Sri Aurobindo. Pururavas = Kalidasa's Characters: I. Pururavas = Vikramorvasie: The Characters // The Harmony of Virtue: Early Cultural Writings (1890-1910)

Sri Aurobindo

The Harmony of Virtue

Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910

Kalidasa

Kalidasa's Characters

I. Pururavas

Pururavas¹ 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 kindness², 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. Pururavas³ 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 Pururavas⁴ 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 Antichrist⁵; 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 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 world⁶; 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 or⁷ 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 this⁸ 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, artistic tastes or⁹ impossible ideals and the best of them had in a most wonderful¹⁰ 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 of¹¹ his line, the only one who set before him a worldly and unideal aim and recognized¹² 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 this¹³ image of the poet-king; on the contrary, Pururavas¹⁴ 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 works¹⁵. 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 temperament¹⁶, 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 understand. 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 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 Mentena¹⁷ 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 recognize¹⁸ his limit, his end might have been as great as his beginning. Pururavas¹⁹ 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 effectively²⁰ as an early death helped Alexander.

Kalidasa's presentation of Pururavas²¹ 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 Pururavas²² 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. Pururavas²³ 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 his²⁴ rushing swoop upon his prey. The remembrance of 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 again²⁵ at the end of the play Kalidasa skilfully strikes the same note and we²⁶ 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, the²⁷ 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 the²⁸ 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 Pururavas²⁹ 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, this³⁰ 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 Pururavas³¹”; 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 he has wrapped himself, matchless valour, matchless fame, matchless empire commingles in his³² 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, Manavaka³³, the Chamberlain, the Huntsman, the Charioteer catch something at times of this³⁴ enthusiastic poetry, but their diction is usually simple and unpretending and, when most ambitious, pale³⁵ 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 visualizing³⁶ 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 lightening³⁷ of a dark night by the moon, fire at night breaking its way through a volume of smoke, 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 fullness³⁸ and an imagination fired and enlarged by the unequalled grandeur of his own destiny, Pururavas³⁹ 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 its⁴⁰ sensuous life, the Apsara⁴¹ 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,⁴² 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 Pururavas⁴³, “the noise of whom has gone far and wide”, whose mother was Ila⁴⁴, 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, and⁴⁵ 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 by Tagore, but⁴⁶ never grasping unless by some good chance he accept the Jewel Union born from the crimson of⁴⁷ 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.]⁴⁸

In one sense therefore the whole previous life of Pururavas⁴⁹ 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 Pururavas⁵⁰, he who is noised afar, but he has never yet felt his own soul. But now⁵¹ 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 the⁵² 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 Pururavas⁵³ 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 in⁵⁴ the infinite freedom of madness. 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 Pururavas⁵⁵; 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” Nature⁵⁶, leaps up under the shock of sudden and inexplicable loss into⁵⁷ 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 it⁵⁸ 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 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 immediately⁵⁹ 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 and⁶⁰ 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 Pururavas⁶¹ 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 Pururavas⁶² 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 Pururavas⁶³ 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.

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 and⁶⁴ shot the thief on the spot; Pururavas⁶⁵ occupies [himself⁶⁶ ] in pouring out splendid tropes and similes over the bird and the jewel and appeals helplessly to Manavaka⁶⁷ 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 Pururavas⁶⁸ 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 plasticity⁶⁹ 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 Pururavas⁷⁰ must have been something like the king's robe in Hans Anderson’s⁷¹ story. But it was one of the necessary “belongings” of the great semi-divine king which Pururavas⁷² just considered⁷³ his “part” in life as⁷⁴ 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 role⁷⁵. If the⁷⁶ 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 Pururavas⁷⁷ incompatible with the high austerity 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.

Later edition of this work: The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 1.- Early Cultural Writings (1890 — 1910).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2003.- 784 p.

¹ 2003 ed: Pururavus