Sri Aurobindo. Apsaras = Kalidasa's Characters: IV. Apsaras = 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
IV. Apsaras [1]

There is nothing more charming, more attractive in Kalidasa than his instinct for sweet and human beauty; everything he touches becomes the inhabitant of a moonlit world of romance and yet — there is the unique gift, the consummate poetry — remains perfectly natural, perfectly near to us, perfectly human. Shelley's Witch of Atlas and Keats' Cynthia are certainly lovely creations, but they do not live; misty, shimmering, uncertain, seen¹ in some half-dream where² the moon is full and strange indefinable shapes³ begin to come out from the skirts of the forest; they charm our imagination, but our hearts take no interest in them. They are the creations of the mystic Celtic imagination with its singular intangibility, its fascinating other-worldliness. The Hindu has been always decried as a dreamer and mystic. There is truth in the charge but also a singular inaccuracy. The Hindu mind, in⁴ one sense, is the⁵ most concrete in the world. It seeks after abstraction⁶, yet⁷ is it never⁸ satisfied so⁹ long as it¹⁰ remains¹¹ abstraction¹². To make¹³ the objects and concepts of¹⁴ this world concrete, that¹⁵ is comparatively easy; sun and rain or air are, at their most ethereal, the sublimated secrets of matter. The Hindu is not contented till he has seized things behind the sunlight also as concrete realities. He is passionate for the infinite, the unseen, the spiritual, but he will not rest satisfied with conceiving them, he insists on mapping the infinite, on seeing the unseen, on visualising the spiritual. The Celt throws his imagination into the infinite and is rewarded with beautiful phantoms, out of which he evolves a pale, mystic and intangible poetry. The Hindu sends his heart and his intellect and eventually his whole being after his imagination and for his reward he has seen God and interpreted existence. It is this double aspect of Hindu temperament which is the secret of our civilisation, our religion, our life and literature; extreme spirituality successfully attempting to work in harmony with extreme materialism¹⁶. On the one side we spiritualise the material out of all but a phenomenal and illusory existence, on the other we materialise the spiritual in the most definite and realistic forms; this is the secret of the high philosophic idealism which to the less capable European seems¹⁷ so impossible an atmosphere¹⁸ and of the prolific idolatry which to the dogmatic and formalising Christian seems¹⁹ so gross. In any other race-temperament this mental division would have split into two broadly disparate or²⁰ opposing types and attempts²¹ at compromise comprising action and reaction would have built up the history²² of thought. In the myriad-minded and undogmatic Hindu it worked not as²³ mental division, but as the first discord which prepares for a consistent harmony; the best and most characteristic Hindu thought regards either tendency as essential to the perfect and subtle comprehension of existence; they are considered the positive and negative sides of one truth, and must both be grasped if we are not to rest in a half light. Hence the entire tolerance of the Hindu religion to all intellectual attitudes except sheer libertinism; hence also the marvellous perfection of grades in²⁴ thought-attitudes which²⁵ the Hindu mind travels between the sheer negative and the sheer positive and yet sees in them only a ladder of progressive and closely related steps rising through relative conceptions to one final and absolute knowledge.

The intellectual temperament of a people determines the main character-stamp of its poetry. There is therefore no considerable poet in Sanskrit who has not the twofold impression (spiritual and romantic in aim, our poetry is realistic in method), who does not keep his feet on the ground even while his eyes are with the clouds. The soaring lark who loses himself in light, the ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in the void are not denizens of the Hindu plane of temperament. Hence the expectant critic will search ancient Hindu literature in vain for the poetry of mysticism; that is only to be found in recent Bengali poetry which has felt the influence of English models. The old Sanskrit poetry was never satisfied unless it could show colour, energy and definiteness, and these are things incompatible with true mysticism. Even the Upanishads which declare the phenomenal world to be unreal, yet have a rigidly practical aim and labour in every line to make the indefinite definite and the abstract concrete. But of all our great poets Kalidasa best exemplifies this twynatured Hindu temperament under the conditions of supreme artistic beauty and harmony. Being the most variously learned of Hindu poets he draws into his net all our traditions, ideas, myths, imaginations, allegories, the grotesque and the trivial as well as the sublime and the lovely²⁶, but touching them with the²⁷ magic wand teaches them to live together in the harmonising atmosphere of his poetic temperament. Under his slight touch²⁸ the grotesque becomes strange, wild and romantic, the trivial refines into a dainty and gracious slightness, the sublime yields to the law of romance, acquires a mighty grace, a strong sweetness; and what was merely lovely attains power, energy and brilliant colour. His creations in fact live in a peculiar light, which is not the light that never was on sea or land but rather our ordinary sunshine recognisable though strangely and beautifully altered. The alteration is not real; rather our vision is affected by the recognition of something the sunbeams concealed²⁹ and yet the cause of the sunbeams; but it is human³⁰ sunlight we see always. May we not say it is that luminousness behind the veil of this sunlight which is the heaven of Hindu imagination and in all Hindu work shines through it without overpowering it? Hindu poetry is the only Paradise in which the lion can lie down with the lamb.

The personages of Kalidasa's poetry are with but few exceptions gods and demigods or skiey spirits, but while they preserve a charm of wonder, sublimity or weirdness, they are brought on to³¹ our own plane of experience, their speech and thought and passion is human. This was the reason alleged by the late Bankim Chandra³² Chatterji, himself a poet and a critic of fine and strong insight, for preferring the Birth of the War-God to Paradise Lost; he thought that both epics were indeed literary epics of the same type, largely planned and sublime in subject, diction and thought, but that the Hindu poem, if less grandiose in its pitch, had in a high degree the humanism and sweetness of simple and usual feeling in which the Paradise Lost is more often than not deficient. But the humanism of which I speak is not the Homeric naturalism; there is little of the sublime or romantic in the essence of the Homeric gods though there is much of both in a good many of their accidents and surroundings. But Kalidasa's divine and semi-divine personages lose none of their godhead by living on the plane of humanity. Perhaps the most exquisite masterpiece in this kind is the Cloud-Messenger. The actors in that beautiful love-elegy might have been chosen by Shelley himself; they are two lovers of Faeryland — a cloud, rivers, mountains, the gods and demigods of air, hill³³ and sky. The goal of the cloud's journey is the ethereal city of Alaka³⁴ crowned by the clouds upon the golden hill³⁵ and bathed at night in the unearthly moonlight that streams from the brow of Shiva³⁶, the mystic's God. The earth is seen mainly as a wonderful panorama by one travelling on the wings of a cloud. Here are all the materials for one of those intangible harmonies of woven and luminous mist with which Shelley allures and baffles us. The personages and scenery are those of Queen Mab, of Prometheus Unbound³⁷ and the Witch of Atlas. But Kalidasa's city in the mists is no evanescent city of sunlit clouds; it is his own beautiful and luxurious Ujjayini idealised and exempted from mortal afflictions³⁸; like a true Hindu he insists on translating the ideal into the terms of the familiar, sensuous and earthy.

For death and birth keep not their mystic round

In Ullaca³⁹, there from the deathless trees

The blossom lapses never to the ground

But lives for ever garrulous with bees

All honey-drunk — nor yet its sweets resign.

For ever in their girdling companies...

And when he comes to describe the sole mourner in that town of delight and eternal⁴⁰ passion unsated, this is how he describes her, how human, how touching, how common it all is! While we read, we feel ourselves kin to and one with a more beautiful world than our own. These creatures of fancy hardly seem to be an imaginary race but rather ourselves removed from the sordidness and the coarse pains of our world, into a more gracious existence. This, I think, is the essential attraction which makes his countrymen to this day feel such a passionate⁴¹ delight in Kalidasa; after reading a poem of his the world and life and our fellow creatures human, animal or inanimate have become suddenly more beautiful and dear to us than they were before; the heart flows out towards birds and beasts and the very trees seem to be drawing us towards them with their branches as if with arms; the vain cloud and the senseless mountain are no longer senseless or empty, but friendly intelligences that have a voice to our souls. Our own common thoughts, feelings, and passions have also become suddenly fair to us, they have received the sanction of beauty. And then through the passion of delight and the sense of life and of love in all beautiful objects we reach to the Mighty Spirit behind them whom our soul recognizes no longer as an object of knowledge or of worship but as her lover to whom she must fly, leaving her husband, the material life and braving the jeers and reprobation of the world for His sake. Thus by a singular paradox, one of those beautiful oxymorons of which the Hindu temperament is full, we reach God through the senses, just as our ancestors did through the intellect and through the emotions; for in the Hindu mind all roads lead eventually to the Rome of its longing, the dwelling of the Most High God. One can see how powerfully Kalidasa's poetry must have prepared the national mind for the religion of the Puranas, for the⁴² worship of Kali, our Mother and of Sri Krishna of Vrindavan⁴³, our soul's Paramour. Here indeed lies his chief claim to rank with Valmiki⁴⁴ and Vyasa as one of our three national poets, in that he gathered the mind-life of the nation into his poetry at a great and critical moment and helped it forward into the groove down which it must henceforth run.

This method is applied⁴⁵ with conspicuous beauty and success in the Urvasie. The Apsaras⁴⁶ are the most beautiful and romantic conception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky Ocean, robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment⁴⁷, waking melody from a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformed the world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash and gleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beauty of the sky; they are the light of sunrise and sunset and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of the soul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through his lines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor seeking a form in the⁴⁸ marble; for the joy of their embrace the hero flings his life into the rushing torrent of battle; the sage, musing upon God, sees the shining of their limbs and falls from his white ideal. The delight of life, the beauty of things, the attraction of sensuous beauty, this is what the mystic and romantic side of the Hindu temperament strove to express in the Apsara⁴⁹. The original meaning is everywhere felt as a shining background, but most in the older allegories, especially the strange and romantic legend of Pururavas⁵⁰ as we first have it in the Brahmanas and the Vishnoupurana⁵¹.

But then came in the materialistic side of the Hindu mind and desired some familiar term, the earthlier the better, in which to phrase its romantic conception: this was found in the Hetaira. The class of Hetairae was as recognised⁵² an element in the Hindu⁵³ society as in the Greek⁵⁴, but it does not appear to have exercised quite so large an influence in⁵⁵ social life. As in the Greek counterpart they were a specially learned and accomplished class of women, but their superiority over ladies of good families was not so pronounced; for in ancient India previous to the Mahomedan episode respectable women were not mere ignorant housewives like the Athenian ladies, but often they were⁵⁶ educated though not in a formal manner; that is to say, they went through no systematic training such as men had, but parents were always expected to impart general culture and accomplishments to them by private tuition at home; singing, music, dancing and to some extent painting were the ordinary accomplishments. General knowledge of morality and Scripture-tradition⁵⁷ was imperative and sometimes the girls of high-born, wealthy or learned families received special instruction in philosophy or mathematics. Some indeed seem to have pursued a life of philosophic learning either as virgins or widows; but such instances were in pre-Buddhistic times very rare. The normal Hindu feeling has always been that the sphere of woman is in the home and her life incomplete unless merged in her husband's. In any case, the majority of the kulavadhus⁵⁸, women of respectable families, could hardly be more than amateurs in the arts and sciences, whereas with the Hetairae (Ganikas⁵⁹) such accomplishments were pursued and mastered as a profession. Hence beside their ordinary occupation of singing and dancing in the temples and on great public occasions such as coronations and holy days, they often commanded the irregular affections of high-born or wealthy men who led openly a double life at home with the wife, outside with the Hetaira. As a class, they held no mean place in society; for they must not be confused with the strolling actor or mountebank caste who were a proverb for their vileness of morals. Many of them, no doubt, as will inevitably happen when the restraints of society are not recognized, led loose, immoral and sensual lives; in such a class Lais and Phryne must be as common as Aspasia. Nevertheless the higher and intellectual element seems to have prevailed; those who arrogated freedom in their sexual relations but were not prostitutes are admirably portrayed in Vasantasena⁶⁰ of the Toy Cart, a beautiful melodrama drawn straight from the life; like her they often exchanged, with the consent of their lover's family, the unveiled face of the Hetaira for the seclusion of the wife. This class both in its higher and lower type lasted late into the present century, both⁶¹ are now under the auspices of western civilisation almost entirely replaced by a growing class of professional prostitutes, an inevitable consummation which it seems hardly worth while to dub social reform and accelerate by an active crusade.

The Apsaras⁶² then are the divine Hetairae of Paradise, beautiful singers and actresses whose beauty and art relieve the arduous and world-long struggle of the Gods against the forces that tend towards disruption by⁶³ the Titans who would restore Matter to its original atomic condition or of dissolution by the sages and hermits who would make phenomena dissolve prematurely into the One who is above phenomena. They rose from the Ocean, says Valmiki⁶⁴, seeking who should choose them as brides, but neither the Gods nor the Titans accepted them, therefore are they said to be common or universal.

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.: uncertain beings seen