Kālidāsa
(ca. 400)
Abhijñāna´sākuntala (usually translated as “The recognition of ´ Sākuntalā” or “Sākuntalā and the ring of recollection,” but often simply called Sākuntalā) is the best-known play by India’s acknowledged greatest master of classical Sanskrit, Kālidāsa. The play is an example of the genre known as nātaka in Sanskrit, which denotes a heroic romance, a play in which a noble hero loves a beautiful woman, but in an epic world in which the hero is a royal sage and the heroine roughly symboic of the forces of nature. The source of the play is the story of Duhsanta Paurava and ´ Sāuntalā as told in the first book of the classic Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata (ca. fourth century B.C.E.), wherein Duhsanta and Sākuntalā give birth to the epic’s hero, Bhārata.
Kālidāsa retells this familiar story in seven acts. The play opens in a summer setting as Sākuntalā, revealed to be the daughter of a warrior sage and a nymph, is living with her adopted father, Kanva, in a rustic grove that serves as an ascetic hermitage. Kanva is absent, having gone on pilgrimage seeking to prevent a vague threat to Sākuntalā that he has become aware of. In his absence, the king Dusyanta finds his way to the ascetic grove, and, captivated by her beauty, watches the young virgin from behind a tree while she and her companions water the trees.When Sākuntalā is threatened by a bee, Dusyanta steps out to rescue her.
When the king discovers that Sākuntalā is not, as he had assumed, the daughter of the Brahman ascetic (and therefore unavailable), but rather of a warrior, he begins to press his suit. At first Sākuntal ā resists him, but eventually the two succumb to an overwhelming passion and marry in secret—a gāndharva or marriage of “mutual consent.” Once they have consummated their love, the king must return to his city, but he gives Sākuntalā a ring as a token of their marriage, and tells her he will send for her.
Dusyanta, however, is not able to keep that vow.In the fourth act of the drama—the central act, considered the garbha (or “womb”) of the play—comes the major turning point, for Sākuntalā, preoccupied by her passion and her departed lover, neglects her duties in the hermitage and incurs the wrath of the sage Durvāsas, who places a curse upon her. As a result of the curse, the king forgets her. But Sākuntalā, now pregnant with the king’s child, can no longer stay in the hermitage, and her adoptive father Kanva sends her to the capital to seek her husband. Disaster befalls Sākuntalā on the journey, for when she pauses on her way to pray at a river shrine sacred to ´ Sa´ ci, consort of the Hindu god Indra, she loses her signet ring in the water. Thus when she reaches the capital, Dusyanta fails to recognize her and spurns her. The devastated Sākuntalā prays to the earth to open and swallow her up, but at that point she is carried off by a light formed like a woman.
Ultimately, a fisherman finds Sākuntalā’s ring in the river, and brings it to the king.When Dusyanta recognizes the token of his love for the faithful Sākuntalā, the curse is broken and he realizes what he has done, and burns with love for her. In the world of the play, this love is able to transform and refine the king, making him capable of attacking and destroying demonic beings who menace the gods themselves.
Having proven himself in this cosmic battle, the king, riding in the chariot of Indra himself, is taken to a paradisal hermitage on a holy mountain, where he sees a young boy (Bhārata) whom he gradually realizes is his own son, and where, ultimately, he is reunited with his great love, Sākuntalā. Barbara Stoler Miller discusses the dramatic theory behind a play like Sākuntalā and the Ring of Recollection: The action of the play depicts a conflict between the cosmic forces of kāma (sensual passion) and dharma (sacred duty). Sākuntalā, the woman associated with the generative powers of the natural world, is both the object and representation of desire. Dusyanta learns that his passion must be curbed by duty, but his duty is awakened by his passion (Miller 1984, 27–29). The king is inspired to true heroism by his love, and his heroic feats make him worthy of the love that he gains at the end of the play, when he is reunited with his beloved Sākuntalā and their son, Bhārata. Sākuntalā is the most popular of Kālidāsa’s three surviving plays, admired for its beautiful love poetry as well as for the humor Kālidāsa includes throughout the play (and whose common characters speak in Pankrit, the local vernacular dialect, rather than in the Sanskrit of his noble characters). It was the first of Kālidāsa’s dramas to be translated into English, and an 18th-century German translation was influential on Goethe, whose prologue to Faust was inspired by Sākuntalā.
Bibliography
■ Gerow, Edwin. “Plot Structure and the Development of Rasa in the ´Sākuntalā,” parts 1 and 2. Journal of the American Oriental Society 99 (1979): 559–582; 100 (1980): 267–282.
■ Kālidāsa. Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kālidāsa. Edited by Barbara Stoler Miller, translated by Edwin Gerow, David Gitomer, and Barbara Stoler Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.