by Kalidasa
Staging and Stage Conventions
As with the Elizabethan theatre, much can be learned about the nature of Sanskrit drama by examining the conventions and techniques attached to its performance.50 Here I confine myself to a brief indication of some of the main conventions as these might affect a reading of Śakuntalā, and especially of its stage directions.
Conventionally, there are four types of representation in Sanskrit drama: verbal, bodily (gesture, etc.), ‘natural’ or emotive,51 and costume. As Goodwin remarks, these together ‘comprise the “language” of drama as “spectacle poetry” (drṣśyakāvya) as opposed to verbal poetry (śravyakāvya)’,52 According to The Drama Manual, theatres should be small enough for the audience to appreciate every nuance of the representation, including the wide repertoire of hand and facial gestures (particularly the use of the eyes).53 These were considered essential to the communication of emotion and so the production of rasa. As Miller points out, in Act 1 of Śakuntalā the heroine barely speaks after encountering the king; her emotions and reactions to what is being said by Duṣyanta and her friends would have been conveyed through gesture and dance, providing a kind of visual commentary to the spoken dialogue.54 This is evident from such, to the Western eye, alarming stage directions as, ‘Śakuntalā displays all the embarrassment of erotic attraction’ (p. 15). Most of the audience is likely, however, to have understood the psychological connotations and felt the emotional resonance of the gestures employed at least as easily as they would have understood the verbal language. The mimetic nature of other gestures is evident from the watering of the plants, and the attack by the bee in Act 1.
Such an emphasis on mime alerts us to the fact that performances would have been conducted on a bare stage with virtually no props. For instance, when the king makes his first entrance at the beginning of Act 1, the stage direction reads: ‘Enter, on a chariot, the king, holding a bow, with an arrow in his hand, and his driver, in pursuit of a deer’ (p. 7). This straightforward statement conceals the fact that the chariot, the bow and arrow, the pursuit of the deer, and the relative status of the king and charioteer would all have been represented by the particular movements and gestures of the actors. (The deer may or may not have been represented.) Flying in the air (as at the beginning of Act 7) would also have been conveyed by stylized gestures.
In addition to all this movement, entrances would have been accompanied by appropriate music, played by an on-stage ensemble, who may well have kept up a continuous musical commentary throughout the performance. The musicians were probably positioned between two doors, designed for entrances and exits, and set into a wall at the rear of the stage, behind which was a kind of green room. Curtains were sometimes drawn across the doors to permit particularly sudden entrances (see the Chamberlain’s entrance on p. 73).
Unlike in the Elizabethan theatre, roles were usually played by the appropriate gender, although, as Gitomer points out, all-male and all-female troupes were known, as were transvestite parts.55 Actors wore elaborate costumes and rich ornaments to signal their character’s status, occupation, and place of origin. These distinctions would also have been apparent from the colours and shades of their makeup, and their gait.
The empty space which was the stage allowed, like Shakespeare’s Globe, complete freedom with regard to location. In Act 7 of Śakuntalā, for instance, the action moves seamlessly from the sky to a celestial hermitage, and then to various locations within that hermitage. Such changes of locale are signalled by dialogue and movement,56 and, for the actors or reader, by a stage direction translated as ‘walking about’ or ‘walking around’ (see, for instance, Act 4 where Kaṇva, Śakuntalā, and party wend their halting way to the boundaries of the hermitage by ‘walking around’ the stage). This convention is often referred to as the partitioning of the stage into zones, but that makes it sound like human chess, whereas in fact, as David Gitomer comments: ‘As easily as these divisions are brought into being they may be dissolved, only to have new ones established.’57 That is to say, they are imagined spaces, shared for the moment by actors and audience using a common convention, and as swiftly vaporized and reimagined.
Kālidāsa’s Sources
A version of the story of Śakuntalā is contained in the first book of the Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata (Critical Edition, 1.62–9).58 It has a direct bearing on the title of the epic, ‘The great (mahā)[story] of the descendants of Bharata (bhārata)’, since Bharata is the child born to Śakuntalā and Duṣyanta, but that is the limit of its significance for the main narrative.59 Although it is probably not the sole source of Kālidāsa’s play, and may not even be its major source (although that seems to me likely), the episode is presented here both for its thematic contrasts, which bring out the peculiarity of Kālidāsa’s dramatic version, and for its intrinsic literary value. In its own right the Mahābhārata version presents a speedy and robust treatment of a compelling story, executed in a forthright, and frequently dramatic, epic verse.60 Above all it is poetic, but in a way quite removed from the kāvya of Kālidāsa, a distance which lends depth to the implied contrast. The major differences between epic and play are self-evident,61 but some of the possible verbal echoes and thematic transpositions that may have found their way into Kālidāsa’s play are indicated in the notes to the latter. (The significant ways in which Kālidāsa differs from his sources are discussed elsewhere in this Introduction.)
In addition to material taken from the Mahābhārata passage, Kālidāsa may have borrowed the device of the ring62 from a Buddhist Jātaka story. This tells of a king who marries a girl he meets in the forest. He leaves her his signet ring, instructing her to bring it to him later, along with any male child she may have conceived. She gives birth to the Buddha-to-be (in one of his earlier lives), takes the boy to the court, but is rejected by the king, even though he secretly recognizes her. By means of a miracle the girl then forces the king to acknowledge his relation to them both.63
The story of Śakuntalā also appears in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa 9.20.8–22, where it is clearly taken from the Mahābhārata, and in the Padma Purāṇa (3.1–6, Svarga Khaṇdṣa).64 The latter is a more elaborate version which, according to most analysts, combines elements from Kālidāsa with the epic version. Given the uncertainties of dating material in the Purānṣas (not to mention Kālidāsa himself), it is possible, however, that it is the playwright who draws on the Padma Purānṣa, rather than vice versa. But none of this detracts from Kālidāsa’s power to make his sources wholly his own.
NOTE ON THE TEXT AND THE TRANSLATION
Early in the process of translation I decided that I should be selling both Kālidāsa and a modern non-Sanskrit reading audience short if this were not first and foremost a performing (i.e. performable) version of the play. The works of Kālidāsa, like those of any other great playwright, only come fully alive on stage: the words on the page are the beginning of the process, not its culmination. This is even more the case when they have been translated into another language. The fact that Kālidāsa was also a great poet should not seduce us into treating his plays as simply anthologies of poetry. To some extent this has been his fate in India, as much as it has been Shakespeare’s in the West; but while the latter is frequently enough performed, and his theatrical context well enough known to redress the balance, Kālidāsa needs more assistance once he is uprooted from his home culture.
Comparing the two major recensions of the text of Śakuntalā, I therefore came to the conclusion that, in the modern theatre, and in translation, the Devanāgarī recension would work better than the Bengali.1 I do not claim that the former is Kālidāsa’s orginal version, or that it necessarily worked better in the Sanskrit theatre; others have argued the merits of both versions.2 The major difference between the two recensions is the presence of twenty-seven additional verses in the Bengali version (notably in Act 3, where they prolong the dialogue between the king and Śakuntalā), and some extra prose passages. There is no doubt that the extra verse
s expand the erotic mood, but they perhaps add nothing to it in terms of effect. Dramatically they bring the play to a halt, and may well, as Miller has suggested, have been added at a patron’s request (they may not even be by Kālidāsa himself).3 The extra prose usually adds little but explicitness. In the wake of Beckett and Pinter, where less means more, a contemporary Western audience would hardly seem to need such assistance.4
Discussion of how a play might have been performed in Kālidāsa’s time has, of course, a historical interest; but if the play itself is to survive as living theatre, then it has to be rediscovered in new circumstances, with new forms and new techniques. Attempts to reproduce the forms of Sanskrit theatre, or indeed Sanskrit verse, in other cultural circumstances and different languages are little better than exotic autopsies, dissections of the picturesque but immobile dead. Such autopsies have their own fascination, but if Śakuntalā cannot come alive for a modern, non-Sanskritic audience, the play remains in the the dissecting-room, from which it is only a short journey back to the morgue.
This is precisely where translations that strive for a tone and rhythm in the new language which is entirely their own, yet at the same time true to the elusive spirit of the original, can help to save such works from oblivion. (Notable successes with the translation and production of classical Greek drama in the modern world might show Sanskritists the way.) Though some might think it blasphemy to say so, great works—and especially great works from distant cultures and remote pasts—can be liberated as much as diminished by translation. Indeed, shrinkage is a price worth paying to achieve liberation from forms that are no longer meaningful, and the chance to remake the original as something new. Those who say that Kālidāsa’s poetry is untranslatable might as well make a bonfire of his works as far as most of the world is concerned. What use is it to tell the reader about the wonderful but untranslatable nature of kāvya, when hardly any will, or can, take the trouble to learn the Sanskrit needed to decide for themselves? This is to be faithful to the poet, after a fashion, but to abandon, and so betray his work.
To remain—indeed, to become—a ‘world’s classic’, a play needs to be tested and reformed in translation and performance by each generation. What Peter Brook has written about the absurdity of trying to ‘perform the play as Shakespeare wrote it’, applies with equal force to the works of Kālidāsa: ‘All that one knows is that he wrote a chain of words that have in them the possibility of giving birth to forms that are constantly renewed. There is no limit to the virtual forms that are present in a great text. A mediocre text may only give birth to a few forms, whereas a great text, a great piece of music, a great opera score are true knots of energy.’5 This translation is offered as simply another such form, born from the chain of words that Kālidāsa, in the characterization of his Actor-Manager, ‘strung together’. My aim, therefore, has been to convey across cultures and time, and without exoticism, some of the poetic and emotional truth latent in this play. To that end I have searched, however inadequately, for language that might produce for a modern Western audience an aesthetic effect similar or equivalent to the charge and resonance of the original. In doing so my perspective has, paradoxically, converged with that of the Sanskrit aestheticians who, in their quest for a universal and transcendent rasa, assumed the basic unity of human emotional and metaphysical experience. The degree to which Śakuntalā has meaning for us now depends, therefore, upon the degree to which we can recognize ourselves in and through Kālidāsa’s transformative art.
My thanks go to Gareth John, Sophia Kanaouti, Roshan Kissoon, Emma Salter, and Girija Shettar, who confirmed my view that Kālidāsa’s play works best on stage. Thanks are also due to the Department of Religious and Theological Studies, Cardiff University, and the University of Wales Conference Centre at Gregynog, who provided the space for us to try out parts of this translation in performance. I am also grateful to Dr Rupert Gethin for supplying me with copies of some secondary sources.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is not intended to be an exhaustive or authoritative bibliography for the study of classical Indian drama. The works listed here are those I have consulted and found useful for my translation, Introduction, and notes. Many have extensive bibliographies in their own right, and the reader wishing to venture further into this field will need to consult them. As will be evident from their titles, a number of general and introductory works on Indian culture and Hinduism have also been included.
Texts and Translations
Abhijñānaśākuntalam
Coulson, Michael (trans.), Three Sanskrit Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981). Includes ‘Śakuntalā by Kālidāsa’, a translation of Pischel’s edition of the Bengali recension, and translations of ‘Rākshasa ‘s Ring by Viśākhadatta’, and ‘Mālati and Mādhava by Bhavabhūti’.
Emeneau, M. B. (trans.), Kālidāsa’s Abhijñana-Śakuntala (California: University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962). Translated from the Bengali recension.
Jones, Sir William (trans.), Sacontalá, or, The Fatal Ring: An Indian Drama by Cálidás (Calcutta: Joseph Cooper, 1789); repr. of 1799 edn. in Michael J. Franklin (ed.), Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 213–97.
Kale, M. R. (ed. and trans.), The Abhijñānaśākuntalam of Kālidāsa with Commentary of Rāghavabhaṭṭa (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, repr. of 10th edn., 1994). The edition of the Devanāgarī recension used as the basis for this translation.
Kanjilal, Dileep Kumar (ed.), A Reconstruction of the Abhijñānaśākuntalam (Calcutta: Calcutta Sanskrit College, 1980). Essentially an edition of the Bengali recension.
Miller, Barbara Stoler (ed.), Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kālidāsa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). This includes Śakuntalā and the Ring of Recollection, a translation by Miller of the Devanāgarī recension, and translations of Kālidāsa’s two other plays, Urvasī Won By Valor (trans. David Gitomer) and Mālavikā and Agnimitra (trans. Edwin Gerow).
Pischel, R. (ed.), Kalidasa’s Śakuntala: An Ancient Hindu Drama (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 16, 2nd edn. 1922). The standard academic edition of the Bengali recension.
Radice, William (ed. with intro.), Śakuntalā by Kālidāsa, trans. Michael Coulson; with ‘The Story of Śakuntalā from the Mahābhārata’ trans. Peter Khoroche; Śakuntalā, by Abanindranath Tagore, trans. William Radice; ‘Śakuntalā: A Tale Retold in Pahari Miniatures’, by Daljeet Khare (London: The Folio Society, 1992). Coulson’s translation is a reprint from Three Sanskrit Plays (see above).
Rajan, Chandra (trans.), Kālidāsa: The Loom of Time: A Selection of His Plays and Poems (New Delhi: Penguin Books (India), 1990). Includes Abhijñānaśākuntalam (The Recognition of Śakuntalā), a translation of Kanjilal’s edition, as well as translations of two of Kālidāsa’s poems: ̣ṣtusamhāram and Meghadūtam.
Mahābhārata
Ganguli, Kisari Mohan (trans.) [early edns. ascribed to the publisher, P. C. Roy], The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, 12 vols. (1884–99; 2nd edn. Calcutta, 1970; repr. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1970; 5th edn. 1990), vol. 1: Ādi Parva. This is a complete translation of the vulgate text, not that of the Critical Edition, which it pre-dates.
Mahābhāratam with the commentary of Nīṭyaśāstra, Ādiparva (Poona: Chitrashala Press, 1929)
Peter Khoroche (trans.), ‘The Story of Śakuntalā from the Mahābhārata’’, in William Radice (ed. with intro.), Śakuntalā by Kālidāsa (London: Folio Society, 1992). This is apparently a translation of the vulgate.
Sukthankar, Vishnu S., Belvalkar, S. K, Vaidya, P. L., et al., eds. Mahābhārata (Critical Edition), 19 vols, plus 6 vols, of indexes (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933–72), vol 1: Ādi Parvan. The edition used as the basis of this translation of the Śakuntalā episode.
van Buitenen, J. A. B. (trans, and ed.), The Mahābhārata 1: The Book of the Beginning (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1973). This is a translation of Book 1 (Ādiparva) of the Critical Edition, with introductory material and notes.
Nīṭyaśāstra
Ghosh, Manomohan (ed. and trans.), The Nīṭyaśāstra, Ascribed to Bharata-Muni, vol. 1 (chs. 1–27) (2nd rev. edn. Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya, 1967); vol. 2 (chs. 28–36) (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1961).
Rangacharya, Adya (trans.), The Nāṭyaśāstra (rev. edn. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996).
Basham, A. L., The Wonder That Was India (New York: Grove Press, 1959).
Bate, Jonathan, The Genius Of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997).
Baumer, Rachel van M., and Brandon, James R. (eds.), Sanskrit Drama in Performance (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1981).
Brandon, James R. (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Brockington, J. L., The Sanskrit Epics (Leiden: Brill, 1998).
Brook, Peter, There Are No Secrets (Methuen: Methuen Drama, 1993).
Brown, John Russell, New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, The Audience and Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
Byrski, M. Christopher, ‘Sanskrit Drama as an Aggregate of Model Situations’, in Baumer and Brandon (eds.), Sanskrit Drama in Performance, 114–66.
Coulson, Michael, Sanskrit: An Introduction to the Classical Language (New York: Teach Yourself Books, Hodder & Stoughton, 1st pub. 1976; numerous reprints).
Cowell, E. B. (ed.) and Chalmers, R. (trans.), ‘Kaṭṭhahāri-Jātaka’, in The Jātaka, or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births (repr. Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1990).