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Supreme Theme : Srågåra or Love
95
response. On the basis of this literary and aesthetic principle, some of the open descriptive touches in the Meghadūta and the married love of Śiva-Pārvati in the Kumarasambhava could not be objectionable, at least from the angle of art. Individual taste may differ; and some would not be able to forget the religious or moral approach; but they are irrelevant in consideration of real art. The point will be clear, I hope, by looking at other examples from Kālidāsa's poetry. In the Raghuvamsa Kalidasa says that Raghu, during his military campaign, lingered over the Southern mountains Malaya and Dardura for a while to enjoy and then he crossed the Sahya in order to turn towards the west. But describing this detail with a poetic fancy and double meaning, Kalidāsa presents the Malaya--Dardura mountains as the twin breasts of the Southern Quarter, and the Sahya as the nitairba (slope; buttock) of Medini, Earth personified as a woman.5 The erotic and sexual suggestion in this descriptive touch is plain; and in the context of a military campaign which is supposed to be brimming with the heroic sentiment (virarasa), the touch of sexual love is unexpected, irrelevant from the angle of art. A verse describisng the death of Tāļakā is objectionable on a similar ground. The arrow of Rāma hit Tädakā on her heart and she passed away to the abode of Yama, the god of death; using metaphor and pun Kālidāsa has likened her death to the journey of a woman in love (abhisärika), hit by Cupid's arrow, wending her way to her lover's house. 6 This touch is uncalled for in the present context and situation. Such irrelevant erotic pictures are few in Kālidāsa's writing; mostly he adheres to the values of art. The point, therefore, is the erotic pictures would be objectionable only on the ground of art, and not for any other consideration. The objection cannot be taken against the treatment of love, but against the uncalled for, irrelevant excesses which offend aesthetic taste and response.
(2)
There is another class of critics who are, in fact, the admirers of Kalidasa. They do not openly criticise Kālidāsa's pictures of love; but they put a different construction on them so as to sublimate the emotion of love with the colour of the Vedānta. The essential point of this interpretative criticism is that in Kālidāsa's treatment of love earth is transformed into heaven, and the physical love with its natural biological urge is sublimated into a bodiless union of two spirits or souls. And the critics imply by suggestion that a poet who raises physical love to the heavenly level of spiritual love must indeed be a very great poet and a supreme artist.7
A critical spproach of this kind is the fruit of two trends of thought which need to be examined carefully. It is assumed in this approach that earthly or physical love belongs to a very low level of life; it has to be sublimated; man must rise to nobility from the mere physical level of love. Kālidāsa has done this in his literature; rather he had to do it to make his art worthwhile. This trend of thought is implicit or openly assumed in this approach. It is not beyond common knowledge that such an attitude to life is rather negative, born of the philosophy of renuncitation. And yet, a
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