By
K. VISWANATHAM, M.A.
(Reader,
Andhra University)
“O
Absence! what a torment wouldst thou prove
Were
it not thy sour leisure gave Sweet love
To
entertain the time with thoughts of love,
Which
time and thoughts so sweetly doth deceive...”
–SHAKESPEARE
“Love
is a kind of chastity.”
–C. S. LEWIS.
In
his charming and discursive Abinger Harvest, Forster has a section
dealing with his Indian itinerary. Ujjain naturally reminds him of the Cloud
Messenger, which is said to be as charming and ill-planned as his book. He has
a disarming fling of sarcasm at the obliging nature of the Indian cloud, i.e.,
Kalidasa’s cloud. An English cloud would have gone without turning, turning to
the right or the left, but this is an Indian cloud.
‘Meghasamdesa’
is one of the immortal lyrics of the world of love. At the beginning of the
rainy season every year the poem like Nature herself gains fresh life and
youth. It touches our hearts with the soft embraces of a cloud and burns us
like the partner of a cloud. Every cloud imaginatively carries our missives to
our loves, though not separated by anything than the drawing-room curtain.
There is a moulting, a sloughing, a dropping of the pod or the husk; love
breaks through the clod, our life, and shakes hands with the cloud. Even the
happy man, with his mistress clinging round his neck like a pendant, becomes
restless and the plight of estranged lovers is misery:
Meghaloke
bhavati sukhinopyanyatha chittavrittih
Kanthaslesha
pranayini jane kim punar durasamsthe.
The
poem touches us with cool fingers and consumes us with burning anguish. It is
ever fresh like a bride jewelled with youth, unageing and draped in invincible
temptation. We are consumed as Hercules was on Mt. Oeta and translated into the
million-pleasured breast of eager-eyed expectant Love on beds of asphodel. We
are fondled on the white breasts of amour and smitten by the honeyed rose of
bride-desire. Desires deep, warm, dark envelop us. We are wafted on plangent
thoughts as Psyche or Endymion was by the winds, or recklessly ecstasied by rati
as Europa was by the bull or Hero by Leander.
So
acute and delightful a critic as the author of The Aspects of the Novel could
not have made the remarks in all seriousness. Does Forster mean seriously that
Kalidasa’s cloud should have slid like a flying saucer or a jet? The Indian
cloud does not commit the mistakes of the foreign tourists who see the greatest
number of places in the shortest time possible and leave the justest verdict
behind them–and below common sense, for instance, Beverley Nichols. Kalidasa’s
cloud is a leisurely cloud. Even from a strictly scientific point of view it is
a monsoon cloud, labouring up the savannahs of the blue. The poet himself has
glanced at a more sensible objection in
Kamartah
prakrtikrupanah chetana chetaneshu.
“The distracted lover
falls to note the distinction between the inanimate and the animate. How
foolish of the Yaksha to choose the cloud as the mail runner!” The poet
forestalls that censure. Further if the Indian cloud does not scud, it is
because it has to be bribed by the wayside delights to carry the message.
Kalidasa’s cloud is an adolescent cloud, married of course, but not turning
away from variety in love’s plenty. And he is bribed or tipped appropriately.
After all, the cloud carrying the message is a peg for the poet to hang his
fancies on, and it is a gentleman’s agreement between the poet and the reader
that the postulates are never questioned. We can question ‘The Midsummer
Night’s Dream’ everywhere; we can question the opening scene in ‘King Lear’ and
they dissolve like Lamia. As it is, we are happy about the linguistic windfall
that it was an Indian cloud, digressing, leisurely, amatory and trustworthy.
The
Abinger Harvest may be ill-planned; the Meghaduta is not.
Abercrombie finds in the observation of Manzoni the final criterion of plot.
Plot is the gesture of the spirit, not a pattern artificially faked, nor is it
like a pre-fabricated house. Ryder finds the plot slight and simple. The sense
of proportion appears, he says, unfortunate to a Western critic. But if Ryder
took the trouble, he would have noticed the kind of austerity and economy that
we find in a play of Ibsen. What has happened is suggested and the poet’s
powers are bent to the task of delineating, the rich ooze of affections in
separation. The plot of the poem evolves from the Yaksha’s dereliction of duty
and the Master’s anger and curse, through the message, to the
revocation, the retrenchment of the curse and the promise of reunion, more
joy-giving than the reunion itself.
The
beginning-middle-end formulae cannot cover the poem. The poem is a new genre–it
is a poetical travel book. It is brier but bountiful in poetry. Action need not
necessarily mean the meeting of two lovers; the journey of the affections of
the lovers towards one another is also action. Meghasamdesa is
not strictly a Kavya. The Yaksha’s plangency colours everything in the
poem and gives it a unity–the unity of sentiment, not that of plot. The plot is
there for the sentiment; sabbath is made for man. The unity of sentiment is, as
Eliot observes, a more binding factor than unity of plot.
A
work like the Meghaduta, which seems to grow in power and appeal from
generation to generation, cannot be like fragments of satisfying sentiment;
cannot be ill-planned. Then it could not satisfy the imagination. Kalidasa here
is the poet of the plot-curse-expiation-reunion. How otherwise can we explain
the legion of Messenger Kavyas spilled from the womb of Kalidasa’s
cloud? The pragmatic test deserves some respect. The totality of impression is
completely satisfying. Nature itself, says Max Beerbohm, is an unashamed
formalist, but Nature is not in uniform or livery.
The
poem deals with love in severance. The cloud machinery is an ingenious and
charming peg for the artist (Yaksha) for the description of places or of his
wife. The argument of the poem is the longing and anguish of a lover separated
from his love in the rainy season. As the poet most provokingly puts it,
Kanthaslesha....
The
poem will always appeal to youth away from a beloved. The singing, lingering mandakranta
is opulent and ample for the long-drawn out
plangency of longing in separation. The tenderest of loves is touched in the
most tender manner. It is convenient to imagine that Kalidasa poured into the
slow tinkling bride–rich bosom of mandakranta–the rich
sighing of his first separation (Cf. II-33, 53). The reunion does not so much
spoil as spill the Vipralambha Sringara. There is not a purer emotion
and none but the Samskrit poet treats it in a delicater way; and mandakrantra
sets its seal on it. The grief is so rich and satisfying that love
in separation is finer than love in union.
The
poem is in two parts: the first sarga is an Airways Guide; the second
part is a Town Guide. The levels of understanding and appeal are many. The
structure of the poem, the mandakranta, the marvellous autonomy of each sloka
can be tasted by a fine and trained intelligence. The poem is a charming
guide book for one who wants to ‘helicop’ from Ramagiri to Alaka which is the
dream world of young lovers with unfading moonlight, fadeless blooms of all
seasons and unageing youth without the anguish of separation. Kalidasa has
sensuously advertised the juicy refinements of towns like Ujjaini, the Miami
Beach of India in his day, and all the starved emotions of the Yaksha put on a
colour and resonate through his appeal to the cloud to taste with his lightning
eyes the sap of sophisticated youth in urban feminity. The whole Nature is one
vast wifehood and tempting womanliness. The Nirvindhya with her melodious zone
of rippling birds, meandering with charming unsteadiness, shows her eddying
navel to the cloud lover. The cloud is dark as the nipple of a woman. The city
of Alaka is a woman on the thigh of Kailasa and the leaping Ganges is her
slipping dress. The Sun-lover wipes off the dew-tears of the Nalini flower
anguished at his straying to other loves. What a sensual delight in the
side-long looks of love to the cloud who is requested to light the path of the abhisarikas
with his lightning. What charming consideration on the part of the Yaksha
to his friend’s wife, the lightning. There is delightful tenderness in the
Yaksha’s advice that the cloud should never abandon his slim-shining wife. There
is a vast conspiracy in Nature to connive at love’s excesses. The chandrakanta
stones shedding large dews at the touch of the moon remove the exhaustion
of the ladies smothered in their lovers’ arms. The 21st stanza in the 2nd part
should be a perfume of praise to any wife like Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’. The
strength of the marriage bond is felt in the 25th. The wife weeps and wets the
strings of the veena on her indifferent lap attempting to thrum his name
into a song. In the 33rd he attempts in a spirit of fine humility to look at
himself from another’s point of view. The stanzas that describe the pathos of
the wife, the ‘grass’ widow are the most tenderly pencilled sketches of a
pining woman. They show not so much the strength of her as his love. Happy the
man with such a wife and happier to be separated from her for a time.
Separation, as Shaw suggests in a short story, is Medea’s cauldron which purges
a wife of staleness and familiarity and re-incarnates her into a young Galatea!
Complete
reciprocation without consummation, Prof. Kuppuswami Sastri points out, is the
supreme moment in spiritual love. The cloud is appealed to not to disturb the
Yaksha’s wife, for in her sleep it is quite possible she may be enjoying union
with her lord. The forest gods seeing his wide-stretched arms in sleep for his
lady’s bosom hang their tear-drops on the fluttering eyelids of the trees. One
can gambol with pleasure in such sorrow!
This
small account should not mislead us into thinking that the poet is a sensual
one. Only one example will suffice to show the unexcelled delicacy and purity
of Kalidasa. We can cite the modest breaking-off of the narration of Menaka’s
love in Sakuntalam. And students of Rasa know that Sringara is
essentially spiritual as conceived by Indians and in Indian culture.
The
barge-like motion of the mandakranta on the full tide of emotion itself
shows the maturity of the poet. The plangent harmonies swell and die and swell
again on the ear. The mandakranta is the metrical clock of Vipralambha
Sringara; it is as lingering and long-drawn out as the lover’s sigh. Its
counterpart in English is the Spenserian stanza. The versicoloured
vignettes–gayer than the rainbow and as brightly variegated, softer than sorrow
and as persuasive–pass and repass before eager eyes and haunt us like a
cataract. Each stanza is a graceful swan taking the flood with her swarthy webs
and singing a sweet carol. The whole poem is perfect chrysolite.
One
cannot think of a richer expression to sum up Meghaduta than Keats’ not-easily
improved remark on the Midsummer Night’s Dream’: ‘It is a piece of profound
verdure’. Meghaduta of Kalidasa is a piece of profound verdure.
‘Profound verdure’ seems to put the girdle round Kalidasa’s achievement in Meghaduta.
Kalidasa is the singer of Sringara, untainted by kama, and
contributory to dharma; is the metrist of mandakranta; is the
poet of nature; the facile princeps of simile–that has been the tribute
paid by sahridayas from ancient times.
Kalidasa
understood in the 5th century what Europe did not learn until the 19th and even
now comprehends only imperfectly: that the world was not made for man, that man
reaches his full stature only as he realises the dignity and worth of life that
is not human. The delicate reminder to Dushyanta by Sakuntala of the pet fawn
drinking out of her cupped hands and turning away from his reminds one of
Wordsworth’s Aslumber did my Spirit seal:
She
shall be sportive as the fawn
And
hers the silence and the calm
Of
mute insensate things
The
floating clouds their state shall lend
To
her; for her the willow bend.
The
stars of midnight shall be dear
To
her...
And
beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall
pass into her face
And
vital feelings of delight
Shall
rear her form to stately height,
Her
virgin bosom swell...
If
still Forster thinks that Meghasamdesa is ill-planned, he is right just
as he will be right if he says that the last plays of Shakespeare are
ill-planned. But this ‘rightness’ is as uncritical as righteousness; it does
not explain the bridging of the human and the divine in the last plays, does
not explain the miracle of poetry that Meghasamdesa is. Common sense is
not valid here the word ‘ill-planned’ is as vile as the word ‘nice’ used by a
lady about the Niagara Falls. Nothing is happier or apter than the comment of
Patrick Crutwell on the irrationality and inadequacy of common sense when
probing the inclusiveness of poets: ‘Disconcerting, this is often, to critical
but inelastic admirers, who are apt (the besetting sin of critics) to stand and
label while creators go on their illogical way.’ (The Shakesperian Moment, p.
99) Has not Eliot pontificated that Hamlet is an artistic failure? It is
better to botch up an artistic failure which is read and enjoyed by generations
of readers than compose a dead perfection which is admired from a distance. We
should understand that unity of Plot is one of several things, that unity of
Interest, unity of Temper, unity of Sentiment, etc., are greater than unity of
Plan.