Shakespeare and Kalidasa

KUM. ADARSH BALA
M. A. (Sanskrit, Hindi, English), B. Ed.

“Shakespeare is the Kalidasa of England and Kalidasa is the Shakespeare of India” is a well-known and popular dictum. Englishmen regard Shakespeare as the greatest poet and dramatist the world has ever produced; Indians similarly pay the same compliment to Kalidasa. Indeed, both Shakespeare and Kalidasa are poets of the world. Although they belong to different times and nationalities, they are for all time and universal. However, we cannot afford to ignore the fact that the Bard of Ujjain lived eleven hundred years before the birth of the Bard of Avon.

Shakespeare thoroughly understood the human heart and infused life into the figures of men and women long passed away. They appear before us real as we watch their making love, making war, making their destiny in life. His philosophy of life cannot be gathered up from the study of a single play or even a few plays. They naturally group themselves into certain periods of his mental development. The plays of one group eventually grow into those of another. It is only after considering, his plays as a whole with special reference to each group as affecting one another that anything like a philosophy of life can be drawn from his writings.

In this context, his historical plays come first and go together. In those dramas, the real hero is England. They overflow with his intense feeling of patriotism and make an excellent handbook of English history. To him there is no land like England as is clear from the following lines:

“This royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise.”
(Richard II, II, i)

Of a piece with this loud extravaganza is his loud boast that,

“This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.”
(King John, V, i)

His historical plays have six full length portraits of the kings of England–portraits of kingly weakness such as in King John, Richard II and Henry VI; portraits of kingly strength such as in Henry IV, Henry V and Richard III. Shakespeare’s highest ideal of a king reaches in Henry V. There is high pitched portraiture of that king:

Hear him but reason in divinity,
And, all-admiring, with an inward wish
You would desire the king were made a prelate:
Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs
You would say, it hath been all-in-all his study:
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle render’d you in music:
Turn him to any cause of policy,
The guardian knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter.”

Hence Schlegel, the German critic, is fully justified when he calls these plays as “a historical heroic poem in the dramatic form of which the several plays constitute the rhapsodies.”

Underneath all his poetic fervour and extravagance, however, Shakespeare has unconsciously but with great truth hit on England as “this seat of Mars”. No doubt, he praises peace; but his love of war lets him down. He deeply deplores “The Weak piping times of peace.” However, reconciled to peace Shakespeare would have it that:

“Peace itself should not dull a kingdom
But defence, musters, preparations
Should be maintained, assembled and collected
As it were a war in preparation”.
(Henry IV, II, iv)

In this passage a modern reader cannot help recalling quite a similarity to the modern increase of armaments merely as a defensive measure in order to prevent war and not to prepare for it. Shakespeare raises a question of the relative importance of war and peace and asks:

“Shall we throwaway our coats of steel
And wrap our bodies in black mourning-gowns
Numbering our Ave-Maries with our beads?
Or shall we on the helmets of our foes
Tell our devotion with revengeful arms?”
(Henry Part III, II, i)

Here is his direct answer put into the mouth of his ideal King Henry V:

When the blast of war blows in our ears
Then imitate the action of the tiger
Stiffen sinews, summon up the blood,” etc., etc., and let
“the cannons have their bowels full of wrath.”

His historical plays are full

Of sallies and retires; of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets:
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin;
Of prisoners’ ransom, and of soldiers slain.”

What a sharp contrast, this unrelenting war-spirit to the perpetual peace–Spirit of the ideal Indian king depicted by Kalidasa.

Anyway, in his historical plays, Shakespeare had his limitations of stern historical facts which he could not alter substantially. In the comedies and tragedies of the second group he never bothered about tradition. He largely borrowed from Plutarch or other sources and recast them suiting his own purpose such as hot passion in “Antony and Cleopatra”; revenge in “Hamlet”, ambition in “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar”; jealousy in “Othello”; senility and filial ingratitude in “King Lear” and so on. In Lear, Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth which represent the acume of tragic intensity, Shakespeare deftly weaves the passions of men and women in different situations of life. But the blood stain of his historical plays repeats itself in his tragedies in lavish intensity. Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Antony and Cleopatra reek in blood–images blood “With tomb not enough to inter the stain.” The hero in Macbeth stands for a disloyal General who murdered a good king and reigned in cruelty. He really felt that his bloody hand would “multitudinous seas incarnadine,” though his wife could at first lightly dismiss the idea with the ready remark “a little water clears us of this deed.” She had, however, no escape from the ever-haunting dread that made her exclaim, “All the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten this little hand.”

Many of his women are mannish, apart from their being dressed in men’s clothes–Julia, in “Two Gentlemen of Verona”; Portia, Jissica and Nerissa in “The Merchant of Venice”; Rosalind in “As You Like It”; Viola in the “Twelfth Night”; and Imogen in “Cymbeline”. And all his women are more or less misjudged–Desdemona, Juliet, Hermiona, Imogen, etc. In spite of all that, his women are mostly types of beauty. Miranda stands head and shoulders above them all as Shakespeare’s, type of perfection, “so perfect and so peerless created of everything best”–(Tempest III, i) a type that Kalidasa has almost in the very same language discovered and depicted in Shakuntala who beats Miranda both in her loveliness and her forgiving character. Truly has Shakespeare hold forth:

“Tis beauty that oft doth make them proud
Tis virtue that makes them most admired
Tis modesty that makes them seem divine.”

This description is in the vein of Kalidasa.

Shakespeare’s women are mostly of the earth, earthly. This idea of woman as woman is contained in his famous lines:

“She is beautiful and therefore to be wooed,
She is woman and therefore to be won.”

Of the sensual Cleopatra he says thatwhile

“The other women clog the appetites they feed
She makes hungry where most she satisfies.”

The taint of flesh reaches its climax in Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother.

“Frailty! thy name is woman,” as the ideal of motherhood in Gertrude shocks Indian decorum and discipline.

However, free and self-willed Shakespeare’s women are, strangely enough, he approaches the Hindu ideal of wifehood as depicted by Kalidasa:

“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land.”
(Taming of the Shrew)

As regards Shakespeare’s heroes Brutus is his ideal man. “The elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world–this was a man.” Yet a man with his unjustifiable taint of his hand against his best friend and the noblest Roman of the time. Coriolanus is another such character. He hated the people whose breath was to him “as the reek of the rotten few”, and whose love counted only “as the dead carcasses of the unburied man that do corrupt the air”, yet Shakespeare would hold up that “his nature is too noble for the world”. This gap between Shakespeare’s aesthetic and ethical conceptions occurs too often, for instance, he remains silent on the undeserving suffering of Cordelia, Kent in “Lear”, Friar Lawrence in “Romeo And Juliet”, Horatio in “Hamlet”, Cassio in “Othello”, Antenio in “Merchant of Venice” are but moral dummies exposed to the blows and buffets of the world. The tragic intensity reached thus in the second group of plays leaves him adrift without any chart or map of life.

In the third group comes “Pericles”; “Henry VII”, “Cymbeline”, “Winter’s Tale”; and “The Tempest”. They are full of imaginative characters and supernatural agencies. The tragic intensity ceases and “lets in new light through chinks that time has made.” In those plays there is no division in the water-tight compartments between tragedy and comedy. They all end happily though interwoven with very tragic incidents. “Cymbeline is called a tragedy, but it is more tragic than Winter’s Tale”. Shakespeare believes that life is a mixtureof sorrow and joy. He endeavours to reconcile between tragedy and comedy in life. Imogen is Desdemona reshaped and refined; Othello isremoulded into the “Winter’s Tale” and “Lear” is recast in “Cymbeline.” All these plays are too full of sea and shipwreck. Shakespeare tries “to fetch happiness to shore out of shipwreck” as inenuously made by Quiller Couch.

Shakespeare lacked a consistent philosophy. “The Tempest” is the last of his plays wherein he reaches the highest in his philosophy of life. Prospero represents, on the intellectual side, wisdom and love of knowledge. He stands on the moral side for unselfishness and devotion to duty. His brother Antonio is a type of worldliness and treachery, Alanso represents subtlety; Gonzalo typifies commonsense; Caliban is gross and earthly. Miranda is Shakespeare’s perfect woman, and Shakespeare’s philosophy does not go far. There mayor may not be another world. For him this world is more important than any other world. Desdemona’s and Cordelia’s will not be the last world. They are transformed intoMarinas, Perditas and Mirandas.

“The sands are numbered that make up my life,
Here must I stay and here my life must end.”
(Henry VI)

In the last resort, man after death, according to Shakespeare, can only

“Lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
To be imprisoned in the viewless wings
And blown with restless violence about
The pendant world.”
(Measure for Measure III, ii)

His utmost philosophy of life does not go further than that

“The weariest and the most loathsome worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, a paradise to what we fear of death.”

These lines clearly indicate that Shakespeare lacks inner illumination. He has no notion whatever of “Eternity whose end no eye can reach.” To know aught of the ideology of “the soul of origin divine, god’s glorious image freed from clay, in Heaven’s eternal sphere,” we have to switch over to the Indian poets among whom Kalidasa holds the palm. The works of Kalidasa are marvels of Sanskrit literature. They consist of two epics. “Raghuvamsa” and “Kumarasambhava”; three plays, “Shakuntala,” “Malavikagnimitra” and “Vikramorvasiya”; and two nature poems, the “Meghaduta” and “Seasons.”

“Raghuvamsa” is a great historical epic with several heroes, but the central figure is Lord Rama with a broad sketch of his ancestors and descendants who adorned the ancient throne of Bharatvarsha. The Rama cantos are an epic within epic and forms the central piece. If it is taken out the whole structure will be disturbed.

Kalidasa’s patriotism is as profound as that of Shakespeare. If to Shakespeare, there is no land like England, which he compares to a “demi-paradise,” to Kalidasa there is no land like India which he calls as a “radiant bit of Heaven.” He writes:

“O fine Ujjain. Gem to Avanti given
Where village ancients tell their tales of mirth
And old romance. A radiant bit of heaven,
Home of a blest band whose worth
Sufficed, though fallen from heaven,
To bring down heaven to earth.”
(MeghadutaPart I, 50)

If Shakespeare’s historical plays constitute a historical heroic poem to dramatic form Kalidasa’s “Raghuvamsa” is a grand historical poem in right epic style. The great epic tells of three groups of kings. Cantos 1 to 9 deal with Rama’s ancestors; Cantos 10 to 15 are directly concerned with the great Rama himself in whom the ideal of kingship reaches its highest; cantos 16 to 19 are devoted to Rama’s descendants.

The poem opens with King Dileepa, Rama’s great-great-grandfather whose motto was duty and self-sacrifice. The story of how he offered his body to the lion in order to save the cow of his devotion from its hungry clutches is too well-known to need repetition. Kalidasa depicts Dileepa as a king, who 

“Practised every virtue though in health,
Won riches with no greed of wealth,
Guarded his life, though not from fear,
Prized joys of earth, but not to dear;
His virtuous foes he could esteem
Like better drugs that heeling seem.”
(RaghuvamsaI, Ryder)

His son Raghu too “manifested royal worth by even justice toward the earth.” He was

“Beloved as is the southern breeze
Too cool to burn, too warm to freeze.”
(RaghuvamsaIV, Ryder)

Aja, Raghu’s son, was a greater king than Raghu or Dileepa. He was known for territorial conquests as well as the conquest of Indumati; “God’s masterpiece of beauty.” This union shows how “a gem is ever fitly set in gold.” (Canto V) Dasaratha, the offspring of this union shows, was renowned for glory, justice, prowess and piety, despite the guilt of his early days. Prince of archers, he possessed the craft of Sabdabhedi, that from sound alone he could pierce the victim. Thinking that it was an elephant at drink, the great sound-discerner drew forth and shot an arrow; but lo! it was a hermit boy who had gone to fetch water for his blind parents. The result was

“The father cursed the king
With tear-stained hands
To equal suffering
In sorrow for your son you too shall die
An old, old man, he said, sad as I.”
(RaghuvamsaIX, Ryder)

Nemesis came and Dasaratha had to suffer retributive justice by sending his own son, Rama, into banishment and himself dying of sorrow for his banished son. Both are acts of self-sacrifice made in order to make good his word to whomsoever thoughtlessly given or howsoever it came to be cruelly used against him as by his own Queen Kaikeyi. This high-pitched ideal of duty and self-sacrifice showed itself in his son too, who had to banish Sita into the forest by a too far-fetched ideal of response to the meanest popular voice. The Rama cantos are splendid and present a unique picture of the highest Indian ideal of a king.

The Raghuvamsadoes not lose sight of kings fallen from this ideal to the lowest depths of degradation. The last two cantos give a rapid glimpse of 21 kings of varying virtues including Agni, Varuna, the worst who had too many mistresses to call them by their right name! It is the ideal of Ekachatradhipatyam or World State, under one king-cum-sage, that Kalidasa holds to view. Even to a later king like Dushyanta (as manifest from the play of Shakuntala)

“The splendid palace serves as hermitage
His royal government, courageous sage,
Adds daily to his merit.”
(ShakuntalaII)

This combined ideal of sage and sovereign to confront the vicissitudes of war and peace shows that Kalidasa understood in the fifth century what Europe failed to learn till the 19th century–if understands even now only imperfectly.

Kalidasa’s ideal of the world is that it is not made for man only and that man reaches his full stature as he realizes the dignity of life and worth of life in relation to every form of life. He holds that life, from plant to God, is truly one; and no one has expressed this more fascinatingly than he. His ‘Raghuvamsa’ is half nature, half love and life; his ‘Kumarasambhava’ is likewise half God and half love; in his ‘Meghaduta’ the first half is a picture of love and second half is a picture of love and human feelings. Both are so equally well defined and depicted that one cannot easily choose between either for its excellence. Look at his description of the Ganges:

“Ganges O’er the king of mountains
Falls like a flight of stairs from heaven let down
For the sons of men; she brings the billowing fountains
Like hands to grasp the moon on Shiva’s crown,
And laughs her foamy laugh at Gauri’s jealous frown.”
(MeghadutaI, 50)

Look at his cloud, “itself as a terraced stairway to the jewelled floor of Mount Kailas”or how the cluster of clouds “adorns her face like gloomy curls and streams of Rain–like silken strings of close inter-woven pearls.”
(MeghadutaI, 63)

Or again how Cupid’s task is over as it is done by lovely maids,

“Whose frowning missile glances darting pain
At lover-targets never passed the mark in vain.”

Kalidasa’s women whether Gauri, Sita, Shakuntala, Urvashi, Malavika or the Yaksha’s bride are all human, Gauri is the mountain Goddess herself; Sita earth-born but divine; Shakuntala daughter of a heavenly nymph herself. Yet all are alike human patterns of love and life, “each the supremest woman from God’s workshop done.” See how Kalidasa blends the human element in Sita as an ideal wife. What can be more piercingly pathetic, touching the very core of being, than Sita’s words when Rama established her constant purity in an ordeal of fire:

“If I am faithful to my Lord
In thought, in action and in word
I pray that earth who bears us all
May bid me inher bosom fall.”
(RaghuvamsaXV, Ryder)

But nothingcan exceed the depth of pathos when on her second banishment, she breaks forth into the appeal:

“You saw the matter
How I was guiltless proved in fire divine
Will you desert me for idle chatter?
Are such things done in Raghu’s line?
(RaghuvamsaXIV, Ryder)

Yet this patient paragon of an ideal woman could console herself by the philosophic reflection that:

“Fate’s thunderclap by which my eyes are blended
Rewards my old forgotten sins.”
(RaghuvamsaXIV, Ryder)

The same ideal is maintained in the other poems as in his plays. These plays written by him on what is usually called the Shakespearian model eleven hundred years before Shakespeare are quite a marvel. Shakuntala is a gem of womankind. Born of heavenly Menaka, bred in a rustic Rishi Ashram and companioned by frisking fawns and tender vines, Shakuntala even in her bark robe is really

“God’s vision of pure thought
Composed in her creative mind,
His severies of beauty wrought
The peerless pearl of womankind.”
(ShakuntalaII,Ryder)

Kanva’s advice on her departure to the king’s palace depicts her duties as an ideal wife:

“Revere thy elders well;
With reverence and with kindness treat thou all,
Adore thy husband as thy God and live
A holy life of duty and of love.”
(ShakuntalaIV, Monier Williams)

When owing to the curse of Durvasa and the loss of her marriage ring, King Dushyanta fails to recognize her, what does Sarangarava say to the king?

“Leave her or take her as you will
She is your lawful wife;
Husbands have power for good or evil
Over woman’s life.”

But when memory comes on the fisherman’s recovery of the lost ring, the king craves Shakuntala’s forgiveness and falls at her feet. Shakuntala consoles him and herself with the remarks:

“It was some old sin of mine
That broke my happiness.”
(Shakuntala, VII)

This perfect beauty of soul, enshrined in beauty of form the same in Urvashi and Malavika. Urvashi, though a nymph, is quite womanly. She is the fairest flower of heaven. She is attacked by the giant hosts on her way from the abode of Kubera. Vikrama who comes to her rescue finds her in a swoon the arms of her friend, Chitralekha:

“Look at the wreath of flowers divine
Upon her swelling bosom fine
It flutters like a quivering dart
With throbs of her own frightened heart.”
(Vikramorvasiya, I)

Malavika shines best in the natural beauty of her person:

“With ornaments but few, her cheeks
All pale, the maiden sweet
Looks like a jasmine with few buds
And leaves, in summer heat.”
(Malavikagnimitra, III)

Shakuntala too looks best in her Valkala vesture:

“Covered with moss, the lotus fairest blows,
The moon’s dark dots add only to her charm;
Valkal-vestured, yet the maid most lovely shows
What is there but decks a true graceful form.”
(Shakuntala, III)

Even the godly Gauri supremely lovely in a forester’s garb in which she performs austerity to win the heart of Siva. “As pictures waken to the painter’s brush, or lilies open to the morning sun, her perfect beauty answered to the flush of womanhood.” (Kumarasambhava, Ryder). She reproaches her beauty as if it were unable to bind her lover, and when the Brahmin youth describes to her her lover’s hideousness,

“Her quivering lipsdisplayed her ire
And reddish glowed her eyes like fire.”
(Shakuntala, VI)

She defends her lover thus:

“Enough of this. Though every word that you
Have said be faithful, yet would Siva please
My eager heart all made of passion true
For him alone, love sees no blemishes.”
(ShakuntalaVI, Ryder)

She behaves quite in a human and womanly way when Siva discovers his glorious forms to her. Look again at the description of her joy when Kumara, the war-God, is presented to her child:

“The vision of the infant made her seem
A flower unfolding in mysterious bliss
Or billowy with joyful tears astream
Or pure affection perfect in a kiss.”
(ShakuntalaXI, Ryder)

“Kumarasambhava” is half Parvati’s love and half Kumara’s war in heaven. The world of nature runs into the world of man and the world of man runs in to the world of gods. These duties are personifications of the powers of nature and of the human soul. The actions of the gods are conceived to be the same in kind as those of man, proceeding from similar motives, directed to similar ends and accomplished very largely by similar means.

Kalidasa gives a wide interpretation of life. The men whose deeds and passions he describes are patterns of life, brimming over with the moral laws of eternity. The history of the race moves under a visible providence, from heroes and gods to an end that would be prosperous. The kings and heroes are the ancestors of the race; they have a root in its affection and they are interwoven with ethical conceptions.

The whole ideal inspires the nation. Behind all sin and suffering, he introduces a redeeming magnanimity of moral justice. Kalidasa displays his genius in interpreting the law of existence as an effort to realize explicitly the ideal good which is implicitly embodied in the facts and lives of his heroes, and supplies quite a healing balm. He says:

“Who has unending love or lasting weal,
Our fates move up and down upon a circling wheel.”
(Meghaduta)

Shakespeare is full of sea and shipwreck, Kalidasa is full of mountain and God. His description of Kailas rock is a typical example of how he blends ethical with aesthetic beauty:

“These saintly breasts with rapt devotion glow
There holy hands the flame of worship feed,
There his good servants, safe from sin and woe
From the sore weight of earthly life are freed
Join his own heavenly band and gain a priceless meed.”

The philosophy of life which underlies Kalidasa’s works stands for (a) the Ekachatradhipatyam or the world state under the sway of an ideal saint sovereign, with an eye to universal peace (b) the Ekatwam of God revealed by the relation of individual to universal consciousness, with an eye to salvation in the end. Man lives for the benefit of religion, identified with the highest. The celebrated hymn to Vishnu in Canto X of the ‘Raghuvamsa’ is the most beautiful expression of this admirable ideal of Adwaitism.

Hence, we can conclude with a unanimity that is all but universal that Kalidasa and William Shakespeare are acknowledged to be by far the greatest of all dramatists and to hold, by right indefeasible, a pre-eminent place in the ranks of the world’s immortals. They belong to the ages.