Shakespeare's Vision of Life and Indian Thought

Shakespeare’s vision on life in the light of Indian thought is both a challenging and intriguing title for a short article attempt. For neither Shakespeare’s vision of life, if any, nor Indian thought, lends itself to any facile definition or description. In the first place, it is doubtful if Shakespeare set out to present an integrated vision of life in his comedies and tragedies, even if we left out the histories, as chronicles, with no such intellectual or spiritual ambition behind them. In fact Bradley himself starts his first lecture on the substance of Shakespearean Tragedy with the poser “What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented by Shakespeare” and immediately proceeds to answer, that by that it is not implied that Shakespeare set himself to reflect on the tragic aspects of life, that he framed a tragic conception, and still less, like Aristotle or Corneille, he had a theory of the kind of poetry called Tragedy. We cannot be sure that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished convictions on ultimate questions or even that he had any. He was first and foremost a dramatic artist who freely, borrowed his material from many a source, though what he made out of the borrowings was a perfect work of art. The complexity of his material can be seen in his tragedies as well as comedies. Talking of his tragedies Prof. Srinivasa Iyengar, the well known Shakespearean scholar, says “they are a vast continent, jungle-like in their complexity and range with royal oaks reaching up to the sky, seductive but deceptive pools here and there, forest fires raging in inimitable fury, wild beasts roaming, tigers and lambs thrown together into the same incalculable scheme of life.” To sort out a vision of life from this kaleidoscopic material and correlate it with the basic strains of Indian thought is a difficult enough task but even if we did succeed in arriving at some conclusions, it would represent only one aspect of life, namely, the tragic aspect and not the whole of life. We cannot arrive at a total conception of Shakespeare’s vision of life from his tragedies exclusively as for instance we can to some extent comprehend Kalidasa’s way of looking at things from any one of his important works like the Abhijnana Sakuntala or Raahuvamsa. Let us, therefore, have a brief glance at the world of Shakespeare’s comedies also. Even though the comedies have received far less scholarly attention than the intellectually more fashionable tragedies, nevertheless, they constitute an integral part of Shakespeare’s genius and reputation as a dramatist. Without the comedies our understanding of Shakespeare would be sadly incomplete. The world of the comedies, despite the jungles there also, is not so terrifying as that of the tragedies with their gigantic oaks, forest fires, seductive pools and man-eaters, as observed earlier, but they are, on a different plane, equally complex and often confusing. Anything may happen and many things do happen in the towns and jungles of the comedies. In the first place, few of them are identifiable in point of space or time and they are peopled with both fairies and mortals jostling cheek by jowl with one another. The mortals range from banished dukes to daily labourers all in such a highly curious mental state as to draw the derisive but probably deserved comment from Puck “What fools these mortals be.” Here also it looks, at least on the surface of things, as if Shakespeare made it his main business as a dramatist to entertain though not through sheer frivolity and he did not consciously project any comic vision of life as for instance Ben Jonson, his great contemporary, attempted to do.

Equally difficult is the attempt to define or describe what constitutes the quintessence of Indian thought. It resists classification into any scheme of bloodless categories. So protean has been its character from the earliest Upanishadic teachers down to more recent mystics, philosophers and saints like Kabir, Paramahamsa, Ramana, Aurobindo, Vivekananda, Tagore and a Karma Yogi like Gandhi. If we turn to Indian literary tradition, we find here again that tragedy as a form has been ruled out. In the whole realm of Sanskrit drama there is no tragedy in the Western sense of the term except probably the stray play Urubhangaattributed to Bhasa. But this does not mean that the Indian mind was either ignorant of, or had deliberately buried its head ostrichlike, and was blind to the tragic aspect of life. A play like Sakuntalafor instance has a great deal of the tragic element in it though it is not a tragedy in the Aristotelian or Shakespearean sense. However, one fundamental postulate of Indian thought despite its otherwise complex skein is the recognition of Dharma or the moral order and that is amply reflected in its religious, philosophical, ethical and literary creations. This moral order so basic to Indian thought can be seen as the constant undercurrent in the plays of Shakespeare also whether they are comedies or tragedies. Whether Shakespeare consciously projected this moral order into his plays, we are not, as already observed, certain, but beneath the complexity of character and action in both the tragedies and comedies, there is, to the discerning reader or spectator of Shakespeare’s plays, this unmistakable moral order. In both the comedies and tragedies ultimately, it is Truth, Goodness and Beauty that triumph, though a great deal of it is crushed in the process. It is probably this universal element in Shakespeare’s plays that has exercised such a fascinating appeal to the Indian mind ever since it came into contact with Western literature and thought. The appeal in the case of Shakespeare was not merely literary as in the case of many other great writers like Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Milton, Keats and a host of others but deeply spiritual and philosophical. That is because we see in the plays of Shakespeare beyond the tomfoolery of the comedies and the purely macabre happenings in the tragedies, a deep affirmation of the values which constitute the warp and woof of Indian thought through the ages. It is probably this affinity between Indian and Western thought, that can explain the spell that a play like Sakuntala, which represents not only Kalidasa at his maturest but also Indian thought at its most comprehensive, has cast on some of the greatest minds of the West like Goethe, Max Muller and Monier Williams. This is true of all the classics of the world. For instance, in his lecture to the Virgil Society on ‘What is a Classic’, T. S. Eliot places the strongest emphasis on the universality of a classic. Apart from other character­istics like maturity of mind, language, manners and civilisation, a classic must have, according to Eliot, an amplitude and a catholicity extending far beyond not only its times but also its national frontiers. It must have a deep significance also for another civilisation, however divided and distant it may be by space and time. Shakespeare is definitely a classic even by the hedging definition that Eliot lays down and that is the secret and significance of his appeal to Indian thought.1

In his comedies as well as tragedies, there is ethical seriousness. In the comedies there may be the occasional spectacle of a Titania doting in the arms of an ass or the lovers running after wrong quarries under the dominating influence of a love portion but ultimately it is married love that is exalted and enthroned, even as in Sakuntala, it is married love and the sanctity of the family that eventually triumph. In the tragedies it appears on a superficial view that there is a great deal of senseless waste of all that we cherish, namely, the death of a Cordelia or a Desdemona or a Hamlet but on deeper reflection they are triumphant vindications of rightness, wholeness, beauty and strength. Cordelia may have to die in order to prove the hollowness of Regan and Goneril; and Desdemona’s death neutralises the fabrications of Iago. As Prof. Iyengar has said “Tragedy thus involves not the seeming end but the intuition of the conclusion yet to be concluded.” It is this which brings Shakespeare so close to Indian thought that he is as much an integral part of the Indian intellectual apparatus as Valmiki, Bhasa, Kalidasa or Bhavabhuti.