The Vikramorvaçī,[20] by many reckoned as the last work[21] in drama of Kālidāsa, seems rather to fall in the interval between the youthful Mālavikāgnimitra and the mature perfection of the Çakuntalā. The theme is that of the love of Purūravas, a king, and Urvaçī, an Apsaras, or heavenly nymph. The prologue, which has been unjustly suspected of being proof of the incompleteness and therefore later date of the drama, is followed by screams of the nymphs from whom Urvaçī on her return from Kailāsa has been torn away by a demon; the king hastens to her aid, recovers her, and restores her first to her friends, and then to the Gandharva king, but not before both have fallen desperately in love. In the entr’acte a servant of the queen extracts cleverly from the Vidūṣaka the secret of the change which has come over the king, his love for Urvaçī. The king himself then appears; in conversation with the Vidūṣaka he [[150]]declares his love, to meet with scant sympathy; Urvaçī and a friend appear in the air, and Urvaçī drops a letter written on birch bark breathing her love; the king reads it and gives it to the Vidūṣaka; Urvaçī’s friend appears, and finally Urvaçī herself, but after a brief exchange of love passages Urvaçī is recalled to play a part in heaven in a drama produced by Bharata. The message, unluckily, falls into the queen’s hands, and she refuses to be appeased by Purūravas’s attempts to soothe her. In the entr’acte before Act II we learn from a conversation between two pupils of Bharata that Urvaçī was so deeply in love that she played badly her part in the piece on Lakṣmī’s wedding; asked whom she loved, she answered Purūravas instead of Puruṣottama, Viṣṇu’s name, and Bharata cursed her; but Indra intervened and gave her leave to dwell on earth with her love until he had seen the face of her child. The Act that follows shows the king, anxious to please the queen, engaged with her in celebrating the festival of the moon’s union with Rohiṇī; Urvaçī and her friend, in disguise and unseen by the king in a fairy mist, watch his courtesy which fills the nymph with anguish, though her friend assures her that it is mere courtesy. To her joy she finds that the queen has decided to be reconciled, and to permit the king the enjoyment of his beloved; pressed to stay with the king, she refuses, and Urvaçī joins Purūravas, her friend leaving her, bidding Purūravas to care for her so that she may not miss her friends in the sky.
The prelude to Act IV tells us of misfortune; the nymphs who mourn by the sea her absence learn that, angry at her husband for some trivial cause, she had entered the grove of Kumāra, forbidden to women, and been turned into a creeper. In distraction[22] the king seeks for her; he deems the cloud a demon which has stolen her away, demands of the peacock, the cuckoo, the flamingo, the bee, the elephant, the boar, the antelope what has become of her; he deems her transformed into the stream, whose waves are the movements of her eyebrows while the rows of birds in its waters are her girdle; he dances, sings, cries, faints in his madness, or deems the echo to be answering [[151]]him, until a voice from heaven tells him of a magic stone, armed with which he grasps a creeper which in his embrace turns into Urvaçī.
From this lyric height the drama declines in Act V. The king and his beloved are back in his capital; the moon festival is being celebrated, but the magic stone is stolen by a vulture, which, however, falls pierced by the arrow of a youthful archer; the arrow bears the inscription, ‘the arrow of Āyus, son of Urvaçī and Purūravas’. The king had known nothing of the child, but, while he is amazed, a woman comes from a hermitage with a gallant boy, who, educated in the duties of his warrior caste, has by his slaying the bird violated the rule of the hermitage and is now returned to his mother. Urvaçī, summoned, admits her parentage, but, while Purūravas is glad, she weeps to think of their severance, now inevitable, since he has seen his son. But, while Purūravas is ready to abandon the realm to the boy and retire to the forest in grief, Nārada comes with a message of good tidings; a battle is raging between the gods and the demons; Purūravas’s arms will be necessary, and in reward he may have Urvaçī’s society for his life.
The play has come down in two recensions, one preserved in Bengālī and Devanāgarī manuscripts and commented on by Ran̄ganātha in A.D. 1656, and the other in South Indian manuscripts, commented on by Kāṭayavema, minister of the Reḍḍi prince, Kumāragiri of Koṇḍavīḍu about A.D. 1400. The most important among many differences is the fact that in Act IV the northern manuscripts give a series of Apabhraṅça verses, with directions as to the mode of singing and accompanying them, which are ignored in the southern manuscripts. The northern text calls the play a Troṭaka, apparently from the dance which accompanied the verses, the southern a Nāṭaka which it in essentials is. The arguments against the authenticity of the verses are partly the silence of the theorists, the fact that the existence in Kālidāsa’s time of Apabhraṅça of the type found is more than dubious,[23] that there is sometimes a degree of discrepancy between the verses and the prose of the drama, and that in the many imitations of the scene (Mālatīmādhava, Act IX, Bālarāmāyaṇa, Act V, Prasannarāghava, Act VI, and Mahānāṭaka, [[152]]Act IV) there are no similar verses. These reasons are on the whole conclusive, and the problematic fact that the Prākrit of the northern recension is better is not of importance.
The Çakuntalā[24] certainly represents the perfection of Kālidāsa’s art, and may justly be assumed to belong to his latest period of work. The prologue with his usual skill leads us up to the picture of the king in swift pursuit of an antelope entering the outskirts of the hermitage; warned of the sacred character of the spot, the king alights from his chariot and decides to pay his respects to the holy man whose hermitage it is; he is absent, but Çakuntalā, his foster-daughter, is there with her friends; pursued by a bee she calls for help; they reply that Duḥṣanta the king should aid as the hermitage is under his protection, and the king gallantly comes forward to help. From the maidens he elicits the tale of Çakuntalā’s birth; she is daughter of Viçvāmitra and Menakā, and is being reared not for the religious life but for marriage to some worthy one. The king loves and the maiden begins to reciprocate his affection, when the news that a wild elephant is menacing the hermitage takes him away. Act II reveals his Vidūṣaka groaning over the toils of the king’s hunting. But the king gives order for the hunt to end, not to please the Vidūṣaka but for Çakuntalā’s sake, and, while he recounts his feelings to his unsympathetic friend, receives with keen satisfaction the request of the young hermits to protect the hermitage against the attacks of demons. The Vidūṣaka he gets rid of by sending him back to the capital to take part in a festival there, assuring him, in order to prevent domestic trouble, that his remarks about Çakuntalā were not serious. In the entr’acte before Act III a young Brahmin praises the deeds of Duḥṣanta, and we learn that Çakuntalā is unwell, and her maidens are troubled regarding her state, as she is the very life breath of Kaṇva. The Act itself depicts Çakuntalā with her maidens; she is deeply in love and writes a letter at their suggestion: the king who has overheard all comes on the scene and a dialogue follows, in which both the king and the maiden express their feelings; the scene is [[153]]ended by the arrival of the nun Gautamī to fetch away her charge. The entr’acte that follows tells us from the conversation of Priyaṁvadā and Anasūyā, Çakuntalā’s dear friends, that the king after his marriage with Çakuntalā has departed and seems to have forgotten her; while Kaṇva is about to return and knows nothing of the affair. A loud cry interrupts them; Çakuntalā in her love-sickness has failed to pay due respect to the harsh ascetic Durvāsas, who has come to visit the hermitage: he curses her, and all the entreaties of her friends succeed in no more than mitigating the harshness of his curse; she will be forgotten by her husband, not indeed for ever, but until she presents to him the ring he gave her in token of their union. The curse is essential; the whole action of the play depends on it. The Act itself tells us that the difficulty regarding Kaṇva has been solved; a voice from the sky has informed him at the moment of his return of the marriage and Çakuntalā’s approaching maternity. He has decided to send her under escort to the king. Then follows a scene of intense pathos; the aged hermit unwillingly parts with his beloved foster-daughter, with words of advice for her future life, and Çakuntalā is desolated to leave him, her friends, and all that she has loved at the hermitage.
Act V shows us the king in his court, overwhelmed with the duties of office, for Kālidāsa takes care to show us Duḥṣanta as the great and good monarch. News is brought that hermits with women desire an interview, while a song is heard in which the queen Haṅsavatī laments the king’s faithlessness to her; the king dispatches the Vidūṣaka to solace her, and receives in state the hermits. They bring him his wife, but, under the malign influence of the curse, he does not recognize her and cannot receive her. The hermits reprove him, and insist on leaving her, refusing her the right to go with them, since her duty is by her husband’s side. The king’s priest is willing to give her the safety of his house till the babe be born, but a figure of light in female shape appears and bears Çakuntalā away, leaving the king still unrecognizing, but filled with wonder. In the entr’acte which follows a vital element is contributed; policemen mishandle a fisherman accused of theft of a royal ring found in a fish which he has caught; it is Duḥṣanta’s ring which Çakuntalā had dropped while bathing. The Act that follows tells us of the [[154]]recognition by the king of the wrong unwittingly done and his grief at the loss of his wife; he seeks to console himself with her portrait, when he is interrupted by a lady of the harem, and then by the minister, who obtains from him the decision of a law case involving the right of succession; the episode reminds the king of his childlessness. From his despair the king is awakened by the screams of the Vidūṣaka who has been roughly handled by Mātali, Indra’s charioteer, as an effective means of bringing the king back to the realization that there are duties superior to private feeling. The gods need his aid for battle. In Act VII Duḥṣanta is revealed victorious, and travelling with Mātali in a divine car high through the air to Hemakūṭa, where dwells in the place of supreme bliss the seer Mārīca and his wife. Here the king sees a gallant boy playfully pulling about a young lion to the terror of two maidens who accompany him in the dress of the hermitage; they ask the king to intervene with the child in the cub’s interest, and the king feels a pang as he thinks of his sonlessness. To his amazement he learns that this is no hermit’s son, but his own; Çakuntalā is revealed to him in the dress of an ascetic, and Mārīca crowns their happiness by making it clear to Çakuntalā that her husband was guiltless of the sorrow inflicted upon her.
A drama so popular has naturally enough failed to come down to us in a single recension.[25] Four are normally distinguished, Bengālī, Devanāgarī, Kāçmīrī, and South Indian, while a fifth may also be traced. There are, however, in reality, two main recensions, the Bengālī, with 221 stanzas, as fixed by the commentators Çan̄kara and Candraçekhara, and the Devanāgarī, with 194 stanzas, of Rāghavabhaṭṭa; the Kāçmīrī, which supplies an entr’acte to Act VII, is in the main an eclectic combination of these two representatives of North Indian texts, and the South Indian is closely akin to the Devanāgarī; Abhirāma and Kāṭayavema among others have commented on it. The evidence of superior merit is conflicting; Pischel[26] laid stress on the more correct Prākrit of the Bengālī and the fact that some readings in [[155]]the Devanāgarī are best explained as glosses on the Bengālī text, while Lévi[27] proved that Harṣa and Rājaçekhara knew the Bengālī recension in some shape. On the other hand, Weber[28] contended for the priority of the Devanāgarī; certainly some readings there are better, and some of the Bengālī stanzas are mere repetitions of others found in both texts. Unless we adopt the not very plausible view of Bollensen that the Devanāgarī version is the acting edition of the play revised for representation, we must hold that neither recension is of conclusive value: the argument from the Prākrit is not conclusive, for it may merely rest on the superior knowledge of the copyists from whom the Bengālī original ultimately issued.[29]
3. Kālidāsa’s Dramatic Art
The order of plays here adopted is in precise harmony with the development in a harmonious manner of Kālidāsa’s dramatic art. The Mālavikāgnimitra is essentially a work of youthful promise and some achievement;[30] the theme is one less banal probably in Kālidāsa’s time than it became later when every Nāṭikā was based on an analogous plot, and there is some skill in the manner in which the events are interlaced; the Vidūṣaka’s stratagems to secure his master the sight of his beloved are amusing, and, though Agnimitra appears mainly as a love-sick hero, the reports of battles and victories reminds us adequately of his kingly functions and high importance. The most effective characterization, however, is reserved for the two queens, Dhāriṇī and Irāvatī: the grace and dignity, and finally the magnanimity of the former, despite just cause for anger, are set off effectively against the passionate impetuosity of the latter, which leads her to constant eavesdropping, and to an outbreak against the king, forgetful of his rank and rights. The heroine is herself but faintly presented, but her friend Kauçikī, who has been driven by a series of misfortunes to enter the religious life, is a noble [[156]]figure; she comforts and distracts the mind of Dhāriṇī; she is an authority on the dance and on the cure for snake bite, and alone among the women she speaks Sanskrit. The Vidūṣaka is an essential element in the drama, and he plays rather the part of a friend and confidant of the king than his jester; without his skilled aid Agnimitra would have languished in vain for his inamorata. But on the other hand he contributes comparatively little to the comic side of the drama.