AT the end of the fourth century, if it was not much later,1 for the dates will always be a weak point in these studies, there lived at the court of a king called Vikramaditya the greatest poet of India, Kalidasa.
He was the son of a Brahman, but, having lost his father early, he was reared by a cowherd. Coarse and quite uneducated, but handsome, he was married to a princess. Legend is not troubled by social inequalities, and in any case it says that the marriage was brought about by the trick of a minister. The young man's ignorance made his wife ashamed. He therefore called on the goddess Kali for help, dedicating himself to her entirely. So he got his name of "Slave of Kali".
From the less fabulous but very scanty information furnished by the poet's own works, we can gather that he was really a Brahman, a follower of Siva and the Vedānta, and in addition an elegant and cultured man of the world, an aristocrat through and through. He loved the city of Ujjayini and knew the country under the Himalaya. But we have no ground for believing a late stanza which makes him one of the "nine jewels", the poets and scholars who adorned the court of King Vikrama. For the names of the other eight "jewels" belong to another age, and only a very vague, remote tradition has linked them together. The surname of Vikramaditya," Sun of Heroism," was bestowed on several kings. However, after the work of Sylvain Lévi, Jacobi and Bühler have proved that one cannot place Kalidasa later than between A.D. 350 and 472. In that case his royal patron would be Chandragupta II, a contemporary of King Matrigupta of Kashmir. The latter was not only a protector of letters but a poet himself.
Kalidasa's inspiration is lyrical, but that did not prevent him from writing dramas and epics. He took his subjects from the Puranas or the great epics, and a brief remark in the Veda was enough for him to conceive a work full of charm.
His epic poems are the Kumāra-sambhava, the "Birth of Kumara", and the Raghu-vaṃśa, the "Race of Raghu". Kumara is another name of Skanda, the war-god.
The gods, in their unending war with the Asuras, need a leader. Such a leader can only be begotten by Siva, and Siva is vowed to asceticism. On a mountain-top, seated on the tiger-skin, with his head encircled by snakes and his body clad in the hide of a black antelope—a Brahmanic feature—he remains deep in meditation, from which nothing can tear him. The fair Uma, also called Parvati, the daughter of the Himalaya, goes to Siva to try to win his love. At the bidding of Indra, Kama goes to support her, accompanied by his wife Rati, "Pleasure of Love," and his friend Vasanta, "Spring." Kama bends his bow and lets fly an arrow, but with one glance of his third eye the god reduces him to ashes. For the sake of the lamenting Rati, the gods soften the severity of Siva, and Kama is restored to life.
Uma's devotion and the cruel mortifications which are destroying her delicate body at last move Siva. In the disguise of an aged ascetic he advises her to cease to do penances for the sake of such a terrible being as Siva. She replies with a passionate eulogy of the god, the Lord of the Three Worlds. "He grants all desires," she says, "and is himself without desire; he dwells in dead places but himself gives life." Seeing her great love, Siva decides to marry her and, proceeding according to the precepts of the Gṛihya Sutras, he sends venerable friends to ask for her hand. The go-betweens are the Seven Sages (rishi) who shine in the sky in the Great Wain (the Great Bear) and the aged Arundhati, the pattern of a faithful wife, who is also a star in that constellation. The King of the Mountains, Himalaya, and his wife receive the messengers in accordance with the rules of etiquette, and presently the wedding is held—a picturesque and vivid picture of Indian life. Kalidasa depicts the emotion of Uma's mother so touchingly that the reader too is affected. The married bliss of Siva and Uma is then described in such lively colours that European taste is sometimes embarrassed by all this frankness. But it never descends to commonness, or even to sensuality pure and simple; on the contrary, the story is throughout enveloped in a haze of the most exquisite poetry.1
The Raghu-vaṃśa1 is a work of Kalidasa's maturity, presenting the genealogy of Rama.
He was, as we know, a descendant of Raghu. His ancestors are all—except one, Agnivarna—steeped in Brahmanic piety, all are stainless heroes, lovers of knowledge and models of virtue, and all retire into the forest at the end of their life. Much of the poem is taken up with devotion to Nandini, the wonderful Cow. If she is satisfied, she will give the childless King a son. So the King offers his life to save her from the claws of a lion. His devotion is rewarded. The lion is a divine messenger who has come to test the King's courage and to announce to him the birth of a son, Aja. Aja is to make a svayaṃvara, or marriage of free will, with Princess Indumati. But he is treacherously attacked and only defeats his enemies by his courage.
Then comes a description of family life, the birth of a son, Dasaratha (afterwards Rama's father), and the peaceful reign of a king devoted to his subjects' good. But one day, when Aja is taking his pleasure in a park with the Queen, a garland of flowers falls from heaven and kills the Queen. The husband's despair is told in some very fine stanzas, which end with a sentence characteristic of that chivalrous but warlike age: the King will not ascend the pyre after his beloved wife, solely in order that people may not say contemptuously of him, "He died for a woman."
Only one king of this model dynasty fails to come up to its standard—Agnivarna. He is the Indian Don Juan, who puts the principles of the Kāmasūtra into practice. The poet seems to have introduced him in order to show his own knowledge of that textbook of the art of love and to condemn the application of it. Agnivarna neglects his duty, despises his subjects, and spends his life among women. He dies young, before seeing the birth of his son. Here there seem to be reminiscences of the Mahābhārata floating about. The First Queen or chief wife being with child, the ministers consecrate her Regent, and "the water of consecration extinguished the fire of the grief with which the widow had been consumed since the death of her husband."
The Kumāra-sambhava and Raghu-vaṃśa as we have them are unfinished, but both were continued by other writers and have given rise to twenty and thirty-three commentaries respectively. The best are by Mallinatha (fifteenth century). Both also served as models to authors, who imitated them much, and they became the type of cultivated poetry for theorists of the poetic art, who quoted Kalidasa's lines in their works as examples.1
The poet has been credited with works which are not his, including a Prakrit epic named Rāvana-vadha, the "Slaying of Ravana", or Setu-bandha, the "Building of the Bridge" which was to take Rama's army to the island of Lanka. Apart from its virtuosity of style and the poetry of certain images, which perhaps remind one of Kalidasa, this poem reveals the degenerate taste of a later age in its super-abundance of stylistic ornaments and its interminable compound words, filling whole lines.
Shortly after Kalidasa, two epic poets, Bharavi and Magha, enjoyed a great reputation. Bharavi's poem, Kirātārjunīya,2 describes in eighteen books the war of Arjuna and Siva. The latter, to test the hero's courage, takes on the appearance of a half-savage hillman of the Kirata tribe. The story is of little importance. The value of the work lies in descriptions of nature which are almost equal to Kalidasa's. Bharavi's sunsets recall those which are so much admired in the Kumāra-sambhava, when Siva and Parvati, sitting on a rock in a Himalayan forest, watch the sun go down with emotion and enchantment (vii, 45 and 54). Bharavi has original images and unexpected thoughts. Thus, the sun inclines earthwards, drunk with the honey which he has drawn with his hands (kara means "ray" and "hand") from the cups of the lotuses of day. The moon is a silver cup which the night brings for the consecration of the King of Love. The golden pollen of the lotus which quivers in the breeze above a group of flowers is the golden parasol which reflects the face of Lakshmi while it shades it.
What most pleased contemporaries was the tricks of the trade and the acrobatics of form. They enjoyed lines which gave the same words when read in either direction, stanzas in which the second part was composed of the same syllables as the first but making other words and an opposite meaning, lines which contained only certain consonants, and the like.
Magha outdoes even Bharavl in the art of versification, for he uses twenty-three different metres as against Bharavi's nineteen. Unfortunately he also outdoes him in tricks. Lines which have two meanings, according to the way in which the compound words are divided, lines which have an opposite meaning when read backwards, stanzas in which the syllables are repeated so as to form geometrical figures, and, more extravagant still, the use of only two consonants in a line (in Śiśupāla-vadha, the story of Vishnu's fight with the demon Sisupala, xix, 3) are the final achievement of this over-ingenious poetry.
Yet Magha was a poet, a poet of love, or rather of the art of love. Women of fulsome beauty and their amorous frolics with the Yadavas are the subjects of his poem. Nature, although he paints it in splendid colours, is only there as a background to the beauty of the female body. The story of Vishnu is quite secondary and the battle-scenes have no truth in them.
We must not leave epic poetry without mentioning a composition, later by eight centuries, which is partly epic poem and partly history and claimed to be a scientific work, the Rāja-taraṃgiṇī or "River of Kings" of Kalhana.
The author, the son of a minister at the court of Kashmir, was at an early age initiated into politics. Having had a good education, he was able to see and judge without bias. In his chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir, which he brings down to 1148, he makes it his aim to tell nothing but the truth; at least, wherever he can ascertain it. He knows that he is a poet, but he regards this gift as necessary if he is to make the past live. In fact, he paints characters with rare acuteness. This does not prevent him from believing in myths and marvels blindly. He relates the legend of the Nagas, the divine serpents which were so intimately linked with the pre-history of Kashmir in the popular mind, without criticism. A king may rule three hundred years or die from the curse of a Brahman. Witchcraft lies at the source of many historical events, and the idea of karman is confirmed at every step. Being permeated with a profound sense of morality, he makes his history a magistral vitae, but not in the political or social sense; what he wants to show is the triumph of good. He can despise upstarts and hate oppressors. When he speaks of the great famine, he castigates the ministers who had laid in stores beforehand and sold corn to the people at the price of gold; through their fault, he says, the ground was white with bones.
His portraits of sovereigns are expressive. He gives some pictures of women, such as the cruel and depraved Queen Didda, putting her grandson to death in order to reign alone, but a wise ruler for all that; or Suryamati, so haughty and passionate that she was bound to end tragically.
Ruling in the place of her feeble husband, she caused her son to be recognized as crown prince and gave him wide powers. Presently a conflict broke out between the father and the ambitious youth. The King reproached his wife as the cause of all the trouble, and flung in her face the suspicion, which he had long harboured, that the prince was not his legitimate son. At the insult Suryamati was furious, and heaped contumely on the King, whom she had always despised for his weakness. The King slew himself for shame, and then Suryamati cursed all who had sown discord between her and her husband and flung herself into the flames.
Tragic, too, was the end of King Harsha.
Endowed with rare talents and famous for his good government and piety, he fell under the influence of evil counsellors, and became cruel and suspicious. Abandoned by all, an outlaw in his own country, he was assassinated by his troops.
Kalhana often reminds one of Tacitus. He is a very trustworthy guide for the history of Kashmir at the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth. His lack of simplicity, of mastery of form and of construction, prevents his work from being a true epic. He has poetry in him, but he is not a poet. He is important to history without being a true historian.
A tendency to lyricism marks all the poetry of India. Kalidasa, who is so "un-epic" in the Kumāra-sambhava and the Raghu-vamśa, where the subject lends itself to epic treatment, achieves lyrical perfection in the Megadhūta, the "Messenger Cloud".1
The subject of the poem is married love.
A Yaksha, a divine being in the service of Kubera, god of wealth, is banished by his master. He has to leave his wife and spend a year in the south of India. At the beginning of the rainy season he sees a cloud drifting before the wind towards the north. There stands the snowy mountain of Kailasa, and there, clinging to its side like a loving woman, is the town of Alaka, with Ganga at its feet like her fallen veils. In the house whose portal "is graceful as Indra's bow",2 in the garden where a pond "covered with lotuses with golden hearts" spreads coolness, the Yaksha's wife, thin with sorrow, "sets out the petals of flowers on the threshold", to count the days which have passed and those which still divide her from her husband's return. His love, his home-sickness, his hope of reunion—all this he bids the cloud tell as his message.
It has been doubted whether the Ṛitu-saṃhāra, the "Seasons", another descriptive poem, is really by Kalidasa. But summer, the rains, autumn, winter, the cool season, and spring are painted in so many colours, nature is so finely observed, and the love-making of each time of the year is so delicate and so ardent that it can hardly have been written by anyone but the Slave of Kali.
A small collection of erotic stanzas, the Śṛingāratilaka, attributed to Kalidasa, recalls the Sattasai of Hala, but it has more delicacy of form and wit. Stanzas in varied metres tell again and again, but always in a new way, of the cruelty of the adored maiden. Her eyes are likened to blue lotuses (nīla, "blue-black"), her teeth to jessamine, her body to the young sprouts of plants, her heart to stone. This simile became a cliché.
Of clichés there were more and more as time went on, and the art of writing poetry became a matter of stringing them together. The lotus at night is always in love with the moon and opens its cup at the advent of the lover. The chakora bird always drinks the nectar of the moon-rays and is another name for the lover, for whom nectar is the sight of the beloved face. The bee (bhramara, "the beast with two r's") is always drunk with the honey of the flowers. The elephant in rut, mountain caves sounding with the roaring of lions, clouds swollen with rain, and a quantity of other images accepted as beautiful recur under the pens of the poets. All nature is classified in metaphors for the use of authors.
The Ghaṭa-karpara,1 the "Broken Pitcher", owes its name to the challenge which the author casts at his rivals. He undertakes to bring water in a broken pitcher to anyone who shall surpass him in the art of versifying. Its only interest is the use of the yamaka, the repetition of the same syllable in different combinations with varying meanings. Kalidasa excelled in this device; Ghatakarpara (the author has the same name as his work) abuses it.
Since I have had to mention Hala and erotic poetry again, let me here add that this type, which Kalidasa merely touched (if the Śringāra-tilaka is indeed his work), was much practised in India. What Hala was for Prakrit, and Amaru soon after him, Kalidasa was for Sanskrit.
The Amaru-śataka ("Hundred Stanzas of Amaru") is rightly admired for its delicacy and elegance. Sometimes, too, the author can embody a profound observation in a short stanza. India, which has little to show in painting comparable to the Persian miniatures, seems to have confined its genius to this type of miniature, in which the colours are words. It is needless to say how many imitations these stanzas inspired. They were quoted in anthologies and explained by commentators centuries afterwards, but nothing is known of their author or his date. For a time it was thought that they could be ascribed to Sankara, the great Vedantine philosopher of the end of the eighth century. The story is that he was a rigid ascetic who took the shape of Amaru, King of Kashmir, to make experiments in love with his hundred wives. The name of Amaru, however, does not appear in the list of the Kings of Kashmir. All that we can say is that the author of the Śataka was very much a man of his age, an age of amorous poetry and ready smiles. His heroes are passionate but frivolous. The great sorrow is separation—not the breach caused by psychological complications so dear to the West, but departure on a journey, on business as we should say now. Homesickness brings tears to the eyes of women and men alike. Weary of waiting by the roadside, the desolate lady, as evening falls, goes slowly home, when a sudden thought leaps to her mind, "Perhaps he is coming now!" She turns quickly, but there is nothing on the great road.
There are the same ideas and the same pictures as in the Sattasai, and the same pessimism, hidden under laughter, or rather the same resignation in the presence of the fragility of happiness.
We now come to one of the most gifted men that India has produced, and one who has the further merit of being historical and datable.
I-tsing wrote in 691 that forty years before there had lived in India a grammarian of great renown, Bhartrihari by name. The features which he describes in the grammarian are what we expect to find in the poet. Bhartrihari is said to have renounced the world seven times and to have seven times returned to it. One of the last times, as he entered the convent, he had his carriage kept near in order that he might escape as soon as the temptation became too strong and the resolve of renunciation too weak. In a line quoted by I-tsing he accuses himself of being the toy of his double inclination.
On the strength of these indications Max Müller1 concluded that the grammarian and the author of the delightful Śṛingāra-śataka are one and the same person. H. Oldenberg doubts it,2 and so does Winternitz.3 According to I-tsing, Bhartrihari was a zealous Buddhist. Yet the Bhartrihari of the Śataka prostrates himself at the feet of Siva. Possibly the Chinese pilgrim, rather a simple-minded soul, having heard stories of the life of the great poet, thought that they referred to the grammarian. In that case, Bhartrihari's date would still be uncertain. Three series of "Hundreds" are ascribed to Bhartrihari—Śringāra-śataka "Love", Nīti-śataka "Wisdom", and Vairāgya-śataka "Renunciation." The first collection is certainly the work of one man. The other two may have been only a compilation, but tradition is unanimous in making Bhartrihari their sole author.
According to H. Oldenberg, if Amaru is the poet of the moment of passion, Bhartrihari gives us the philosophy of love. It is a very simple philosophy: woman is joy and sorrow, trouble and appeasement. It is she who stops us on the way by her glances. It would take less long to traverse the ocean of suffering which is our life if woman did not complicate our voyage and turn us from our goal. The torch of wisdom burns clear until lovely eyes throw their radiance into it. Yet what is the highest object of our power of sight? To see woman. Of our faculty of hearing? To hear her speak. Of our thought? Her youth and beauty. But the continual thirst of love brings disappointment. Unsatisfied in himself, the poet seeks the fault in woman, the eternal culprit. "In this dirty little girl, fool and liar that she is, what is it that I have adored?" he cries. From loving too much, he ceases to love at all, and takes refuge in asceticism, but not for long. It is very Indian, this oscillation between two poles, frantic desire to live and complete abnegation, and so is the exaltation of love for love's sake and the amorous cult, not of a particular woman, Beatrice or Laura, but of woman as such, provided she be young and beautiful. One is inclined to ask, "But what about other interests? Are there none?" The strife of contrary passions and great conflicts did not lend themselves to artistic presentation.
Bhartrihari was the first Indian poet to be known in Europe. The Dutch missionary Abraham Roger, who wrote the first Sanskrit grammar (1651), translated the Nītiśataka and the Vairāgya-śataka. These two poems are already gnomic in character. This form was practised in India and was introduced into every other form. The Vedas offer examples of it. The great epics are full of maxims. Aphorisms travelled through India, and things well said (subhāshita) were appreciated. For her talent in saying them aptly, Yama grants Sāvitrī her husband's life. There is no work in Indian literature in which general ideas do not occupy an important place. Aphorisms are introduced into the dialogue of plays; the chapters of novels begin and end with them; columns of aphorisms serve as a framework to the short tales of the Pañchatantra. India loves the general; the particular serves only to illustrate it. A cultivated man should be able to quote on every occasion one of the general thoughts of which he finds a large selection in the anthologies.1 Without that, "his tongue would be but a piece of meat hidden in his mouth for fear the crows should take it."
Before Bhartrihari's time, a Sataka of Chanakya, the minister of a Maurya king, was known. This Chanakya, who was surnamed Kautilya, from kuṭila, "tortuous", is the supposed author of the Arthaśāstra (above p. 92). Not content with the prose work in which he had set forth his Machiavellian doctrines, he expressed his acute observation of life in verse. "One must not be particular," he says, "about three things—food, money, and one's own wife. Be exacting about three others—study, penance, and alms." "Empty is the house without children, empty the country without parents, empty the heart of a fool, and poverty is emptiness itself."
Bhartrihari, although perhaps less witty than the supposed Chanakya, far surpasses him in elegance and beauty in his philosophic verse. He was, therefore, often imitated. Silhana of Kashmir, some centuries later, carried the asceticism of the Vairāgya-śataka still further in his Śānti-śataka, which treats of the nothingness of existence.2
From the seventh century we have, besides the Sataka of Bhartrihari, an Ashṭaka (eight stanzas) of Mayura. The subject is a young woman at a tryst and her return. But this slight theme is enough to allow the author to display profound knowledge of the Kāmaśāstras and to give proof of an extra-ordinary command of language. The story goes that Mayura sang of his own daughter, and she, taking offence, cursed him, whereupon the gods punished him with a skin-disease. Having sinned by poetry, it was by poetry that he was absolved. A hymn to the Sun won his pardon—the Sūryaśataka, which is ingenious in style and often original in similes. Aruna, the "Red", Surya's charioteer, is likened to the manager of a theatre reciting the prologue, and the series of parallels is continued. It is they which, together with the ornaments of style, account for the popularity of the poem.
The Indian imagination liked to brighten the drab realities of biography by ascribing the most extraordinary histories to authors. When Bilhana of Kashmir won the public favour by his Chaurīsurata-pañchāśikā, a whole legend was embroidered on the associations awakened by the word chaurī. In Sanskrit chaura means "thief". The title, which means "The Joys of Clandestine Love", suggested the secret loves of a lady of high degree with a man of lower station but rare intelligence. It was accordingly related that Bilhana was the lover of the King's daughter, was found out, and was condemned to death. Led to the place of execution, he breathed his despair and love in fifty burning stanzas, perhaps too vivid for our taste. Each begins "Only to-day (I held her in my arms, and so on)". The King, who was fortunately a good judge of literature, was enchanted, and gave the poet a free pardon and his daughter. One need not add that Bilhana himself had no notion that he was the hero of this stirring episode.
He wrote a historical work in verse on the deeds of the princes of the Chalukya dynasty. It contains a kernel of truth, for the inscriptions confirm it, but it is full of myth. Indra blows his conch and flowers fall from the sky at the birth of a king. At the same time the author describes the village in which he was born charmingly, and with a truth which strikes one even now. He had studied all the science of his day, travelled to improve his mind, and taken part in poetic contests with success. Established at last at the court of King Vikramaditya VI (1076-1127), he obtained from that prince the title of Vidyāpati, "Master of Science," and the privilege of the blue umbrella. His wife was a lady of rank.
The Kuṭṭanīmata, or "Bawd's Lessons", of the end of the eighth century is pornographic.1 An old professional teaches a beginner how she should behave in order to seem to be in love with a rich young man. So the work is didactic in its kind. The author, Damodaragupta, was the chief minister of Jayapida, King of Kashmir. At the same court had lived Vamana, who wrote on the theory of literature and was the first to raise the question of the definition of poetry and answered it rather mechanically, starting from style. The harlot of the Kuṭṭanīmata is an actress, and this work shows what an important place the theatre had in the life of the Indian upper classes.
There were many works like the Kuṭṭanīmata. Licentious in appearance, they have a moral purpose—to warn the reader against dangers and abuses. They throw a new light on the position of certain classes of society, such as courtesans, bogus ascetics, and strolling singers.
A work of this type, but of a severer tone, is the "Dialogue of Suka and Rambha on Love and the Highest Knowledge".1 Rambha the harlot speaks in a lively strain, full of imagery, of the pleasures of love, and ends by saying, "Vain has been the life of a man who has not tasted the joys of love." Every verse of Rambha is answered by the man, Suka, in a contrary verse, which he ends with "Vain has been the life of a man who has not sought wisdom and knowledge". The author and date of this work are not known.
A word on the love sung by these too numerous erotic poets. It is sensual love. It is not conducted without scratchings, bitings, and other proofs of ardent passion. A woman, seeing fresh nail-marks on her lover's chest, knows that he has been unfaithful to her. A lover's lips are so bitten that he cannot pronounce certain sounds, and the poet has to use all his skill to avoid giving his hero words containing labials, b, p, etc., to speak. Lovely damsels bend under the weight of their bosoms, and can only hold themselves up by means of the counterweight of their hips, and so on. The frolics of the lovers, too, seem over-lascivious; at least they are exhibited with much frankness.
But this poetry does not deal entirely with amorous adventures. The love of husband and wife inspires the poets as often. Tender affection ennobles sensuality and respect gives dignity to what would otherwise be trivial love-making. In addition, there are the elegance of expression, the wit, the delicacy, and the vast culture possessed by the representatives of this aristocratic literature.
Eroticism is not far removed from mysticism, which in many poets is simply inverted eroticism. This is all that can be said of such poems as the Chaṇḍī-kucha-pañchāśikā, "Fifty Stanzas on the Breasts of Chandi." Chandi is a goddess, otherwise called Uma, Devi, Durga, Parvati, Kali, etc., the wife of Siva and the divine Mother of the World (Jaganmātṛi), worshipped as the common origin of Vishnu and Siva. She is the energy (śakti) of her husband, and her worshippers, who are numerous at the present day, call themselves Śaktas.1 The hymns to Devi, which were unknown in the old days of the Vedas and Brāhmanas, are the product of early Hinduism. These still deserve the name of literature, which can no longer be applied to the somewhat later Buddhist stotras or the dhāraṇīs, the invocations and spells of degenerate, popular Buddhism, from which the Tantra sect sprang.2
To the great Vedantine philosopher Sankara, of the end of the eighth century, are ascribed certain religious poems entitled Devyaparādhakshamāpaṇa, "Prayer to Devi for Pardon of Sins." They are imbued with burning piety and a truly filial love. Each stanza of this poem of penitence and hope ends with the refrain, "For a bad son is born often, but there never was a bad mother."3 This devotion is the more remarkable because Sankara as a philosopher is an absolute monist and declares in one poem that he never bows to any god.
A celebrated poem, at once religious and erotic, is the Gīta-govinda,4 the "Herdsman (Krishna) in Song", of Jayadeva. Jayadeva lived at the end of the twelfth century and was contemporaneous with four other writers who adorned the court of King Lakshmanasena in Bengal. These "five jewels" are better supported by history than the earlier nine to whom Kalidasa is supposed to have belonged. Yet legend has not failed to obscure the true facts of Jayadeva's life. It is said that he had been a Yogi in his youth and had wandered about India in that capacity until a Brahman made him marry his daughter.
The Gīta-govinda is a lyrical drama, which tells how Radha in jealousy left her faithless husband Krishna, but in her solitude did not cease to think of him, how she opened her heart to a woman friend, how Krishna sported with the herd-girls, how in spite of all he still loved Radha and his love for her increased, and how the two were at last reunited. It is doubtless based on some popular rite in honour of Krishna and has a certain dramatic quality, but is not written as a play for acting. It is composed of songs which are obviously meant to be danced; the sounding lines have the rhythm of a ballad and sway like a dance. The stanza introducing each part states in a few words the subject of the coming song. Thus, Radha's companion sings of the dances of Krishna with the herd-girls. Three intermediate lines speak of spring and announce a new song, in which the companion depicts the gaiety of the herd-girls, their delight in the young god, and their calls to love. Again the stanza, probably intended to be spoken, tells in the form of a prologue that Radha, tormented by jealousy, has retired into the shadow, and the two following songs, placed in Radha's mouth, complain of the unfaithfulness of her beloved while they express an ardent desire to be able to forgive him. So it goes on till the reunion of the lovers and a eulogy of Krishna, the one god.
Some have seen mystic allusions in this poem. Radha, they say, is the soul, fallen into confusion, chaos, and suffering as soon as it ceases to be in union with the divine. The return to that union is supreme happiness. There is no doubt that the work has a religious character; it is inspired by bhakti, amorous devotion to Krishna. But of symbolism there is no trace. Jayadeva is content to be a poet without aiming at philosophy.
He can pour the fire of passion into a faultless mould. Now short words follow in quick succession, and again there is a slow, measured movement of solemn compounds. Alliteration and rhyme add charm to this musical invention, sweeter than anything known before Jayadeva's time. Here the nobility of Kalidasa's lyricism comes into full flower.
1 Cf. G. Huth, Die Zeit des Kâlidâsa, Berlin, 1890, and B. Liebich, in Indogermanische Forschungen, 1912, pp. 198 ff.
1 Nevertheless, the opinions of Indian philologists were divided. Some thought that it was indecent to describe the amorous antics of the gods, as it would be to describe one's own parents in such a situation (Wisiternitz, iii, pp. 57 and 58 n.). Such is the opinion of Mammata, a Kashmiri Brahman of the eleventh century, who wrote a Kāvyaprakāśa. He holds that the true art of poetry consists in not saying everything but leaving much to be understood. This is the theory of dhvani "tone" and by extension "allusion". Anandavardhana, a Kashmiri of the ninth century, who was the true creator of the theory of dhvani, is more indulgent. In his remarkable Dhvanyāloka, a commentary on Udbhata's book on rasa, he points to the eighth book of the Kumāra-sambhava as showing how much poetic talent and command of language are needed to escape the difficulties of an improper subject. Yet the rules which he laid down in the Dhvanyāloka are very strict. True poetry, he says, is that in which the "unexpressed" plays the chief part. His very pure notion of poetry was somewhat distorted after his time. The word vakrokti "oblique" or even "tortuous speech was invented to designate what should be the greatest quality of a work of imagination. This was going contrary to the master's intention, and poetry was reduced to tricks of language.
1 Translated into French by L. Renou, Paris, 1927.
1 Cf. Hari Chand, CCXCVII.
1 Translated into English by C. Cappeller, Harvard Oriental Series, xv.
1 Translated into French by Hippolyte Fauche, Paris, 1865; A. Guérinot, Paris, 1902; and Marcelle Lalou, Paris, n.d., 1920.
2 From Mlle Lalou's translation.
1 Translated into French by A. Chézy in Journal Asiatique, 1828.
1 India: what can it teach us?
2 Die Literatur des alten Indien, Stuttgart and Berlin, 1903.
3 CCLXXXVIII, iii, p. 139.
1 O. Böhtlingk has collected two volumes of Indische Sprüche.
2 As a specimen of this gnomic poetry, sec the Bhāminī-vilāsa ("The Sport of the Fair One") of Jagannatha (seventeenth century), translated by A. Bergaigne, in Bibl. des Htes. Études, i, 1872; Victor Henry, Trente Stances du Bhâminî-Vilâsa, translated, with fragments of the unpublished commentary of Manirama, Paris, 1885.
1 Bühler, in Indian Antiquary, xiv (1885). Quoted in CCLXXXVIII, iii, p. 151.
1 Published by J. M. Grandjean (text and translation) in Annales du Musée Guimet, x (1887).
1 For the Śaktas, see Winternitz, "Die Tantras und die Religion der Śāktas," in Ost-asiatische Zeitschr., iv (1916); Sir J, Woodroffe, Shakti and Shâkta, London, 1920; Ellen and Arthur Avalon (Sir J. Woodroffe), Hymn to the Goddess, London, 1913.
2 Cf. CCLXXXVIII, ii, pp. 200 277; A. Barth, Religions de l'Inde, III.
3 CCLXXXVIII, iii, p. 123.
4 Translated into French by G. Courtillier, with a preface by S. Lévi, Paris, 1904.