Shakuntala

The spine is tight and its turns are required. The curse in the interlude before the fourth act is the hinge: without it the rejection of the fifth act is a calculated denial, and the play would be another play. The ring, lost at a bathing place and found in a fish, is required to turn forgetting into memory; the son of the seventh act is required because the recognition must pass to the next generation and the dynasty. The farewell of the fourth act does nothing for the plot and is required by what the play knows: the cost of leaving a world. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is slack in two places: the king’s lovesickness talked over with the jester in the second act, which delays more than it builds, and Mātali’s summons to fight Indra’s demons in the sixth, a device to carry the king to heaven rather than a necessity.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Love begun as desire, in a glance at a girl watering trees, is not yet love; it is completed through loss, forgetting and recognition, and its substance is memory. A stanza of the fifth act says it: “ramyāṇi vīkṣya madhurāṃś ca niśamya śabdān”
“seeing lovely things and hearing sweet sounds”, even a happy man grows restless, remembering without knowing it “jananāntarasauhṛdāni”
“the loves of other lives”. Beside it the court discloses a social fact plainly: a woman alone, pregnant and without a token, has no standing against a king’s word, and the priest proposes to keep her until the child’s marks decide. Held off the top by the curse itself: the epic’s king chose to forget; this king is made to, and the play’s truth about power is softened to absolve him.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Elevation is frequent and high, nearly all of it beauty and tender pathos. The first act opens with the hunted deer looking back over its shoulder at the chariot, and turns to Shakuntala in her bark dress, of whom the king says “kim iva hi madhurāṇāṃ maṇḍanaṃ nākṛtīnām”
“what is not an ornament to lovely forms?”. The fourth act is the summit the tradition itself named: Kaṇva’s “yāsyaty adya śakuntaleti”
“Shakuntala goes today”, the trees giving her ornaments, the cuckoo’s call taken as the forest’s leave, the fawn she reared holding her hem. The fifth rises to the king’s unexplained longing and to Shakuntala’s anger; the seventh to the descent from Indra’s heaven and the boy dragging a lion cub by its mane. Held below the top: there is little dread, and the elevation thins in the second act and in the jester’s business.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Myth built, and built at three depths. The story is the origin of a dynasty: the boy Sarvadamana of the seventh act will be Bharata, from whom the land takes the name it still bears in its own languages. The plot is the archetype of the token and the recognition, the kin of Odysseus’ scar and the folktale’s ring, made the play’s title and its machinery. And the three worlds are a fall from a garden and a return to a higher one: Shakuntala, a nymph’s daughter by a sage, raised by birds and then by an ascetic, sister to the creepers she waters, is taken from nature into the world of law and power, cast out, and restored where gods live. It stays particular: the friends’ teasing, the bee at her face, the fawn. Held a step from the top because the cosmic frame of the seventh act is announced by the gods’ explanation more than earned by the action.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The inheritance is the Shakuntala episode of the Mahābhārata and the codified drama of the Nāṭyaśāstra, with Bhāsa’s plays and the courtly lyric behind them. The turn is real. A tale of law and legitimacy, in which Shakuntala argues her own case at length and a voice from heaven confirms her, becomes a drama of interior life: desire, forgetting, remorse and recollection, carried by the curse and the ring, generally taken to be Kālidāsa’s own additions. The lyric’s world of nature is brought fully into the drama, so that the fourth act is a farewell to a landscape. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is that the stake was bounded: the play keeps the prologue, the jester, the hero of royal birth, the interludes and the benediction, and fulfils the theory of rasa rather than defying it. It perfects a form; it does not reorganise one, and its change to the epic, absolving the king, is a softening more than a wager.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The play is built on the two modes of the erotic rasa as the theory names them, love in union and love in separation, and the structure is the passage from the first through the second to a third, union regained with a son. Told as narrative, as in the epic, the story is a lawsuit. Staged, the audience holds in view what the persons do not know, that the king does not lie, and the court scene becomes a tragedy of forgetting rather than of bad faith. The languages carry the social order: the king’s Sanskrit and Shakuntala’s Prakrit meet across a rank the play is about. The stanzas stop time for the moments the play must hold: the deer, the farewell, the longing. Held below the top because the form is in great part the inherited form, and much of what it knows the genre already knew how to say.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence rather than promise. The play has been commented on in Sanskrit for many centuries, Rāghavabhaṭṭa’s commentary among them, and was a set text of the tradition; and it has been read again in each new frame: by Jones, Herder and Goethe as a revelation of the East; by Rabindranath Tagore, in his essay on the play, as a passage from an earthly to a heavenly paradise; by Romila Thapar, in Śakuntalā: Texts, Readings, Histories (1999), as a text whose readings track the histories of its readers, from the epic’s heroine to the colonial ideal of Indian womanhood. Its open questions are real: whether the curse excuses the king or indicts him; whether Shakuntala’s anger in the fifth act or her silence in the seventh is the play’s last word on her; what it thinks of the hermitage it leaves. Held below the high band because those questions are fewer than the greatest works keep open, and its formal depth is mapped.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the Sanskrit literature of its centuries: the two epics, Bhāsa’s dramas, the fragments of Aśvaghoṣa’s, the Nāṭyaśāstra and the courtly lyric. The intrinsic force is the setting of a measure: after Kālidāsa the Sanskrit drama and poem were measured against him, and the tradition’s own verse puts this play first among plays and its fourth act first in it. That is the consummation of a form more than its reorganisation, which holds the force a step down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it runs through two literatures. In India, the model of the nāṭaka, and a story continuously retold, by Tagore and in cinema, V. Shantaram’s Shakuntala (1943) among the films. In Europe, Jones’s Sacontalá; or, The Fatal Ring (1789) and Georg Forster’s German (1791) made it the first major Sanskrit work most European readers met; Goethe wrote his epigram on it and modelled the prologue of Faust on its stage manager’s; Gautier’s ballet Sacountala (1858) and Alfano’s opera followed.

Score: 8.7 / 10

About one and a half millennia, the text whole. Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the play survives entire, in seven acts, in many manuscripts and in more than one recension. The recensions are the charge: the action is certain and nothing is fragmentary, but which wording and how many stanzas are Kālidāsa’s is not settled, and every edition chooses among versions. The charge is small, about two tenths against the usual figure for the span. Presence: continuous in India, as a text of the Sanskrit curriculum and commentary for over a millennium and as a story known far beyond those who read Sanskrit; and, since 1789, translated into the major languages of Europe and Asia and staged repeatedly. Outside India its presence has narrowed since its Romantic peak to the academy and the theatre, which holds it below the top. Fabric: nothing to charge beyond the variants.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Judged on the original as far as it can be weighed; the metres are known here by name and pattern, not by ear, and the Prakrit passages are not read in the original, a limit of this reading and not charged to the play. The making is load-bearing. The stanzas compress an image and a feeling into one figure: the deer, the lotus lovely though wound with moss, the bee the king envies. The tradition’s own saying gives Kālidāsa the simile: “upamā kālidāsasya”
“the simile is Kālidāsa’s”. The prose is quick and social: the friends’ teasing, the jester’s complaints about the hunt, the policemen and the fisherman squabbling over the ring, where the low comedy is as finished as the lament. The dramaturgy is exact: the curse placed in an interlude so that the audience hears it and Shakuntala does not; the friends’ choice to keep it from her; the ring lost offstage and reported; the stage manager carried off by a song as the king will be by a deer.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the police beating the fisherman for the ring he found in a carp’s belly, in the interlude of the sixth act, and the gods’ explanation in Mārīca’s heaven in the seventh. One law governs both: a token passes through every order of the world, low and high, and brings what was forgotten back into its place; desire is answered by restraint and returns as duty fulfilled. The natural world obeys the same law as the human: the trees give the bride her jewels, the creeper is married to the mango, and the bee at her face in the first act is the king’s rival in the painting of the sixth. The range is wide: hermitage idyll, palace comedy, a court of law, the sky. Charged for two strains: the curse, unknown to the king and kept from Shakuntala, suspends the moral law of the action at its centre, so that guilt and suffering fall where no one chose them; and Indra’s war enters from outside the play’s world.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what one seven-act play holds, and it holds much. Consciousness: the king’s longing and remorse, Shakuntala’s shame and anger, Kaṇva’s grief. The family: a foster-father and a daughter, a marriage, a son, the question of an heir. The state: the king’s duty to his subjects and to the hermits, the sixth share, the court and its priest. Labour and the low: the fisherman and the police. The sacred: the sages, the curse, the gods, the benediction to Śiva. The natural order: the hermitage’s plants and animals as kin. The cosmos: the earth seen from heaven. They are integrated, not listed: one bond, lost and recovered, passes through them all. Held below the higher band because history is absent as an agent and the state is seen from the throne only.

Score: 8.4 / 10