Forster on 'Meghasamdesa'

FORSTER ON ‘MEGHASAMDESA’

By K. VISWANATHAM, M.A.
(Reader, Andhra University)

“O Absence! what a torment wouldst thou prove
Were it not thy sour leisure gave Sweetlove
To entertain the time with thoughts of love,
Which time and thoughts so sweetly doth deceive...”
–SHAKESPEARE

“Love is a kind of chastity.”
–C. S. LEWIS.

In his charming and discursive Abinger Harvest, Forster has a section dealing with his Indian itinerary. Ujjain naturally reminds him of the Cloud Messenger, which is said to be as charming and ill-planned as his book. He has a disarming fling of sarcasm at the obliging nature of the Indian cloud, i.e., Kalidasa’s cloud. An English cloud would have gone without turning, turning to the right or the left, but this is an Indian cloud.

‘Meghasamdesa’ is one of the immortal lyrics of the world of love. At the beginning of the rainy season every year the poem like Nature herself gains fresh life and youth. It touches our hearts with the soft embraces of a cloud and burns us like the partner of a cloud. Every cloud imaginatively carries our missives to our loves, though not separated by anything than the drawing-room curtain. There is a moulting, a sloughing, a dropping of the pod or the husk; love breaks through the clod, our life, and shakes hands with the cloud. Even the happy man, with his mistress clinging round his neck like a pendant, becomes restless and the plight of estranged lovers is misery:

Meghaloke bhavati sukhinopyanyatha chittavrittih
Kanthaslesha pranayini jane kim punar durasamsthe.

The poem touches us with cool fingers and consumes us with burning anguish. It is ever fresh like a bride jewelled with youth, unageing and draped in invincible temptation. We are consumed as Hercules was on Mt. Oeta and translated into the million-pleasured breast of eager-eyed expectant Love on beds of asphodel. We are fondled on the white breasts of amour and smitten by the honeyed rose of bride-desire. Desires deep, warm, dark envelop us. We are wafted on plangent thoughts as Psyche or Endymion was by the winds, or recklessly ecstasied by rati as Europa was by the bull or Hero by Leander.

So acute and delightful a critic as the author of The Aspects of the Novel could not have made the remarks in all seriousness. Does Forster mean seriously that Kalidasa’s cloud should have slid like a flying saucer or a jet? The Indian cloud does not commit the mistakes of the foreign tourists who see the greatest number of places in the shortest time possible and leave the justest verdict behind them–and below common sense, for instance, Beverley Nichols. Kalidasa’s cloud is a leisurely cloud. Even from a strictly scientific point of view it is a monsoon cloud, labouring up the savannahs of the blue. The poet himself has glanced at a more sensible objection in

Kamartah prakrtikrupanah chetana chetaneshu.

“The distracted lover falls to note the distinction between the inanimate and the animate. How foolish of the Yaksha to choose the cloud as the mail runner!” The poet forestalls that censure. Further if the Indian cloud does not scud, it is because it has to be bribed by the wayside delights to carry the message. Kalidasa’s cloud is an adolescent cloud, married of course, but not turning away from variety in love’s plenty. And he is bribed or tipped appropriately. After all, the cloud carrying the message is a peg for the poet to hang his fancies on, and it is a gentleman’s agreement between the poet and the reader that the postulates are never questioned. We can question ‘The Midsummer Night’s Dream’ everywhere; we can question the opening scene in ‘King Lear’ and they dissolve like Lamia. As it is, we are happy about the linguistic windfall that it was an Indian cloud, digressing, leisurely, amatory and trustworthy.

The Abinger Harvest may be ill-planned; the Meghaduta is not. Abercrombie finds in the observation of Manzoni the final criterion of plot. Plot is the gesture of the spirit, not a pattern artificially faked, nor is it like a pre-fabricated house. Ryder finds the plot slight and simple. The sense of proportion appears, he says, unfortunate to a Western critic. But if Ryder took the trouble, he would have noticed the kind of austerity and economy that we find in a play of Ibsen. What has happened is suggested and the poet’s powers are bent to the task of delineating, the rich ooze of affections in separation. The plot of the poem evolves from the Yaksha’s dereliction of duty and the Master’s anger and curse, through the message, to the revocation, the retrenchment of the curse and the promise of reunion, more joy-giving than the reunion itself.

The beginning-middle-end formulae cannot cover the poem. The poem is a new genre–it is a poetical travel book. It is brier but bountiful in poetry. Action need not necessarily mean the meeting of two lovers; the journey of the affections of the lovers towards one another isalso action. Meghasamdesa is not strictly a Kavya. The Yaksha’s plangency colours everything in the poem and gives it a unity–the unity of sentiment, not that of plot. The plot is there for the sentiment; sabbath is made for man. The unity of sentiment is, as Eliot observes, a more binding factor than unity of plot.

A work like the Meghaduta, which seems to grow in power and appeal fromgeneration to generation, cannot be like fragments of satisfying sentiment; cannot be ill-planned. Then it could not satisfy the imagination. Kalidasa here is the poet of the plot-curse-expiation-reunion. How otherwise can we explain the legion of Messenger Kavyas spilled from the womb of Kalidasa’s cloud? The pragmatic test deserves some respect. The totality of impression is completely satisfying. Nature itself, says Max Beerbohm, is an unashamed formalist, but Nature is not in uniform or livery.

The poem deals with love in severance. The cloud machinery is an ingenious and charming peg for the artist (Yaksha) for the description of places or of his wife. The argument of the poem is the longing and anguish of a lover separated from his love in the rainy season. As the poet most provokingly puts it,

Kanthaslesha....

The poem will always appeal to youth away from a beloved. The singing, lingering mandakranta is opulent and ample for the long-drawn out plangency of longing in separation. The tenderest of loves is touched in the most tender manner. It is convenient to imagine that Kalidasa poured into the slow tinkling bride–rich bosom of mandakranta–therich sighing of his first separation (Cf. II-33, 53). The reunion does not so much spoil as spill the Vipralambha Sringara. There is not a purer emotion and none but the Samskrit poet treats it in a delicater way; and mandakrantra sets its seal on it. The grief isso rich and satisfying that love in separation isfiner than love in union.

The poem is in two parts: the first sarga is an Airways Guide; the second part is a Town Guide. The levels of understanding and appeal are many. The structure of the poem, the mandakranta, the marvellous autonomy of each sloka can be tasted by a fine and trained intelligence. The poem is a charming guide book for one who wants to ‘helicop’ from Ramagiri to Alaka which is the dream world of young lovers with unfading moonlight, fadeless blooms of all seasons and unageing youth without the anguish of separation. Kalidasa has sensuously advertised the juicy refinements of towns like Ujjaini, the Miami Beach of India in his day, and all the starved emotions of the Yaksha put on a colour and resonate through his appeal to the cloud to taste with his lightning eyes the sap of sophisticated youth in urban feminity. The whole Nature is one vast wifehood and tempting womanliness. The Nirvindhya with her melodious zone of rippling birds, meandering with charming unsteadiness, shows her eddying navel to the cloud lover. The cloud is dark as the nipple of a woman. The city of Alaka is a woman on the thigh of Kailasa and the leaping Ganges is her slipping dress. The Sun-lover wipes off the dew-tears of the Nalini flower anguished at his straying to other loves. What a sensual delight in the side-long looks of love to the cloud who is requested to light the path of the abhisarikas with his lightning. What charming consideration on the part of the Yaksha to his friend’s wife, the lightning. There is delightful tenderness in the Yaksha’s advice that the cloud should never abandon his slim-shining wife. There is a vast conspiracy in Nature to connive at love’s excesses. The chandrakanta stones shedding large dews at the touch of the moon remove the exhaustion of the ladies smothered in their lovers’ arms. The 21st stanza in the 2nd part should be a perfume of praise to any wife like Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’. The strength of the marriage bond is felt in the 25th. The wife weeps and wets the strings of the veena on her indifferent lap attempting to thrum his name into a song. In the 33rd he attempts in a spirit of fine humility to look at himself from another’s point of view. The stanzas that describe the pathos of the wife, the ‘grass’ widow are the most tenderly pencilled sketches of a pining woman. They show not so much the strength of her as his love. Happy the man with such a wife and happier to be separated from her for a time. Separation, as Shaw suggests in a short story, is Medea’s cauldron which purges a wife of staleness and familiarity and re-incarnates her into a young Galatea!

Complete reciprocation without consummation, Prof. Kuppuswami Sastri points out, is the supreme moment in spiritual love. The cloud is appealed to not to disturb the Yaksha’s wife, for in her sleep it is quite possible she may be enjoying union with her lord. The forest gods seeing his wide-stretched arms in sleep for his lady’s bosom hang their tear-drops on the fluttering eyelids of the trees. One can gambol with pleasure in such sorrow!

This small account should not mislead us into thinking that the poet is a sensual one. Only one example will suffice to show the unexcelled delicacy and purity of Kalidasa. We can cite the modest breaking-off of the narration of Menaka’s love in Sakuntalam. And students of Rasa know that Sringara is essentially spiritual as conceived by Indians and in Indian culture.

The barge-like motion of the mandakranta on the full tide of emotion itself shows the maturity of the poet. The plangent harmonies swell and die and swell again on the ear. The mandakranta is the metrical clock of Vipralambha Sringara; it is as lingering and long-drawn out as the lover’s sigh. Its counterpart in English is the Spenserian stanza. The versicoloured vignettes–gayer than the rainbow and as brightly variegated, softer than sorrow and as persuasive–pass and repass before eager eyes and haunt us like a cataract. Each stanza is a graceful swan taking the flood with her swarthy webs and singing a sweet carol. The whole poem is perfect chrysolite.

One cannot think of a richer expression to sum up Meghaduta than Keats’ not-easily improved remark on the Midsummer Night’s Dream’: ‘It is a piece of profound verdure’. Meghaduta of Kalidasa is a piece of profound verdure. ‘Profound verdure’ seems to put the girdle round Kalidasa’s achievement in Meghaduta. Kalidasa is the singer of Sringara, untainted by kama, and contributory to dharma; is the metrist of mandakranta; is the poet of nature; the facile princeps of simile–that has been the tribute paid by sahridayas from ancient times.

Kalidasa understood in the 5th century what Europe did not learn until the 19th and even now comprehends only imperfectly: that the world was not made for man, that man reaches his full stature only as he realises the dignity and worth of life that is not human. The delicate reminder to Dushyanta by Sakuntala of the pet fawn drinking out of her cupped hands and turning away from his reminds one of Wordsworth’s Aslumber did my Spirit seal:

She shall be sportive as the fawn
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things

The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend.

The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her...
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face

And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell...

If still Forster thinks that Meghasamdesa is ill-planned, he is right just as he will be right if he says that the last plays of Shakespeare are ill-planned. But this ‘rightness’ is as uncritical as righteousness; it does not explain the bridging of the human and the divine in the last plays, does not explain the miracle of poetry that Meghasamdesa is. Common sense is not valid here the word ‘ill-planned’ is as vile as the word ‘nice’ used by a lady about the Niagara Falls. Nothing is happier or apter than the comment of Patrick Crutwell on the irrationality and inadequacy of common sense when probing the inclusiveness of poets: ‘Disconcerting, this is often, to critical but inelastic admirers, who are apt (the besetting sin of critics) to stand and label while creators go on their illogical way.’ (The Shakesperian Moment, p. 99) Has not Eliot pontificated that Hamlet is an artistic failure? It is better to botch up an artistic failure which is read and enjoyed by generations of readers than compose a dead perfection which is admired from a distance. We should understand that unity of Plot is one of several things, that unity of Interest, unity of Temper, unity of Sentiment, etc., are greater than unity of Plan.