Abhijnanashakuntalam

01Kalidasa

Kalidasa wrote seven works that have come down: three plays, Malavikagnimitram, Vikramorvashiyam and Shakuntalam; two mahakavyas, Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava; and the shorter Meghaduta and Ritusamhara. He says almost nothing of himself. Tradition makes him one of the nine gems at the court of Vikramaditya in Ujjain, and tells that he began as a simple man married by a trick to a learned princess, and that Devi Kali’s grace made him a poet, so that he took the name Kali-dasa, servant of Kali. His love of Ujjain and the land of Malwa shows on every page he wrote.

02The katha and the ring

Kalidasa took the katha from the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata and added the two things everyone now remembers: Durvasa’s curse and the ring. Lost in thought of her husband, Shakuntala fails to greet the short-tempered sage, who curses that the one she thinks of will forget her. Her friends plead, and he softens it: a token of recognition will undo it. The ring Dushyanta gave her slips from her finger at Shachi tirtha on the way to court. The play’s title means ‘Shakuntala recognised by a token’, and the token is that ring.

03The first act

The play opens with a nandi, a benediction to Shiva in his eight visible forms: water, fire, the sacrificer, the sun and moon, space, earth and air. Then King Dushyanta comes on in his chariot, chasing a black buck, and the audience is made to see the speed: the deer looks back over its shoulder, half-chewed grass falls from its mouth. Hermits stop him; this is an ashram deer. He goes into Kanva’s ashram on foot, out of respect, and from behind the trees sees three girls watering the plants. A bee buzzes round Shakuntala’s face, she cries out, and the king steps forward to rescue her. Their eyes meet, and the play has begun.

04The fourth act

Sanskrit critics have long said that the fourth act is the best of the play, and its farewell the best of the act. Shakuntala leaves the ashram for her husband’s house. The deer she raised tugs at her hem. The creepers she watered seem to shed leaves like tears, and the peahens stop dancing. Kanva, an ascetic who has given up the world, finds his throat choked at sending away a daughter, and wonders how much worse it must be for a householder. He asks the trees of the grove to give her leave, since she would never drink water before they had been watered. Generations of Indian fathers at their daughters’ vidai have recognised themselves in him.

05Forgetting, and the fisherman

In the fifth act the hermits bring Shakuntala, now with child, to Dushyanta’s court. Under the curse he does not know her, and he speaks with a king’s cold courtesy. She reaches for the ring and finds her finger bare. Her companions leave her, and as she stands weeping a radiance in a woman’s form comes down and carries her away. In the sixth act the city guards drag in a fisherman who has been found selling a royal ring taken from the belly of a carp. The moment the king sees it, memory floods back. He gives up the spring festival, paints her portrait and talks to it, until Indra’s charioteer Matali comes to call him to war against the asuras.

06Hemakuta and the boy with the lion cub

Returning from Indra’s heaven, the king’s chariot comes down on Hemakuta, where Maharshi Maricha, Kashyapa, lives in tapas with Aditi. There he sees a small boy forcing open a lion cub’s mouth to count its teeth, while two ascetic women try to stop him. The boy wears a protective herb on his wrist which, they say, turns into a serpent if anyone but his mother or father touches it. It has fallen; the king picks it up, and nothing happens. Shakuntala comes in, pale, in the grey clothes of a woman waiting for her husband. Maricha explains the curse, blesses them, and foretells that the boy, Sarvadamana, will rule the earth as Bharata.

07Sanskrit, Prakrit and the stage

The play is a nataka in seven acts, the highest form of Sanskrit drama, with a hero of royal birth and a story drawn from Itihasa. After the nandi, the sutradhara and an actress open with a prologue praising the summer and announcing the play. The king, the sages and the high-born men speak Sanskrit; Shakuntala, her friends and the jester Madhavya speak Prakrit, Shauraseni in prose and Maharashtri in song, and the fisherman and the city guards speak Magadhi. Its ruling rasa is shringara, love, in union and in separation, with karuna rising in the fourth and fifth acts. An old saying runs: of poetry, drama is the loveliest; of drama, Shakuntala.

08Four recensions

The play has come down in four recensions, Bengali, Devanagari, Kashmiri and South Indian, which differ in length and in many verses; the Bengali is the longest. Raghavabhatta’s commentary, the Arthadyotanika, is the one most read with the Devanagari text, and M. R. Kale’s school edition with notes, first printed in 1898, has taught generations of Indian students. In Sanskrit pathashalas the play is still read as the model of how to write a scene, and teachers ask students to learn the verses of the fourth act by heart.

09From Ujjain to Weimar

In 1789 William Jones published an English translation from Calcutta, and within two years Georg Forster had put it into German. Goethe read it and wrote a short verse saying that if you would name heaven and earth in one word, he names Shakuntala; the prologue in the theatre that opens his Faust follows Kalidasa’s. In India the play has never left the stage. Annasaheb Kirloskar’s Marathi Sangeet Shakuntal of 1880 began the Marathi musical theatre, V. Shantaram filmed it in 1943, and Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings of Shakuntala writing to the king on a lotus leaf hang in countless homes as prints.

What it contains

1. 1
   Act 1: the hunt प्रथमोऽङ्कः

   After the nandi and prologue, Dushyanta, hunting near the Malini, is stopped from killing an ashram deer and enters Kanva’s ashram. He sees Shakuntala watering the trees with her friends Anasuya and Priyamvada, rescues her from a bee, and learns she is the daughter of the sage Vishvamitra and the apsara Menaka, raised by Kanva.

2. 2
   Act 2: the king stays द्वितीयोऽङ्कः

   The lovesick king calls off the hunt and stays near the ashram on the pretext of guarding the rishis’ yajnas from rakshasas. He confides in the jester Madhavya, then sends him back to the capital, telling him it was all a joke.

3. 3
   Act 3: the lotus-leaf letter तृतीयोऽङ्कः

   Shakuntala, pining in the heat, writes a love verse to the king on a lotus leaf with her fingernail. He has been listening; they meet in the bower and give their hearts, and the gandharva marriage, by mutual consent, follows.

4. 4
   Act 4: the curse and the farewell चतुर्थोऽङ्कः

   The king returns to his capital, promising to send for her. Durvasa’s curse falls. Kanva returns, learns of the marriage from a voice from the sky, blesses it, gives her his counsel for married life and sends her to her husband in the most famous farewell in Sanskrit.

5. 5
   Act 5: the rejection पञ्चमोऽङ्कः

   At court the king does not know her. Without the ring she cannot prove the marriage, Kanva’s disciples leave her to her husband, and a radiance in a woman’s form carries her away to the sky.

6. 6
   Act 6: the ring found षष्ठोऽङ्कः

   A fisherman finds the ring in a fish; memory floods back and the king is consumed by remorse, cancelling the spring festival and grieving before her portrait. Indra’s charioteer Matali calls him to fight the asuras.

7. 7
   Act 7: reunion at Hemakuta सप्तमोऽङ्कः

   Returning from heaven, the king finds a fearless boy playing with a lion cub in Maharshi Maricha’s ashram on Hemakuta. The protective herb proves him the boy’s father, Shakuntala is restored to him, and Maricha blesses the family and the future Bharata.

Famous verses

या सृष्टिः स्रष्टुराद्या वहति विधिहुतं या हविर्या च होत्री ये द्वे कालं विधत्तः श्रुतिविषयगुणा या स्थिता व्याप्य विश्वम् । यामाहुः सर्वबीजप्रकृतिरिति यया प्राणिनः प्राणवन्तः प्रत्यक्षाभिः प्रपन्नस्तनुभिरवतु वस्ताभिरष्टाभिरीशः ॥

May the Lord protect you through his eight visible forms: the water, first creation of the Creator; the fire that carries the offering made by rule; the sacrificer; the two that measure time, sun and moon; space, whose quality is sound, pervading all; the earth, called the source of all seeds; and the air by which living beings breathe.Abhijnanashakuntalam 1.1 (the nandi)

यास्यत्यद्य शकुन्तलेति हृदयं संस्पृष्टमुत्कण्ठया कण्ठः स्तम्भितबाष्पवृत्तिकलुषश्चिन्ताजडं दर्शनम् । वैक्लव्यं मम तावदीदृशमिदं स्नेहादरण्यौकसः पीड्यन्ते गृहिणः कथं नु तनयाविश्लेषदुःखैर्नवैः ॥

Shakuntala goes today, and my heart is touched with longing; my throat is choked with held-back tears, my sight dull with care. If such is the anguish of a forest-dweller from mere affection, how must householders suffer at the fresh pain of parting from a daughter?Abhijnanashakuntalam 4.6 (Kanva)

पातुं न प्रथमं व्यवस्यति जलं युष्मास्वपीतेषु या नादत्ते प्रियमण्डनापि भवतां स्नेहेन या पल्लवम् । आद्ये वः कुसुमप्रसूतिसमये यस्या भवत्युत्सवः सेयं याति शकुन्तला पतिगृहं सर्वैरनुज्ञायताम् ॥

She who would not think of drinking water before you had drunk, who, though she loved to adorn herself, would not pluck a leaf of yours out of affection, whose festival it was when you first came into flower: this Shakuntala goes to her husband’s house. Let all of you give her leave.Abhijnanashakuntalam 4.9 (Kanva to the trees of the grove)