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Supreme Theme : Spågåra or Love
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to our ancient writers. And how could one understand the men and women in the past age without understanding the contemporary context of time and place ? Shakespeare brought a ghost on the theatre stage and made him speak to his living son in human language; he made three witches dance round a boiling cauldron and predicted through them a future happening. Our readers are prepared, I think, to understand these scenes as consistent with public beliefs in Elizabethan England. What they apparently refuse to understand are the customs and beliefs prevailing in the past in our own country. An example is the social custom of polygamy. Does any one deny in the present day that it was an unfair social custom which created social imbalance and considerable misery ? But it existed in Kalidasa's times; how could he make it un-exist and paint monogamous heroes against the glaring social conditions? No writer can afford to run counter to the social life of which he himself is a part; and Kalidasa, uplike Bhāsa, is not a rebellious writer; he works within the existing religious and social frame. What kind of art criticism it is which fails to recognise these facts and imposes criteria of the following ages ?
We understand from social history that not only kings but rich men also pra. ctised polygamy in those days. The case of the merchant Dhanamitra mentioned in the Sākuntala leaves no doubt about it. Apart from the sanction of religion and social practice, the question of polygamy is basically rooted in economy. A modern young man may be hard put to supporting one wife; how could he plan a harem ? But it appears that in the ancient economic conditions it was possible for a man to have more than one wife either for pleasure or for sharing the occupational burden of the family; rich men could afford many wives, and a farmer too would get more wives to work his farm because that was more economical than to engage paid servants to work for him. These conditions have prevailed upto quite recent times among the agricultural and labour classes in India. There was another consideration of social prestige which a student of social history cannot ignore. It was regarded as prestigious for a man to have many women besides his wedded wife; instances could be picked up till the eighteenth century during the rule of Peshwas in Maharashtra. The point is that it is wrong to use polygamy as a weapon to strike at the heroes of Sanskrit drama. Polygamy was an established social fact of the times. Rāma, whom a modern reader may very much admire as an ideal hero and a very loving husband, had three mothers. His own father Dasaratha had three wives, and instances like that of Rāma are exceptions to the prevailing social order. Had Kālidāsa bypassed this social fact, ran far ahead of his times to please the twentieth century readers ?), his contemporary spectators would have rejected his plays as unrealistic, distorting the existing social facts. The question of personal likes and dislikes is, in this case, completely outside the design of art.
The context of the contemporary social realism discussed above will throw a different light of understanding on the women characters and their portrayal in
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