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Kalidasa's Characters
I. PURURAVAS
PURURAVAS
is the poet's second study of
kinghood; he differs substantially from Agnimitra. The latter
is a prince, a soldier and man of the world yielding by the way to
the allurements of beauty, but not preoccupied with passion;
the sub-title of the piece might be, in a more innocent sense than
Victor Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse. He is the mirror of a courteous and
self-possessed gentleman, full of mildness and grace, princely tact, savoir
faire, indulgent kindness, yet energetic withal and
quietly resolute in his pleasure as well as in his serious affairs.
"Ah, Sire," says Dharinie with sharp irony, "if you only showed
as much diplomatic skill and savoir faire in the affairs of your
kingdom, what a good thing it would be!" But one feels that
these are precisely the gifts he would show in all his action, that
the innocently unscrupulous and quite delightful tact and diplomacy with which he pursues his love-affair is but the mirror of
the methods he pursued in domestic politics. We see in him the
typical and ideal king of an age hedonistic, poetic, worldly but
withal heroic and capable. Pururavas is made of very different
material. He is a king and a hero, a man of high social and
princely virtues, otherwise Kalidasa would not have taken the
trouble to depict him; but these qualities are like splendid robes
which his nature has put on, and which have become so natural
to him that he cannot put them off if he would; they are not the
naked essential man. The fundamental Pururavas is not the king
and the hero but the poet and lover. The poet on a throne has
been the theme of Shakespeare in his Richard II and of Renan in
his Antichrist; and from these two great studies we can realise
the European view of the phenomenon. To the European mind
the meeting of poet and king in one man wears always the
appearance of an anomaly, a misplacement, the very qualities
which have fitted him to be a poet unfit him to rule. A mastering
egotism becomes the mainspring of the poetic temperament so
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placed; the imagination of the man is centred in himself, and
the realm and people whose destinies are in his hands, seem to
him to be created only to minister to his ingenious or soaring
fancies and his dramatic, epic or idealistic sense of what should
be; his intellect lives in a poetic world of its own and thinks in
tropes and figures instead of grappling with the concrete facts
of the world, hence he is unfitted for action and once absolute
power is out of his hands, once he is no longer able to arrange
men and events to his liking as if he were a dramatist manoeuvring the creatures of his brain but is called upon to measure
his will and ability against others, he fails and his failure leads
to tragic issues; for he persists in attempting to weave his own
imaginations into life; he will not see facts; he will not recognize the inexorable logic of events. Hence, though not necessarily a
coward, though often a man of real courage and even ability, he
plays the part of an incompetent or a weakling or both. Moreover, he tends to become a tyrant, to lose moral perspective and
often all sense of proportion and sanity; for he regards himself
as the centre of a great drama, and to all who will not play the
part he assigns them or satisfy his emotional needs and impulses,
to all who get in the way of his imaginative egotism he becomes
savage and cruel; his rage when a word of this life-drama is mispronounced or a part ill-studied or a conception not complied
with is a magnified reflection of the vexation felt by a dramatist
at a similar contretemps in the performance of his darling piece;
and unfortunately unlike the playwright he has the power to
vent his indignation on the luckless offenders in a fashion only
too effective. The last end of the poet-king is almost always tragic, the mad-house, the prison, suicide, exile or the dagger of the
assassin. It must be admitted that this dramatic picture largely
reflects the facts of history. We know some instances of poet-kings in history, Nero and Ludwig of Bavaria were extreme
instances; but we have a far more interesting because typical
series in the history of the British Isles. The Stuarts were a race
of born poets whom the irony of their fate insisted upon placing
one after the other upon a throne, with the single exception of
Charles II (James VI was a pedant, which for practical purposes
is as bad as a poet) they were all men of an imaginative temper,
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artistic tastes or impossible ideals and the best of them had in a
most wonderful degree the poet's faculty of imparting this enthusiasm to others. The terrible fate which dogged them was no
mysterious doom of the Atridae, but the natural inexorable result of the incompatibility between their temperament and their
position. Charles II was the only capable man of his line, the only
one who set before him a worldly and unideal aim and recognized
facts and using the only possible ways and means quietly and
patiently accomplished it. The first James had some practical
energy, but it was marred by the political idealism, the disregard
of a wise opportunism, and the tyrannical severity towards those
who thwarted him which distinguished his whole dreamy, fascinating and utterly unpractical race. Nor is the type wanting in
Indian History. Sriharsha of Cashmere in the pages of Kalhana
affords a most typical picture of the same unhappy temperament.
It is interesting therefore to see how Kalidasa dealt with a similar character.
To our surprise we find that the Hindu poet does not associate incompetence, failure and tragedy with this image of the
poet-king; on the contrary, Pururavas is a Great Emperor, well-loved of his people, an unconquered hero, the valued ally of the
Gods, successful in empire, successful in war, successful in love.
Was then Kalidasa at fault in his knowledge of the world and of
human nature? Such a solution would be inconsistent with all
we know of the poet's genius as shown in his other works. The
truth is that Kalidasa simply gives us the other side of the shield. It is not
an invariable law of human nature that the poetic temperament should be, by its temperament, absolutely unfitted for
practical action and regal power. Nero and Charles I were artistic temperaments cursed with the doom of kingship. But Alexander of Macedon and Napoleon Buonaparte were poets on a
throne, and the part they played in history was not that of incompetents and weaklings. There are times when Nature gifts
the poetic temperament with a peculiar grasp of the conditions
of action and an irresistible tendency to create their poems not
in ink and on paper, but in living characters and on the great
canvas of the world; such men become portents and wonders,
whom posterity admires or hates but can only imperfectly under-
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stand. Like Joan of Arc or Mazzini and Garibaldi, they save a
dying nation, or like Napoleon and Alexander they dominate a
world. They are only possible because they only get full scope in
races which unite with an ardent and heroic temperament a keen
susceptibility to poetry in life, idealism and hero worship. Now
the Hindus, before the fibre of their temperament had been
loosened by hedonistic materialism on the one side and Buddhistic impracticability on the other, were not only the most ardent
and idealistic race in the world, the most ready to put prose
behind them, the most dominated by thought and imagination,
but also one of the most heroic, and they still preserved much of this ancient temper in the days of Kalidasa. It was only
natural therefore that the national dramatist in representing the
great legendary founder of the Kurus as of the poet-emperor type,
should mould him of stronger make and material and not as one
of the beautiful porcelain vessels that are broken. Yet always,
even when gifted with the most extraordinary practical abilities,
the poetic temperament remains itself and keeps a flaw of weakness in the heart of its strength. The temperaments of Alexander
and Napoleon were both marked by megalomania, gigantic
imaginations, impossible ideals; though not wantonly cruel or
tyrannical, they at times showed a singular insensibility to moral
restraints and the demands of generous and humane feeling;
especially in times of abnormal excitement or temporary indulgence of their passions, the birth-mark came out and showed itself in acts of often insane tyranny. This was especially the case
with Alexander; but Napoleon was not free from the same taint.
Alexander, we know, strove consciously to mould his life into
an Iliad; Napoleon regarded his as a Titanic epic and when facts
would not fit in ideally with his conception of himself as its great
protagonist, he would alter and falsify them with as little scruple
as a dramatist would feel in dealing licentiously with the facts of
history. All men of this type, moreover, show a strange, visionary impracticability in the midst of their practical energy and
success, make huge miscalculations and refuse to receive correction, insist that facts shall mould themselves according to their
own imaginations and are usually dominated by an unconquerable egoism or self-absorption which is not necessarily base or
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selfish. Their success seems as much the result of a favouring
destiny as of their own ability and when the favour is withdrawn,
they collapse like a house of cards at one blow. Joan of Arc
dreamed dreams and saw visions, Mazzini and Garibaldi were
impracticable idealists and hated Cavour because he would not
idealise along with them. The rock of St. Helena, the blazing
stake at Rouen, the lifelong impotent exile of Mazzini, the field
of Mentena and the island of Caprera, such is the latter end of these great
spirits. Alexander was more fortunate, but his greatest good fortune was that he died young; his next greatest that
the practical common sense of his followers prevented him from
crossing the Ganges; had Napoleon been similarly forced to recognize his limit,
his end might have been as great as his beginning. Pururavas in the play is equally fortunate; we feel throughout that the power and favour of the Gods is at his back to save
him from all evil fortune and the limits of a legend help him as
effectively as an early death helped Alexander.
Kalidasa's presentation of Pururavas therefore is not that of
a poetic nature in a false position working out its own ruin; it is
rather a study of the poetic temperament in a heroic and royal
figure for no issue beyond the study itself. This is in accordance
with the temper of the later poetry which, as I have said, troubles
itself little with problems, issues and the rest, but is purely romantic, existing only to express disinterested delight in the beauty of
human life and emotion and the life and emotion of animate and
inanimate Nature.
When Pururavas first appears on the scene it is as the king
and hero, the man of prompt courage and action, playing the
part which he has assumed like a royal robe of purple, but it is
not in the practical side of his character that Kalidasa is interested. He has to introduce it only as a background to his inner
temperament, in order to save him from the appearance of
frivolous weakness and unworthiness which always surrounds
the dilettante in life, the epicure of his own emotions. This he
does with his usual consummate art. Pururavas is introduced
to us at the very beginning in a scene of extraordinary swiftness,
decision and tumultuous excitement, like an eagle cleaving the
winds in his rushing swoop upon his prey. The remembrance of
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this rapid and heroic episode lingers with us and gives us a sense
of concealed iron behind his most feminine moods as lover and
poet. Then when again at the end of the play Kalidasa skilfully
strikes the same note and we take leave of the Ilian, it is again
as the king and hero whose strong arm is needed by the Gods in
their approaching war with the Titans. Thus finding and leaving
him as the warlike prince, we always have the impression that
however great the part played by his love for Urvasie in his life,
it is not the whole, that we are listening only to a love episode in
some high epic. This impression again is skilfully aided by brief
but telling touches in each Act, such as the song of the Bards,
for example, which remind us of the King of Kings, the toiling
administrator, the great warrior; in not a single Act are these necessary
strokes omitted and the art with which they are introduced naturally and as if without design is beyond praise. But
here again Kalidasa does not depart from the artistic principle of
"nothing too much, nothing too little"; the purple robes of the
Emperor and the bow of the hero being needed only for the background are not allowed to intrude upon the main interest, which
is Pururavas the man in his native temperament.
From the very first utterance that temperament reveals itself; the grandiose and confident announcement of his name
and his communion with the Gods is characteristic of the epic
megalomaniac. We are not deceived by his proud assumption of
modesty, which he only wears as a fit outward ornament of the
role he is playing on the world's stage, part of the conventional
drapery of the heroic king. "For modesty was ever valour's
crown." Through this drapery we see the man glorying in himself as a poet might glory in some great creation and when madness has removed all conventional disguise, this temper breaks
out with the most splendid frankness. We see his mind empurpled with the consciousness of his world-wide fame, "This is
too much, it is not possible he should not know me"; of his
marvellous birth, "the grandson to the Sun and Moon"; of his
matchless achievements as "the chariot-warrior, great Pururavas"; of his mighty empire, "the universal sceptre of the
world and sovran footstool touched by jewelled heads of
tributary monarchs". The glory of this triple purple in which
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he has wrapped himself, matchless valour, matchless fame,
matchless empire commingles in his imagination, and he speaks
in the proud brief language of the hero but with an evident
consciousness of their fine suitability to the part. We seem to see
Napoleon robing himself in the dramatic splendour of his despatches and proclamations or Alexander dragging Batis at his
chariot wheels in order that he may feel himself to be Achilles.
Shall we accuse these men as some do of being liars, theatrical
braggarts, inhuman mad men, mountebanks? Let us not so in
our feeble envy spit our venom on these mighty souls to half
whose heights we could never rise even if we have no opportunity
given us of sinking to their depths!
And then as he rushes in pursuit of the Titan and revels in
the speed of his chariot and the scenic splendour of the crumbling
thunder-clouds flying up like dust beneath it, all the poet in him
breaks out into glories of speech. Surely no king before or after,
not even Richard II, had such a royal gift of language as this
grandson of the Sun and Moon. It is peculiar to him in the
play. Others, especially those who habitually move near him,
Manavaka, the Chamberlain, the Huntsman, the Charioteer
catch something at times of this enthusiastic poetry, but their
diction is usually simple and unpretending and, when most
ambitious, pale to the colour, energy and imaginativeness which
floods all his utterance. For example in the scene of the vulture
how he catches fire from a single trope of the Huntsman's and his
imagination continues coruscating and flashing over the jewel
until it has vanished from sight. I have said that his imagination
has become empurpled but the tendency is really inborn in him,
he sees, thinks and speaks in purple. Not only is his mind stored
with pictures which break out in the most splendid tropes and
similes, but he cannot see any natural object or feel any simplest
emotion without bathing it in the brilliant tones of his imagination and expressing it in regal poetry. He has also the poet's
close and inspired observation, the poet's visualizing power, the
poet's sensuousness and aim at the concrete. Little things that
he has seen in Nature, a portion of the bank of a river collapsing
into the current, the rapid lightening of a dark night by the
moon, fire at night breaking its way through a volume of smoke,
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a lotus reddening in early sunlight, a wild swan flying through the
sky with a lotus fibre in his beak, remain with his inner eye and at
a touch burst out in poetry. So inveterate is this habit of seizing
on every situation and emotion and turning it into a poem, that
even when he affects a feeling as in his flattery of the queen, he
takes fire and acts his part with a glory and fervour of speech
which make the feigned emotion momentarily genuine. Thus
with a mind stored and brimming with poetry, a habit of speech
of royal splendour and fullness and an imagination fired and
enlarged by the unequalled grandeur of his own destiny, Pururavas comes to the great event which shall be the touchstone of
his nature. Such a man was alone fit to aspire to and win the
incarnate Beauty of the world and its sensuous life, the Apsara
who sprang from the thigh of the Supreme. The Urvasie of the
myth, as has been splendidly seen and expressed by a recent
Bengali poet,¹ is the spirit of imaginative beauty in the universe,
the unattainable ideal for which the soul of man is eternally panting, the goddess adored of the nympholept in all lands and in
all ages. There is but one who can attain her, the man whose
mind has become one mass of poetry and idealism and has made
life itself identical with poetry, whose glorious and starlike career
has itself been a conscious epic and whose soul holds friendship
and close converse with the Gods. This is Pururavas, "the noise
of whom has gone far and wide", whose mother was Ila, divine
aspiration, the strange daughter of Human Mind (Manu), who
was once male and is female, and his father Budha, inspired
and mystic wisdom, Hermes of the moonlike mind, and his near
ancestors therefore are the Sun and Moon. For Urvasie he leaves his human wife,
earthly fame and desire, giving her only the passionless kindness which duty demands and absorbs his whole
real soul in the divine. Even he, however, does not enjoy uninterrupted the object of his desire; he transgresses with her into that
fatal grove of the Virgin War-God where ethereal beauty and
delight are not suffered to tread, but only ascetic self-denial and
keen swordlike practical will; at once she disappears from his
ken. Then must his soul wander through all Nature seeking her,
imagining her or hints and tokens of her in everything he meets
¹Urvasie
(1895) byTagore.
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but never grasping unless by some good chance he accept the
Jewel Union born from the crimson of the marvellous feet of
Himaloy's Child, Uma, daughter of the mountains, the mighty
Mother, She who is the Soul behind Nature. Then he is again
united with her. And their child is Ayus, human life and action
glorified and ennobled by contact with the divine. It is therefore
one of the most profound and splendid of the many profound and
splendid allegories in the great repertory of Hindu myth that
Kalidasa has here rendered into so sweet, natural and passionate
a story of human love and desire. [The religious interpretation
of the myth, which is probably older than the poetical, is slightly
but not materially different.]¹¹
In one sense therefore the whole previous life of Pururavas
has been a preparation for his meeting with Urvasie. He has
filled earth and heaven, even as he has filled his own imagination
with the splendour of his life as with an epic poem. He has become indeed Pururavas, he who is noised afar, but he has never
yet felt his own soul. But now he sees Urvasie and all the force
of his nature pours itself into his love for her like a river which has at last
found its natural sea. The rich poetry of his temperament, the sights and images with which his memory is stored, his
dramatic delight in his own glory and greatness and heroism, are
now diverted and poured over the final passion of his life, coruscate and light it up and reveal it as in a wonderful faeryland full
of shimmering moonlight. Each thought, image, emotion of his
mind as it issues forth, connects itself with his love and for a
moment stands illumined in the lustre of his own speech. The
same extraordinary vividness of feeling and imagination is
poured over Ayus when Pururavas finds himself a father; never
has the passion of paternity been expressed with such vivid
concreteness or with such ardent sensuousness of feeling.
Yet the conventions of life and the dramatic part in it he feels bound to
sustain cling about him and hamper his complete utterance. In order therefore to
give him his full opportunity, Kalidasa has separated him from Urvasie by a more romantic device
than the dramatically unmanageable contrivance of the original
legend, and liberated him in the infinite freedom of madness.
1 The square brackets are in the original.
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The fourth Act therefore which seems at first sight episodical is
really of essential importance both to the conduct of the play and
the full revelation of its protagonist.
Yet madness is hardly the precise word for the condition
of Pururavas; he is not mad like Lear or Ophelia; it is rather a
temporary exaltation than a perversion or aberration from his
natural state. An extraordinarily vivid and active imagination,
which has always felt a poetic sense of mind and sympathy in
brute life and in the encouragement of romantic "inanimate"
Nature, leaps up under the shock of sudden and inexplicable
loss into gigantic proportions; it is like a sudden conflagration
in a forest which transfigures and magnifies every petty object it
enlightens and fills the world with the rush and roar and volume
of its progress. The whole essential temperament of the man
comes whirling out in a gyrating pomp of tropes, fancies, conceits, quick and changing emotions; everything in existence he
gifts with his own mind, speech, feelings and thus moves through
the pageantry of Nature draping it in the regal mantle of his imagination until the whole world exists only to be the scene and witness of his sorrow. For splendour of mere poetry united with
delicate art of restraint and management, this scene is not easily
surpassed. We may note one of the smaller and yet essential features of its
beauty, the skill with which the gradations of his excitement are indicated. When he first rushes in he is in the very
height and tumult of it mistaking the cloud for a Titan who
carries off his Urvasie and threatening him with a clod of earth
which he imagines to be a deadly weapon. But he is not really
mad; the next moment he realises his hallucination, and the
reaction produces a certain calming down of the fever; yet his
mind is still working tumultuously and as it ranges through the
forest, every object is converted for a moment into a sign of
Urvasie and the megalomaniac in him bursts out into the most splendid flights of
self-magnification. But each fresh disappointment brings a reaction that sobers him just a little more; he turns
from the inanimate objects of nature to the bee in the flower,
then to the birds, then to the beasts; he gifts them with a voice,
with articulate words, with thoughts lent out of the inexhaustible
treasury of his teeming imagination. Next he appeals to the God
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of the mountain and fancies the Echo to be his answer. Mark
that now for the first time it is a real articulate voice that he hears,
though but the reflection of his own. And immediately afterwards his mind, coming nearer and nearer to sanity, hits upon
something very close to the truth; he realises that a divine force
may have transformed her to some object of nature and at first
by a natural misapprehension imagines that it must be the river
which has the appearance Urvasie wore when she fled from him.
Then reason as it returns tells him that if he wishes to find her,
it must be nearer the place where she disappeared; as he hurries
back he appeals for the last time to an animal to speak to him,
but does not lend him a voice or words; again also he sees tokens
of her in flower and tree, but they are no longer hallucinations
but real or at least possible tokens. He touches the Jewel Union
and hears the actual voice of the sage; he is now perfectly
restored to reason and when he embraces the creeper, it is not as
Urvasie but as an "imitatress of my beloved". Through the rest
of the scene it is the old natural Pururavas we hear — though in his most
delicate flights of imagination. What a choice of a "conveyance" is that with which the scene closes and who but Pururavas could have imagined it! I dwell on these subtle and just
perceptible features of Kalidasa's work, the art concealing art,
because the appreciation of them is necessary to the full reception
on our mind-canvas of Kalidasa's art and genius and therefore to
the full enjoyment of his poetry.
And while Pururavas glorifies and revels in his passion, he is
also revealed by it; and not only in the strength of the poetic temperament at its strongest, its grasp of, devotion to and joy in its
object, its puissant idealism and energy and the dynamic force
with which for a time at least it compels fate to its will, but also
in its weaknesses. I have spoken of his self-magnification and
touches of megalomania. There is besides this a singular incompetence or paralysis of activity in occasional emergencies
which, as I have before suggested, often overtakes the poetic
temperament in action even in its most capable possessors. His
helplessness when confronted by Aushinarie compares badly
with the quiet self-possession and indulgent smile with which
Agnimitra faces Iravatie in a much more compromising situation.
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Characteristic too is his conduct when the jewel is lost. We feel
certain that Agnimitra when rushing out of his tent would have
caught up his bow and arrows and shot the thief on the spot;
Pururavas occupies [himself] in pouring out splendid tropes
and similes over the bird and the jewel and appeals helplessly to
Manavaka for advice. This is characteristic of the poetic temperament whose mind has long trained itself to throw out its imagination to meet every new object or situation and not its acting faculties; except in natures of a very firm balance the habit must lead to
paralysis of the will. Such a sapping of vigour has been going on
in Pururavas during the long years of absorption in his romantic passion. One
must hope that when he stands again in the forefront of battle, "Heaven's great soldier" will have sufficient plasticity of character to recover in the shock of action what he
has lost in the peace of the seraglio. Then there are certain moral
insensibilities, certain feelings which seem to have been left out
in his composition. It is part of his self-assumed role in life to be
the ideal king, the mirror of gallantry and conjugal duty, the
champion of the gods and of religion. Yet it is Urvasie and not
he who remembers that his "high capital awaits him long" and
who shrinks from the displeasure of the people. He exhibits
deference and a show of love to Aushinarie because he "owes"
her respect and affection, but in spite of his glowing language
and fine acting we feel that he cherishes towards her none of the
genuine respect and affection or of the real and indulgent kindliness Agnimitra feels for Dharinie and Iravatie. In the last Act
he expresses some fear that he may lose religious calm; one feels
that religious calm in Pururavas must have been something like the king's robe in Hans Anderson's story. But it was one of
the necessary "belongings" of the great semi-divine king which
Pururavas just considered his "part" in life as impassive calm and
insensibility to human misfortune and grief was one of the necessary "belongings" of the great demi-god, the human Jove which
Napoleon thought to be his destined role. If the vast, flaming and
rushing mass of genius and impetuosity which we call Napoleon
was incompatible with stoical calm and insensibility, so was the
ardent mass of sensuousness and imagination which Kalidasa
portrayed in Pururavas incompatible with the high austerity
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of religion. It is in the mouth of this champion of Heaven
Kalidasa has placed one of the few explicit protests in Sanskrit
of the ordinary sensuous man against the ascetic idealism of the
old religion:
And yet I cannot think of her
Created by a withered hermit cold.
How could an aged anchoret dull and stale
With poring over Scripture and oblivious
To all this rapture of the senses build
A thing so lovely?
The minor male characters of the piece look too wan in the
blaze of this great central figure to command much attention
except as his adjuncts. As such the Charioteer, the Huntsman
and the Chamberlain, Latavya, appear; the former two merely
cross the stage and are only interesting for the shadow of tropical
magnificence that their master's personality has thrown over
their mode of speech.
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