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II. URVASIE
In nothing else does the delicacy and keen suavity of Kalidasa’s dramatic genius exhibit itself with a more constant and instinctive perfection than in his characterisation of women. He may sometimes not care to individualise his most unimportant female figures, but even the slightest of his women have some personality of their own, something which differentiates them from others and makes them better than mere names. Insight into feminine character is extraordinarily rare even among dramatists for whom one might think it to be a necessary element of their art. For the most part a poet represents with success only one or two unusual types known to him or in sympathy with his own temperament or those which are quite abnormal and therefore easily drawn; the latter are generally bad women, the Clytemnestras, Vittoria Corombonas, Beatrice Joannas. The women of Vyasa and of Sophocles have all a family resemblance: all possess a quiet or commanding masculine strength of character which reveals their parentage. Other poets we see succeeding in a single feminine character, often repeating, but failing or not succeeding eminently in the rest. Otherwise women in poetry are generally painted very much from the outside. The poets who have had an instinctive insight into women, can literally be counted on the fingers of one’s hand. Shakespeare in this as in other dramatic gifts is splendidly and unapproachably first, or at least only equalled in depth though not in range by Valmiki. Racine has the same gift within his limits and Kalians without limits, though in this as in other respects he has not Shakespeare’s prodigal abundance and puissant variety. Other names I do not remember: there area few poets who succeed with coarse easy types, but this is the fruit of observation rather than an unfailing intuitive insight. The Agnimitra is a drama of women; it passes within the women’s apartments and pleasure gardens of a great palace and is full of the rustling of women’s robes, the tinkling of their ornaments, the scent of their hair, the music of their voices. In the Urvasie where he needs at least half the canvas for his hero, the scope for feminine characterisation is of necessity greatly contracted, but
Page – 276 what is left Kalidasa has filled in with a crowd of beautiful shining figures and exquisite faces each of which is recognizable. These are the Apsaras and Urvasie the most beautiful of them all. To understand the poetry and appeal of these nymphs of heaven, we must know something of their origin and meaning. In the beginning of things, in the great wide spaces of Time when mankind as yet was young and the azure heavens and the inter-regions between the stars were full of the crowding figures of luminous Gods and gigantic Titans by the collision of whose activities the cosmos was taking form and shape, the opposing forces once made a truce and met in common action on the waves of the milky Ocean. The object for which they had met could not have been fulfilled by the efforts of one side alone; the good must mingle with the evil, the ideal take sides with the real, the soul work in harmony with the senses, virtue and sin, heaven and earth and hell labour towards a common end before it can be accomplished; for this object was no less than to evolve all that is beautiful, sweet and incredible in life, all that makes it something more than existence, and in especial to realise immortality, that marvellous thought which has affected those even who disbelieve in it, with the idea of unending effort and thus lured men from height to height, from progress to progress, until mere beast though he is in his body and his sensations, he has with the higher part of himself laid hold upon the most distant heavens. Therefore they stood by the shore of the milky Ocean and cast into it the mountain Mandara for a churning stick and wound round it Vasukie, the Great Serpent, the snake of desire, for the rope of the churning and then they set to it with a will, god and devil together, and churned the milky Ocean, the ocean of spiritual existence, the ocean of imagination and aspiration, the ocean of all in man that is above the mere body and the mere life. They churned for century after century, for millennium upon millennium and yet there was no sign of the nectar of immortality. Only the milky Ocean swirled and lashed and roared, like a thing tortured, and the snake Vasukie in his anguish began to faint and hang down his numberless heads hissing with pain over the waves and from the lolling forked tongues a poison streamed out and mingled with the anguish of the Ocean so that it became
Page – 277 like a devastating fire. Never was poison so terrible for it contained in itself all the long horror and agony of the ages, all the pain of life, its tears and cruelty and despair and rage and madness, the darkness of disbelief and the grey pain of disillusionment, all the demoniac and brute beast that is in man, his lust and his tyranny and his evil joy in the sufferings of his fellows. Before that poison no creature could stand and the world began to shrivel in the heat of it. Then the Gods fled to Shankara where he abode in the ice and snow and the iron silence and inhuman solitudes of the mountains where the Ganges streams through his matted locks, for who could face the fire of that poison ? Who but the great ascetic Spirit clothed in ashes, who knows not desire and sorrow, to whom terror is not terrible and grief has no sting, but who embraces grief and madness and despair. And now wonderful things began to arise from the Ocean; Ucchaisravas arose, neighing and tossing his mighty mane, he who can gallop over all space in one moment while hooves make music in the empyrean. Varunie arose, Venus Anadyomene from the waters, the daughter of Varuna, Venus Ourania, standing on a lotus and bringing beauty and delight and harmony and opulence into the universe; Dhanwantari arose, cup in hand, the physician of the Gods who can heal all pain and disease and sorrow, minister to a mind diseased and pluck out from the bosom its rooted sorrow; the jewel Kaustubha arose whose pure luminousness fills all the world and, worn on the bosom of the Saviour and Helper, becomes the cynosure of the suffering and striving nations.
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Such then is Urvasie, Narain-born, the brightness of sunlight, the blush of the dawn, the multitudinous laughter of the sea, the glory of the skies and the leap of the lightning, all in brief that is bright, far-off, unseizable and compellingly attractive in this world, all too that is wonderful, sweet to the taste and intoxicating in human beauty, human life, the joy of human passion and emotion: all finally that seizes, masters and carries away
Page – 278 in art, poetry, thought and knowledge, is involved in this one name. Of these outward brilliances Kalidasa’s conception of Urvasie is entirely void. His presentation of her is simply that of a beautiful and radiant woman deeply in love. Certainly the glories of her skiey residence, the far-off luminousness and the free breath of the winds are about her, but they are her atmosphere rather than part of herself. The essential idea of her is natural, frank and charming womanliness; timidity, a quick temper, a harmless petulance and engaging childishness, afterwards giving way to a matronly sedateness and bloom, swift, innocent and frank passion, warm affections as mother, sister and friend, speech always straight from the heart, the precise elements in fact that give their greatest charm to ideal girlhood and womanhood are the main tones that compose the picture. There is nothing here of the stately pace and formal dignity of the goddess, no cothurnus raising her above human stature, no mask petrifying the simple and natural play of the feelings, the smile in the eyes, the ready tears, the sweetness of the mouth, the lowered lashes, the quick and easy gesture full of spontaneous charm. If this is a nymph of heaven, one thinks, then heaven must be beautifully like the earth. Her terror and collapse in the episode of the abduction and rescue, where Chitraleqha manages pretty successfully to keep up her courage as a goddess, is certainly not Apsara-like. Chitraleqha with sisterly impatience expresses her sense of that, "Fie, sweet! thou art no Apsara" — but it is nevertheless attractively lively human and seizes our sympathies for her from the outset. There is also a sensitiveness in her love, a quickness to take alarm and despond which make her very human. If this is jealously, it is a quick and generous jealousy having nothing in it of "jealous baseness"; it is hardly more than the quick rush of hasty temper which leads to her separation from Pururavas, but rather a panic born of timidity and an extreme diffidence and ignorance of the power of her own beauty. This detail is very carefully observed and emphasized as if Kalidasa wished to take especial pains to prevent even the most hidebound commentator from reading into her character any touch of the heavenly courtesan. The ostentations, splendours, the conscious allurements of the courtesan are not there, but rather a divine simplicity and
Page – 279 white candour of soul. It is from an innate purity and openness that the frankness and impulsiveness of her love proceeds. Incapable of disguise, hastily open, direct in words, even tremulously playful at times, she is easily dashed in her advances and quick to distrust her merit. And she can be very sweet and noble too, even dignified as in a few utterances of the Third Act, her reunion with Pururavas in the Fourth and all through the Fifth where she is wife and mother, and while losing the girlishness, petulance and playfulness of the earlier scenes has greatly deepened her charm. I see nothing of the heavenly courtesan which some overprecise commentators insist on finding in her; within the four corners of the play which is all Kalidasa allows us to consider, she is wholly delightful, innocent, even modest, at any rate not immodest. Certainly she is more frank and playful in her love than Shacountala or even Malavica could venture to be, but something must be allowed to a goddess and her demeanour is too much flavoured with timidity, her advances too easily dashed to give any disagreeable impression of forwardness. There are few more graceful touches in lighter love-drama than her hasty appearance, unconsciously invisible, before Pururavas, and her panic of dismay when he takes no notice of her. In the same scene her half playful, half serious self-justification in embracing her lover and her immediate abashed silence at his retort, portray admirably the mixture of frank impulsiveness and shy timidity proper to her character. These are the little magic half-noticeable touches of which Kalidasian characterisation is mainly composed, the hundred significant trifles which Kalidasa’s refined taste in life felt to be the essence of character in action. Urvasie’s finest characteristic, however, is her sincerity in passion and affection. The poet has taken great pains to discharge her utterance of all appearance of splendour, ornament and superfluity; her simple, direct and earnest diction is at the opposite pole to the gorgeous imaginativeness of the Ilian. And while her manner of speech is always simple and ordinary, what she says is exactly the unstudied and obvious thing that a woman of no great parts, but natural and quick in her affections, would spontaneously say under the circumstances; it is even surprisingly natural. For example, when she sees Ayus fondled
Page – 280 by Pururavas, "who is this youth", she asks with the little inevitable undertone of half jealousy
Himself My monarch binds his curls into a crest ! Who should this be so highly favoured ?
and then she notices Satyavatie and understands. But there is no positive outburst of maternal joy and passion. "It is my Ayus! How he has grown!" That is all and nothing could be better or truer. Yet for all the surface colourlessness there is a charm in everything Urvasie says, the charm of absolute sincerity and direct unaffected feeling. Her passion for Pururavas is wonderfully genuine and fine from her first cry of "O Titans! You did me kindness!" to her last of "O a sword is taken out of my heart!" Whatever the mood, its speech has always a tender force and reality. Her words with Chitraleqha and the other Apsaras, from the outburst, "O sisters, sisters, take me to your bosoms", to her farewell "Chitraleqha, my sister! do not forget me", are instinct, when moved, with "a passion of sisterliness" and at other times bright and limpid in their fair kindness and confidence. She comes to her son "with her whole rapt gaze
Grown mother, the veiled bosom heaving towards him And wet with sacred milk".
And her farewell to the Hermitess sets a model for the expression of genuine and tender friendship. Urvasie is doubtless not so noble and strong a portraiture as Shacountala, but she is inferior to no heroine of Sanskrit drama in beauty and sweetness of womanly nature.
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