Shakuntala

     When I was hired as an adjunct to teach a course called World Drama at a large and respectable university, I found that the anthology that had been in use, though indeed titled World Drama, contained nothing but European plays. I added a paperback of Chinese works from the Yuan Dynasty, and cautioned the students that I was not pretending to cover the territory promised by the course title, but only aimed to remind them of what was omitted.
     Such compromises are unavoidable. The reader who wishes truly to know literature, unrestricted by a single national tradition, must accept the impossibility of wholly realizing such an ambition. Though some scholars have achieved dazzling breadth in linguistic study, one can learn only a limited number of languages, especially considering the depth of knowledge required to handle aesthetic texts. Exploring the literary expanse, the curious will repeatedly encounter vistas startling and grand that reveal vast and previously unknown regions. [1]
     Without knowledge of Sanskrit or expertise in Indian literature in any language, I make bold to present a few comments on the comparison of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, generally considered one of the finest plays of ancient Sanskrit drama. I beg the same indulgence from the well-disposed reader offered by a professor who finds that the necessarily fresh readings of inexperienced students, while generally repeating the dullest old errors, occasionally offer a window to an illuminating insight.
     A striking contrast with European drama is the insistence of Indian playwrights on a happy ending. This contrast is particularly problematic for Westerners since a naïve prejudice favors tragedy as more serious. [2] This may be due to the fact that the drama in India remained under religious auspices while it was secularized in the European Renaissance. Optimistic conclusions may be an implied consequence of the deities’ mastery of human affairs, though such considerations did not ameliorate the Greeks sense of tragic horror or Christian claims of tragedy in the fall of Satan or the passion of Christ. One expects similarly positive outcomes from popular and mass culture, reassuring the audience that all is fundamentally right in their assumptions about the world, but Kalidasa’s theater was courtly.
     Though action does occur in the story, the primary focus of the play is clearly lyrical. Poems succeed poems, some of them almost set pieces that could stand alone. The work’s courtly character is clear from the fact that Kalidasa displays erudition in his familiarity not only with the great Indian epics – the plot is drawn from a passage in the Mahabharata – but also by his adherence to the conventions set forth in such theoretical authorities as the third century Natya Shastra attributed to Bharata Muni..
     The courtly performance setting, the artificiality of the form and the concentration on highly conventional forms of aesthetic refinement suggest affinities to the masque, though there are critical differences. The allegorical figures typical of the masque offer even less plot and character, substituting an extravagant fondness for spectacle. The slow pageantry of the masque inspires first of all the appreciation of beauty and secondly seeks to enact general truths, while in both theory and practice ancient Sanskrit drama is centered around emotional affect, called rasa. Though the word in older texts may be defined as “juice,” “essence,” or “taste,” by the time of the Natya Shastra, it means the “flavor” of a scene, conceived as eight or nine possibilities: love, hilarity, pathos (or disgust), anger, compassion, bravery, horror, and astonishment. [3] Later writers added the serenity of enlightenment.
     In the context of the Hindu (and Buddhist) philosophic system the intentional excitation of passion may seem incongruous. Yet according to the Natya Shastra drama arose as a fifth Veda with the same goals as the first four: to teach truth (I.14-16) for people in some measure seduced by their senses. (I.12, 108-9) Though in a sense the gods have nothing to do with drama (I.22), which occurs not in the divine realm but in “the three worlds” (I.106), its sacred character is affirmed by the fact that the first play was presented at a festival for Indra (I. 55) and that puja must be offered before performances. (I.125)
     Though plays are a mimicry of human actions (I. 111 ff.), plausibility is inconsequential. The author’s goal is to evoke from the audience a series of related “flavors,” [4] or emotions. Initially, the Western reader may wonder why, in a meditative system aimed at freeing individuals from passion and attachment, the intentional generation of such feelings would be desirable. Fiction in general and plays in particular may be considered a form of upaya or “skillful means” by which the consciousness tricks itself into greater enlightenment. [5]
     The dramatist seeks to involve the viewer in an encyclopedic range of the varieties of a given human passion, for Shakuntala the erotic, not simply to experience the emotions for their own sake, but as the basis for meditation. If one feels every variety of love in a wholly artificial situation, only to be returned in the end from the setting of the drama to the real world of the playhouse, the result should be a certain detachment from the erotic.
     In a comparable conflict between the claims of art and religion, St. Augustine laments his youthful attachment to reading fiction and watching tragedies, thus immersing himself in “false” suffering while ignoring his own sin and indeed the entire suffering world. To him such taste came to seem perverse. [6] For Augustine verbal beauty is justified only when it has the object of furthering salvation. In a similar way, the Indian sages admitted drama as a route to enlightenment.
     Even the specific mechanism in which plays serve wisdom differs little from India to Europe. Of course, in the first instance, the play should have some instructive theme. Beyond that however, plays are said to perform a sort of alchemical metamorphosis of human emotion, transmuting potentially destructive feelings into something redemptive.
     In Aristotelean tragedy, the viewer will experience the emotions of pity and fear, leading to a salutary catharsis. Critics have differed over whether this describes a purgation in the sense of clearing away the troublesome passions altogether, a sort of flushing out of feelings better done without, or some sort of heightening that replaces the limiting emotions of everyday life with a profounder, nobler, and wiser version that allows the play-goer to sustain life in a more enlightened manner after leaving the world of the stage.
     The same dilemma is present in ancient Sanskrit drama. If such entertainments are to serve as a “fifth Veda,” is the mechanism through the elimination of passion or its objectification? Is such emotional expense present in all humans? In what way does consciousness of one’s own emotional susceptibility lead toward enlightenment? The rasas have a long critical history of analysis by learned pandits, so I do not doubt that such questions have been investigated, but I am here concerned only with the most immediate comparisons.
     In any event it is clear that both Western and South Asian dramatic systems rely on emotions, the determining factor in human decision-making, often occluded by the desire to consider ourselves rational, as the dynamo for generating changes in consciousness. Both employ recognizable (if unlikely) “imitations” of human action, but operate in a world of assumed universals rather than the incidental particularities of an individual’s fate. Both make use of legendary material couched in rhetorically elaborate language to indicate the gap between their truth and that of mere everyday life.
     Kalidasa’s Shakuntala opens with a prologue with what seems like modern self-referentiality. After a pious Shaivite benediction the stage manager interrupts with a blustery “Enough of that!” to introduce a singer. Her song transports him with its beauty to the extent that he forgets the night’s production. In an analogous way the author hopes his audience will be transported by the imagined emotions of the play. The last lines of the prologue provide a transition to the action of the play with the reference to the deer leading the king to his destiny unawares. Thus, the song, the play as a whole, and, within the play, the deer all provide the “cunning means,” or upaya that abstracts the season individual from the mundane and allows access to a more sublime realization of reality. The audience is drawn by the beauty of the play as King Dushyanta is by Shakuntala’s. Through the paradoxical operation of art, the fictional, the artful, and the imaginative allows the consciousness to focus not on the inconsequential details that absorb our daily attention, but on the longer view, of which the horizon is liberation, enlightenment, or, as Kālidāsa would say, moksha.


1. For instance, oral literature, which dominated human culture for most of the history of our species, is still largely neglected or ceded to anthropologists, whose concern is not with the beauty of the texts they collect.

2. Thus Hollywood movies for decades adapted literary classics, both novels and plays, by making their ambiguous or unhappy endings into happy ones. Popular culture tends to affirm received ideas.

3. This system is further rationalized in the Natya Shastra which, with an almost scientific impulse toward economy, maintains that the comic rasa arises from erotic, the pathetic from the furious, the marvelous from the heroic, and the terrible from the odious. (I.39)

4. The rasas are specifically likened to tastes in cooking in I.31.

5. The term (and kaushalya “cleverness”) is more commonly associated with Buddhism, it is used in Hinduism as well and is relevant here.

6. See his Confessions (III, 1-4). Augustine argues that a fondness for tragedy cultivated an absurd “love of suffering.” Elaborating this idea Augustine uses the language of bondage and masochism, recalling tragic stories that "scratched" his soul and became "inflamed spots, pus, and repulsive sores" according to God's justice ("you beat me with heavy punishments"). The bishop did not apparently see any similar sado-masochistic aspect to meditation on the passion of Christ or ascetic practices.
Augustine did find a place for art if it could aid a soul toward salvation. In On Christian Doctrine, Bk. IV, ch 12 to engage the faculty of eloquence on the side of truth to combat those who employ it to further error.

7. Satya Shastra, I.108-9.