer arrive at a hermitage in an earthly paradise. Ascetics predict that the king will be the father of a world emperor. He discovers and is charmed by Śakuntalā.11
Act 7
Duṣyanta and a different charioteer (on loan from the god Indra), arrive at a hermitage in a celestial paradise, where the king discovers his son (exhibiting the physical signs of a world emperor) and recovers Śakuntalā. It is clear from this that the first and last acts reflect each other.12
Act 2
Duṣyanta, accompanied by the Vidūṣaka, is encamped in a miniature court set up in the middle of the country. Here he reflects on his encounter with Śakuntalā in Act 1 and plans her seduction in Act 3. Their separation promises to be temporary. His opportunity comes when ascetics arrive, asking him to remain there and protect them from threatening demons.
Act 6
After the discovery of his ring and the restoration of his memory, Duṣyanta, accompanied by the Vidūṣaka, appears in a pleasure garden (the country in miniature) within the court. Here he relives his first encounter with Śakuntalā through a painting. He is filled with remorse, and his separation from her seems permanent. Indra’s charioteer arrives and recruits the king to protect the gods from threatening demons, thus providing him, although he does not yet know it, with the opportunity to be reunited with Śakuntalā. The ‘pairing’ of these two acts, as different registers of separation, is reinforced by Śakuntalā’s total absence from them (she appears in each of the other five acts).
Act 3
Duṣyanta finds Śakuntalā in the countryside, discovers that his feelings are reciprocated, and suggests a gāndharva marriage. They suffer a temporary separation when she is called away by the senior female ascetic, Gautamī, and he is once again called to deal with some demons threatening the ascetics’ rituals.
Acts 5
Śakuntalā appears to Duṣyanta in the court; she discovers that her feelings for him are apparently no longer reciprocated: he denies their marriage and disowns the child she is carrying. The king loses Śakuntalā when she is whisked away by supernatural means, starting an apparently permanent separation.
Act 4
In this pivotal and transitional act the changes are effected that allow the plot to echo itself in another register or key thereafter. Śakuntalā’s marriage and pregnancy (she now carries the continuity of the religious and social order within her) necessitate her departure from the forest hermitage. Leaving behind her forest children (fawns and plants), she goes from the natural world of unfettered love to the rule- and duty-bound world of the city and the court, and to a new social status in marriage and motherhood. Thanks to the curse, of which Śakuntal�
�, like the king, is unaware, the promised resolution turns out to be postponed until Act 7. By that time Śakuntalā, again waiting in a hermitage, but this time a celestial one, has grown from an innocent girl into a woman with a 6-year-old child. Her second departure for the court, as Duṣyanta’s recognized chief consort and the mother of his heir, is imminent as the play ends. But this time she will go in the company of her husband, a husband who was significantly absent from Act 4.
Aesthetic Theory13 and the Meaning of Śakuntalā
Kālidāsa’s work seems to have been more or less contemporary with the compilation of the earliest extant treatise dealing with the art of Sanskrit drama, The Drama Manual (Nāṭyaśāstra) attributed to the legendary Bharata.14 Subsequent commentators, ancient and modern, have relied heavily on this work to analyse the elements and structure of Kālidāsa’s plays, although the extent to which he follows, rather than helps to establish, the convention as presented in the treatise is by no means certain. Nevertheless, a brief outline of the aesthetic and structural considerations underlying Sanskrit drama provides a gateway to his work.15
In the Prologue the Actor-Manager designates Śakuntalā a nāṭaka, both a general term for drama as one of the principal forms of Sanskrit poetry or kāvya,16 and a specific name for a particular kind of play, a ‘heroic romance’ with a royal hero. According to The Drama Manual,17 all worthwhile drama has a precise purpose: the creation of a harmonious and complementary whole out of the principal emotions (sthāyibhāva) evoked within the play in order to engender a related, but impersonal and universalized, experience of joy and bliss in the audience. It is the particular combination of poetry, action, plot, movement, sound, and gesture that brings about this mood or rasa.18 According to the theory, there is therefore nothing fortuitous about the way in which such an effect is obtained: as Robert Goodwin, drawing on T. S. Eliot, puts it, ‘the aesthetic enhancement of emotion that produces rasa results from a subtle mix of the appropriate “objective correlatives” of the basic emotion … and the depiction, again via objective correlatives, of related secondary feelings’.19 In other words, an audience of cognoscenti, educated in the subtleties of this aesthetic, have their common response conditioned, both by the specifics of the performance and by the dominant emotion or emotions that persist throughout it. Thus, a long time before postmodernism, the ancient Indians had realized that aesthetic response depends as much on the expectations and conditioning of the audience as it does on poetry, theatrical conventions, and styles of acting. Indeed, some of the later Indian commentators stressed the role of the spectator above that of the actor in achieving the aesthetic goal.20