Kalidasa’s Similes

BY PURASU BALAKRISHNAN

(Translated by the Author from his original Tamil Essay)

“Metaphor is the special mark of genius, for the power of making a good metaphor is the power of recognizing likeness.”–Aristotle.

In Sanskrit poetry Kalidasa has long been recognized as “excelling in similes” (“Upama Kalidasasya”). He recognized likenesses everywhere around him. His mind was full of visions of beauty–of moments of intense sensuous experience–and his similes stand out as perfect pictures of those impassioned moments. As a dramatist dealing with human problems he falls short of many authors, ancient and modern, but in the rich accumulation of such poetic experience he holds a unique place among the poets of the world.

When he stands at the confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna, the richness and enchantment of that moment, as he observes that mingling of the two waters, he communicates to us in one similar after another: ^*

“Behold, Seeta, the current of the Ganges broken by the waves of the Jumna. Here are pearls and shining emeralds, thrown into a heap together. There are lotuses, blue and white, strung into wreaths. Here it looks like emigrant flamingoes flapping their wings in the company of dark grey geese. Yonder there we see some pattern like black leaves painted on white sandaled ground. Here it looks like the splendour of the moonlight in the dappled shade. There on the waters we see patches of the autumnal sky peering through clouds. And here we behold something like Shiva’s form, smeared with ash and adorned with black snakes.”

In this we hear the voice of a poet trying to express an inexpressible vision of beauty in terms of similar images. It is characteristic of Kalidasa’s poetic fervour and sincerity. Everything that he saw he seized with all his senses, as if he would hold it in his hands, turn it round and view it in all its aspects and become intimate with it. He had a vivid, prehensile imagination.

“Inspired realization,” says Lascelles Abercrombie in his book, The Theory of Poetry, “is perhaps the commonest, as it is also perhaps the most useful, of the workings of genius in poetry. There is a fine example in the beautiful Indian drama Sakuntala; the chariot of the god Indra driving through heaven passes over a cloud, and at once the wetted rims of the wheels begin to spin moisture off in sparkling showers. Of course! That is exactly what would happen. Keats has the very same thing in Endymion but he may have looked into Sir William Jones’ version of Kalidasa:

‘A silver car, air-borne,

Whose silent wheels, fresh-wet from clouds of morn,

Spun off a drizzling dew’.”

Another instance of such vivid, vitalizing imagination is Dushyanta’s description of the earth which unrolls itself below him as he descends from the sky in Indra’s car:

“Rushing through the air what wondrous things I saw!

How from the mountains the earth shelved away

As the great peaks emerged; wrapt no more

In indistinguishable foliage, trees

Towered up and showed the stature of their stems.

The rivers that were narrowed into threads

Of shining silver, broadened their green banks;

And momently grown nearer, all the earth

Was by some unseen power flung up to me.”

(Tr.: Laurence Binyon)

Inspired realization of this kind is perhaps best exemplified in some of Kalidasa’s similes, with lightning-like brilliance and rapidity of revelation. For in them it displays its power in a concentrated form, the similes being lines and not complete pictures. Rama thus points out to Seeta the bridge which he had built across the sea, while they fly back home in the aerial car:

“Behold, Vaidehi, the ocean foaming against my bridge which divides it as far as the Malaya mountain, like the milky way dividing the autumnal sky.”

This simile gives us a true idea of what the ocean with the dividing bridge fact will look to a spectator from above. The sky is of the same dimension as the ocean and must, with the foamy milky way, appear to spectators from below beg the same as what the ocean with the foam-covered bridge must appear to spectators from above. Similes like this, which are unerring in their judgment and precision and true to every detail–which are, in short, born of “inspired realization”–are found in profusion in Kalidasa’s poetry. For example, Rama’s description of the sea shore to Seeta in the same situation:

“The forests of Tamala and Tali trees on the strand are reduced to a thin dark-blue line by this distance; and owing to this the salt sea looks like an iron wheel with edges rusty.”

Thus Kalidasa’s similes are emotional and intellectual at the same time. For he imagined things not only like a poet but also like a scientist. His perception was not only sensuous but also disciplined:

“See, my beloved, how the sun

With beams that o’er the water shake

From western skies has now begun

A bridge of gold across the lake.”

(Tr.: Ryder)

He has observed that the setting sun very near the water’s edge is reflected across the entire expanse of the waters.

And the greatest glory of poetry is achieved in his similes–namely, the achievement of blending numerous images and feelings into single short pictures:

“As on the tree the lightning,

On them fell His wrath;

He to unknown regions

Silent sought His path.”

(Tr.: R.C. Dutt)

This is how he describes the anger of the great god Siva when He was disturbed from His penance by the meddlesome god of Love. In such an apparently simple and unpretentious simile as this, how many pictures and feelings are blended together, the suddenness of Siva’s wrath, the destructive fire of it, His vanishing, and its equal suddenness, the total annihilation of Manmatha (the god of Love), and the terror and desolation of Parvati! This is the very stuff of poetry inasmuch as Kalidasa transmits to us a spark of his own creativeness and we begin to create these images for ourselves.

Suggestion, it is often said, is the soul of poetry. The surpassing suggestiveness of Kalidasa’s similes is a thing which cannot be brought out in translations. But it is such a rich quality of theirs that must indicate it. Kalidasa thus describes Siva in meditation as He appeared to the luckless god of Love who came to aim his shaft at Him:

“Like the deep cloud-dark but silent,

Like the ocean–vast but still,

Like the flame–by winds unshaken,

Dreaded God of dauntless will!”

(Tr.: R. C. Dutt)

Reading the Sanskrit original one feels something shadowy, something grave and ominous descending on one–something portentous of the coming tragedy. One feels that the cloud may burst at any moment, that the ocean may soon surge, that the flame may shortly quiver. There is a tension, a state of unnaturalness which cannot last long, in the air. All the similes are negatively stressed. It is borne in upon us by the poet’s diction that the cloud is surcharged with water, that the ocean is potentially turbulent, that the flame is steady only because the vital currents have been suspended for a while. Through the poet we ourselves enjoy the privilege of creative experience.

Just as in one simile-picture he conjures up other images and feelings which he has in mind, Kalidasa sometimes employs similes to make clear his idea to us. All the knowledge acquired in her previous birth came to young Parvati at the time of her instruction, and Kalidasa explains it thus:

“As the swans resort to the Ganges when autumn sets in, or as their native lustre returns to the luminous herbs at nightfall, so the knowledge of her previous life became Parvati’s at the time of instruction.”

This is as such as to say that it was quite a natural process–like any of the natural phenomena.

Similarly, he employs similes to render clear and convincing parodoxical ideas: Indra, the king of Gods, sues for a mortal’s help to destroy the demons, and this is how his charioteer explains it:

“Indra, the mighty, who deigns to call you friend,

Appoints you their destroyer. The dark night

No sun can enter, yet the moon subdues it.”

(Tr.: Laurence Binyon)

It may be observed here that the moon owes its light to the sun, and Indian astronomy was advanced enough in Kalidasa’s days for him to be cognizant of this fact. To give another illustration, Dushyanta claims that he has been more seriously hit by love than Sakuntala:

“Lovely one, you Love with his fever fills,

But not, as me, consumes, destroys, devours;

Day glares upon the parching lotus flowers,

But the wan moon he withers and he kills.”

(Tr.: Laurence Binyon)

These reveal to us that Kalidasa’s mind worked essentially in terms of similes or likenesses, that it was rational and of the highest poetic order–which the latter, in fact, signifies its being rational and inspired, intensive and disciplined at the same time.

“In order to describe horse-thieves,” says Chekov, “I must all the time speak and think in their tone and feel in their way.” This is spoken just like a modern. Kalidasa does think and feel in the way of his characters, but because similes are things of beauty, he imparts to them a spark of his own, even while they retain their individuality. This may appear paradoxical but it is true and constitutes one of the charms of his similes. The most striking example of this is the most homely one: one of the two hermits who escort Sakuntala from the forest to the city views the luxury of the palace with strange eyes and remarks to his brother-hermit.

“These pleasure-seeking folk strike me as funny–as oil-smeared men appear to those that have bathed, as the scheming appear to the guileless, as sleeping men to those that are up early, as fettered slaves to free men.”

Of course! The hermit has in him the pride of cleanliness and purity. Many an early morning in the forest, on returning fresh and clean after the river-bath, he must have come upon poor, unclean foresters and viewed with disgust the dust and the oil on their limbs; or on way home after chanting hymns on the river-bank, he must have been struck by some of those people still asleep outside their huts, he must have thought of their dull tedious lives and felt himself free, liberated from animal existence. And the ideas that spring to his mind in the palace ring true to his experiences in the hermitage. And thus with the few strokes of his similes, Kalidasa has characterised the hermit in the way of a great master.

Dushyanta, when he has to return to his city from Sakuntala’s hermit grove, expresses his unwillingness thus:

“My limbs move forward, while my heart flies back

Like silken standards borne against the breeze.”

(Tr.: MacDonnel)

We may note here how natural and happy the comparison to a standard is on the lips of a “car-warrior” like Dushyanta.

To give two more instances, for their intrinsic beauty:

When the two friends of Sakuntala decide to keep Durvasa’s curse a secret from her, one of them remarks, “Would any one sprinkle a jasmine-vine with scalding water?” (Tr.: Ryder) Her way of thinking is just like the child of Nature that she is, watering the plants of the hermitage and gathering flowers daily for worship. Again when Sakuntala, a child of Nature like her friends, is rejected by the King in the court, when her whole being is writhing and shrinking into itself with shame and she accuses her deceiver, even then she does not go beyond the sights and accidents of forest-life, and her words reveal to us not only her anguish and the beauty of her soul but also the texture of her mind:

“Ignoble! By your own heart you judge mine. Who else would act like you? You robe yourself in righteousness and all the time you are false, like a deep well covered over with grass!”

Thus Kalidasa’s similes, even when they are quite brief and not striking on the first reading, are executed with consummate art, just as the clear surface of a pool does not often reveal its depth. His similes are charged with sensuous, emotional and intellectual content all at once; a single moment which each expresses is charged with such intense experience. It is intensity which makes an experience poetic; and judged by this standard Kalidasa towers in an almost unique way over other poets.

Kalidasa not only speaks and feels in the way of the character who speaks and feels; he also hears and feels in the way of the character who feels. The latter statement is only an extension of the former. But it is worthy of illustration as the illustration justifies itself. Just as a letter partakes not only of the character of the writer but also to some extent of the person to whom he writes it, so Kalidasa’s similes suit the person to whom they are addressed. Dushyanta confesses to Sakuntala his inexplicable madness in rejecting her thus:

“Lovely one, cast away your grief. When I did not recognize you I was under a potent spell, I know not how. Strange how one acts sometimes as if mad, spurning even one’s good fortune! You throw a garland round the neck of a blind man and he shakes it away frightened, thinking it a snake.”

This is a frank confession of his folly, made with tenderness and repentance. The garland to wear and to adore is fitting figure for the person to whom and the simile is addressed. On the other hand, when Dushyanta blames himself for his folly before the sage Maricha, he describes himself thus:

“Like one who doubts an elephant,

Though seeing him stride by,

And yet believes when he has seen

The footprints left; so I.”

(Tr.: Ryder)

Here Dushyanta ruthlessly denounces himself for having rejected Sakuntala when she sought him, while he recognized her later when he saw her lost ring. How the simile fits in with the nature of the rishi to whom it is addressed–the dispassionate man, who views things in a stern cold light! Would it be fact, half as pleasing if it had been said by him to Sakuntala, exposing as it does the same delusion? Again, when Dushyanta in his loneliness blames himself for his rejection of Sakuntala, he mourns:

I treated her with scorn and loathing ever;

Now o’er her pictured charms my heart will burst:

A traveller I, who scorned the mighty river

And seeks in the mirage to quench his thirst.”

(Tr.: Ryder)

Here again his delusion is brought out, and with it, his naked passion. To Sakuntala he expresses himself delicately; but to himself he is more honest about himself. Each of the three similes, describing his strange forgetfulness, occupies its own place which the poet assigned to it. This points to the exuberance of his fancy, to the sureness of his touch and to the manner of his thinking in terms of analogy and likenesses.

We have returned to the point we started from. In some cases the poet, instead of picking out outward likenesses, proceeds from the outward the to the inward, from the material to the spiritual, from the manifestations to the principle. The result is not a simile but what one may call a simile reversed, if by that one refers to the creative process. The poet sees a beautiful sight and a human parallel–a human idea–strikes him, and its beauty surpasses itself because it is approached through Beauty. If the poet had started with the idea and resort to a simile to illustrate it, it would have lost its power or even become commonplace, no more than a platitude. The idea, however, arises spontaneously and naturally from the impact of the outward on the poet in a moment of inspiration; in a sudden flood of illumination; and so it carries conviction to us and has the power to stir us like a vision of our own. The prose-poems of Turgenev offer us an illustration of this method. In the fourth act of Sakuntala the moon is sinking and the sun is rising. By the simultaneous setting and rising of these two luminaries mankind is instructed, as it were, regarding its own vicissitudes of fortune. The poet grows thoughtful. We feel keenly with him why the two beauties cannot exist side by side, why one must necessarily exist apart from the other. It dawns upon us with the light of a discovery that, in the whole scheme of Nature, including the affairs of mankind, if there is a rise somewhere there must be a fall elsewhere. The truth of the poet’s vision comes home to our bosom with the moving power of beauty. And this is the secret of Kalidasa’s art in general and of his similes in particular.

^* The translations from Sanskrit, when not otherwise indicated, are by the author.

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