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Supreme Theme: Srngära or Love
101
est the sacrificial faggots, flowers and fruits ; make preparations for the daily worship and the morning and evening prayers and offerings; the girls were required to water the trees in and about the hermitage, fetch water from river or water-reservoirs, help in preparing meals for the aśrama residents, and so on. The learning of lessons was accompanied by such daily discipline. If after completing the course of education a particular pupil wanted to lead an ascetic and celibate life there was no bar. But it is obvious that most of the pupils took their preceptor's blessing and entered the householder's stage of life. In the restrained and disciplined atmosphere of the contemporary tapovana or aśrama the pupils were principally devoted to their studies and to imbibing the moral and cultural discipline inculcated by the teachers. In this sense a tapovana could not be an upavana. But it does not imply that the elders taught the young generation to suppress and kill natural impulses and emotions. Were it so, the gurukulas and aśramas would have been schools for turning out {anyāsins and yoginis. The fact, on the contrary, is that the initiation and training to love creepers and flowers in nature, animals and birds, to behave with brotherly feeling and affection with one and all that the pupils got here, both by precept and example, was apt to prove to be a noble foundation of their future life. This is best illustrated in the life of Sakuntalā herself. Kālidāsa has nowhere repudiated the love that further leads to married life. No character in the Śakuntala has even covertly suggested that it was a terrrible mistake on the part of Sakuntalā to respond naturally to the demand of her body and mind, and that, therefore, she rightly deserved the terrible punishment. The entire evidence of the play is against the interpretation of error, punishment and sublimation as the theme of the poet. The Vedānta-biassed approach is an after-thought, and a construction totally irrelevant to the design, purpose and intention of the artist.
The witerpretation put by the above approach on the curse of Durvāsas is similarly twisted to suit its trend of philosophy and confuses the basic issues. Sakuntala was not aware of the arrival of Durvāsas in Kaņva's hermitage and that is why she did not go forward to welcome the guest. And she was not aware of any one's arrival because, we are told by the dramatist, Dusyanta had left for his capital the same morning15 and Sakuntalā was experiencing the fresh pangs of separation from her recently married husband. Though she was physically present in the āśrama her heart was not there16. If, therefore, in this condition of mind she did not hear the sage, is it a serious offence ? And whom was she thinking about, apparently neglecting the sage ? Was she not thinking of her husband only ? 'The anxiety about her husband has made her unmindful of her own person; how could she then be aware of an uninvited guest ? This is the observation of Sakuntala's companions. The critics of the spiritual approach have not the eyes, apparently, to see the dramatic situation created by Kālidāsa or the ears to hear the words of the companions. They would like to take the curse as a punishment to Sakuntalā for neglecting her duty of atithi -satkāra. Which Śästra imposes the penalty of terrible curse on a newly married girl
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