Sri Aurobindo's ‘Kalidasa’

SRI AUROBINDO’S ‘KALIDASA’

DR R. VAIDYANATHASWAMY, M. A., D. SC, Ph. D.

The Creative Process and the source of creative Energy are in the last analysis inscrutable mystery. What, for instance, is the nature and process of the influence emanating from the great sols who stand out in history as the leaders of men, who have guided humanity in its evolution by creating institutions and laying down the Dharma? What is the vital impulse behind the external mechanism of a nation or an empire, which sustains it generation after generation, producing leaders, philosophers, poets, men of vision and of strength? What again is the process behind the transformation of personality through sudden religious or other experience? And–this is a paramount question for us today in India,–when the integrity of national life has been lost, by What art or device can the vital energy be coaxed into it again?

The Tantra offers to us the concept of Nada and Bindu as proximate analytical description of the typical creative process. Disregarding the refinements of the theory, we can put the matter roughly thus. The state before Creation is one of dispassionate quiescent Chit, which, though it constitutes the stuff and the positive support of all existence, is yet a negative condition, inasmuch as nothing can be said about it, avyakta. Then there starts somewhere a minute vibration, spanda, which instantaneously spreads like a flash and gathers itself up into a central point of illumination–the Bindu. With the Bindu comes a definition of the Indefinite, a centre of reference or I-sense, an outlook and a preparation born of recognition and self-definition; for the Bindu is an essentially unstable massed-up potential energy, which must dissolve and disperse itself through dynamic evolution.

In this description of the typical creative process, the initial minute vibration which starts the whole process culminating in the dynamic centre, can only be accounted for by Karma, that is to say, by some sort of memory, while its instantaneous spreading has to be looked upon as due to a vague recognition or rather Love, culminating is distinct consciousness in the Bindu (observe that a single word smara in Sanskrit means both ‘love’ and ‘recognition’). Why and how Karma and Kamaact is utterly inexplicable; the only thing that can be asserted on the basis of Yogic experiment and observation (particularly of the descent from Samadhi to normal consciousness), is that some subtle chord of memory is touched somehow, and that Love or Recognition electrifies into manifestation the active Bindu, the dynamic purposeful ‘I’.

This account of the creative process would indicate that the ultimate principle in all creative action – whether it be the energising of an individual or of a nation,–is to recall to memory. Whenever this can be done successfully, the Bindu-Self has to appear by an inevitable spiritual law, and the pang of love-recognition with which it is born, contains within itself implicitly all the dynamic mechanism of its future unfoldment, its creative evolution. Thus all ultimate problems of individual or corporate life, resolve themselves into a question of memory and recognition, which may be formulated as ‘who and what am I?’ This profound truth has been thoroughly grasped in India, in all its aspects and implications. Thus the guru of Ancient India initiates the disciple in Atmavidyaby reminding him of what he is, Taltvamasi. Generations of Upasakasworship the Deity with a traditional string of sacred names, in order to arouse memory, and to force the repetition and fixation ofthe original revealed experience which gave it birth. In the same way, when Brahma is produced at the beginning ofa new Kalpa, the Puranarelates how the Lord has to remind him of his earlier creations, in order that he may be able to create again.

Again, of all the invocations in the Upanishads, is there any which rings with more passionate intensity than the prayer in the Isa, “O! Will, remember, remember what thou hast done!”

It is again the same fundamental truth in a special application, which has been rediscovered by Freud in psycho-analysis. The psychopath, in treating a case of hysteria, first sets himself out to discover, by dream-analysis, the sub-conscious purpose ofthe hysteric manifestation, and then proceeds to remind the patient of his own intention in permitting the symptoms. Immediately, the whole creative process described is gone through in the mind of the patient, and the Binduonce formed effectually checks the particular hysteric symptom. Verily in all this, the commonplace maxim that Knowledge is Power, becomes true in a new and unexpected sense.

It would appear, therefore, that the state of utmost helplessness and ineffectiveness that can ever be imagined, is the loss of the sense of Self. The Tamil imagination has created a happy picture of this condition in the fable of the fly which forgets its own name, and sets about to learn it by asking every creature that it meets. The condition of India at the present day, in her loss of self-consciousness, her loss of Dharma, in her general ineffectuality and  lack of orientation, is not dissimilar to that of the fly of the fable. One feels that the shade of India wanders about from Himalaya to Ceylon, lingering among the ruins, trying to recall, recall, or looking at the doors of her cultured sons and daughters, asking distractedly ‘Oh! Tell me, what am I?’ Especially does the shade haunt the Pundits, the historians, and the archaeologists, but alas, they can give but little comfort! For, what they know has been realised not as Aham, but as Idam, not as the experiences of a single national soul in its career, but as philosophies, facts and dates; therefore, it is incapable of touching the sensitive nerve of memory, it does not precipitate the dynamic self-revelation, and force the re-integration through a recovered self-definition. It would seem as if the miraculous restoring touch can only come from a divinely gifted teacher, from one who has dedicated himself without reserve to the highest, who, leaving behind all the pettiness of the lower self, can establish himself firmly in the Mahat, and act therefrom in the plenitude of divine wisdom and power.

In the troublous days of the dawn of Indian Nationalism, it was Sri Aurobindo’s voice which spoke out, vibrant with the message of the New India rising from her ashes, and the vision of a future wherein her agelong ideals, her Sanatana Dharma, the supreme inner law of life to which she had consciously moved, assimilating to themselves the positive elements of the modern age, would fructify into a supreme synthesis. Prophet and leader of the Young Nationalism, he infused into it the spiritual fervour and high-souled devotion brought from the two great fountains of Indian inspiration–the Gita ideal of surrender and Naishkamyakarma Yoga and the Tantricfigure of the Mother, fresh with the memories of Ramakrishna. Later, as political exile, Sri Aurobindo set himself out, guided by the hand of a Divine Providence, to explore, seize and assimilate the innermost self of the India of the milleniums to re-live her intensest spiritual realisations, to assort, order and estimate the great spiritual syntheses of her past. The conviction of his earlier years, that the key, the vital and interpretative principle of India’s national history, was to be sought in her persistent and many-sided spiritual effort, deepend into a certainty as he proceeded, till the Soul of India stood revealed to him, in all the forms and ways of her seeking through the ages, and in the sudden and tragic check which prostrated her at last. The nationalism which he offered as Ahutiinto the fire of Yoga, returned to him transformed – for, Sacrifice does not destroy, but always disciplined and transmutes – from a blind rush of the imperfectly disciplined emotion, into a growing into the very self of India, and a love, rooted in one’s life and being, yet founded in detachment, of all that India stood for,–the effectuation of spiritual ideals into social forms, and into all forms of human activity.

His whole writing breathes of this mystic intimacy with the soul of India; phrase and word ring true, fraught with the meaning of centuries. Even in his earlier books, a new and strange power of expression is revealed. I mean not only that the style, charged with suggestiveness and power, is like a pure flame of idealistic fervour, but that the English language itself is subdued to something which approaches the poise and cadence of Indian thought. In the Aryaand later writing, the style undergoes a subtle transformation, parallel to the transformation of personality which sustained yogic discipline entails. It loses eagerness and rush, and develops a restfulness and depth, suggestive of a calm equipoise. However great or moving the theme might be, one feels that the style is not only adequate to the theme, but that it carries it lightly without a tremor agitating its still depths. The book before us it titled ‘Kalidasa’, and suggests a literary appreciation and criticism of the Indian poet. In point of fact, the book has a much larger purpose. It surveys the Post-Vedic history of India, and infers the three successive phases of development-characterised respectively as moral, intellectual, and material–fromthe representative poets Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa. A large and illuminating characterisation, quite in keeping with what one would expect from the course of development of the individual soul. For, if the Veda with its Sadhana of Sacrifice may be characterised as a psychological synthesis, and the Upanishads with their supreme insistence on the ultimate comprehensive principle of existence, the Poornam, be characterised as a spiritual monistic synthesis, it is not unnatural that the spiritual impulse of the Veda and the Upanishad should realise and work itself out in succeeding ages in all the planes of national life, thus completing a ‘round’ or cycle of experience. Sri Aurobindo thinks that at the time of the barbarian invasion, India was already preparing for a new and more perfect age. “It was the supreme misfortune of India that before she was able to complete the round of her experience, and gather up the fruit of her long milleniums of search and travail by commencing a fourth and more perfect age in which moral, intellectual and material development should be all equally harmonised, and all equally spiritualised, the inrush of barbarians broke in finally on her endless solitary tapasyaof effort, and beat her national life into fragments. A preparation for such an age may be glimpsed in the new tendencies of spiritual seeking that began with Shankara, and continued in later Vaishnavism and Shaivism and in new turns of poetry and art, but it found no opportunity of seizing in the total life of the nation and throwing it into another mould. The work was interrupted before it had well begun; and India was left with only the remnants of the culture of the material age to piece out her existence”.

A characterisation of this kind is of course too broad to serve any specific historical purpose or theory; on the other hand, it is precisely because of this generality that it has so much interpretative value, and helps us to form a unified picture of the broad course of Indian history.

Sri Aurobindo apparently regards it as beyond question that a single mind, Vyasa, was responsible for the Mahabharata; also he agrees that the Ramayana refers to a period anterior to the Mahabharata, without however committing himself on the question whether Valmiki wrote after or before the Mahabharata. Both of these questions are controversial, each Indologist prejudging them according to his own particular idiosyncracy, and supporting his view by arguments of more or less value, the main point of agreement lying in giving little or no value to indigenous tradition. It is apparently the study of the Epic itself which has led Sri Aurobindo, as it led Dahlmann, to the view that the Mahabharata pictures the life of a single age, and that a single individual was responsible for it, not in the sense that he wrote every line of the epic, but in the sense that he gathered round the central plot selections from available current material, with suitable adaptations, alterations and additions, and built it all up into a single unified whole. As for the Ramayana, the fact that some Indologists think that it might have been contemporaneous with the Mahabharata, though emanating from a different part of the country, shows that textual considerations which were supposed to point to the Ramayana as the later work, may probably be based on additions or interpolations, and would therefore not be decisive. On the other hand, the fact that the Ramayana shows no acquaintance with Krishna or the Gospel of the Gita, as well as the general character of the work giving the impression of a ‘younger and less sophisticated humanity’, should form sufficiently strong inner evidence in favour of the traditional view of the Ramayana as the earlier work.

There are some delightful touches about the personality of Valmiki. For example: “To the pure and delicate moral temperament of Valmiki, imaginative, sensitive, enthusiastic, shot through with rays of visionary idealism and ethereal light, this looseness and violence were shocking and abhorrent.” And again, penetrating, thought-provoking judgments, such as “Valmiki’s mind seems nowhere to be familiarised with the high-strung intellectual gospel of a high and severe Dharma, culminating in a passionless activity, raised to a supreme spiritual significance in the Gita, which is one great keynote of the Mahabharata. Had he known it, the strong leaven of sentimentality and femininity in his nature might well have rejected it; such temperaments, when they admire strength, admire it manifested and forceful rather than self-contained;” or again, “Valmiki’s characters act from emotional or imaginative enthusiasm, not from intellectual conviction; an enthusiasm of morality actuates Rama, an enthusiasm of immortality tyrannises over Ravana. Like all mainly moral temperaments, he instinctively insisted , on one old established code of morals being universally observed as the only basis of all ethical stability, avoided casuistic developments and distrusted innovators in metaphysical thought, as by their persistent and searching questions dangerous to the established bases of morality, especially to its wholesome ordinariness and everydayness.” This characteristic temperament of Valmiki is well revealed in the opening incident of the Ramayana, which is apparently a genuine account of the origin of the poet, and which strongly suggests the view taken by Sri Aurobindo, namely that the Ramayana is an aesthetic reaction against an age of aristocratic violence and immorality, and pictures a past imperial civilisation idealized.

Then follows a brilliant description of the age of the Mahabharata, and its predominantly intellectual character, as contrasted with the moral note struck in the Ramayana. Insight supplies what is lacking in the shape of actual data, in seizing the personality of Vyasa, We read of him: "But while V almiki was a soul out of harmony with its surroundings, and looking to an ideal past, Vyasa was a man of his time, profoundly in sympathy with it, full of its tendencies, hopeful of its results, and looking forward to an ideal future. . . . Vyasa does not revolt from the atistocratic code of morality; it harmonises with his own proud and strong spirit and he accepts it as a basis for conduct, but purified and transfigured by the illuminating ideal of Nishkama Dharma. But above all, intellectuality is his grand note; he is profoundly interested in ideas, in metaphysics, in ethical problems; he subjects morality to casuistic tests from which the more delicate moral tone of Valmiki's spirit shrank; he boldly erects above ordinary ethics a higher principle of conduct having its springs in intellect and strong character.”

The third period, or the age of material civilisation mirrored in Kalidasa, is much nearer the range of historical vision, and is reconstructed for us vividly in outline and detail, from the indications in the works of Kalidasa and other poets of the period, With the very acute characterisation of the person Kalidasa, which follows, I suppose it is hardly possible even for a lover of Kalidasa to disagree, The superb description of the peculiar quality of Kalidasa's genius and his special poetic gifts, is a sheer feast of literary criticism; at the same time, the difference in level between the Ramayana and Mahabharata on the one hand, and the works of Kalidasa on the other, is not lost sight of: “HIS poetry has therefore never been, like the poetry of Valmiki and Vyasa, a great dynamic force for the moulding of heroic character or noble or profound temperament.” The reason of this difference lies, paradoxically enough, in the fact that Kalidasa was too completely the artist and hedonist. While Valmiki achieves sublimity “by disdaining all consistent pursuit of the sublime,” Kalidasa's appreciation of “high ideal and lofty thought is aesthetic in its nature, and he elaborates and seeks to bring out the effectiveness of these, on the imaginative sense of the noble and grandiose, applying to the things of mind and soul the same aesthetic standard as to the things of sense themselves.” It is a most remarkable thing, that in spite of his intense. aestheticism and hedonism, Kalidasa is virile enough not to fall into the cloying languor of a Keats, or the second-rate level of a Tennyson. Sri Aurobindo attributes this to “the chastity of his style, his aim at burdened precision and energy of phrase, his unsleeping aesthetic vigilance,” but there is probably a deeper reason as well, depending on racial character and environment. The book closes with a study of the Ritusamhara, as shewing in undeveloped form the peculiar poetic qualities of Kalidasa.

As a work of literary interpretation and criticism ‘Kalidasa’ stands on a high pedestal of excellence. While this is so, we have said enough to indicate that herein does not lie the whole of its value. It brings a new historical outlook, and insight into the field of literary estimation, born of the vision of a single national soul in purposeful activity, expressing and progressively realising itself in Time. In small compass, with a few finished strokes of the pen, and almost unintentionally, in the garb of literary criticism, a glimpse is conveyed to us of this mighty soul, of the flavour of its peculiar individuality, of what it sought and wrought for during the long period of its active life.

[Reprinted from Triveni, Nov.-Dec. 1929]