Appointment with Kalidasa

Author(s): G K Bhatt
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 53

3 GLIMPSES OF PERSONALITY
A perpetual handicap in the study of Sanskrit Literature is the lack of information about the personal life of a poet and of the times in which he lived. The Sanskrit poets are very reticent about themselves. What tradition or legendary accounts tell about them is either scanty or often distorted by hearsay, imagination of the mistaken notion of heroworship. Some exceptions do occur. Bhavabhūti or Bāņa write about their family and their childhood. The prologue of Südraka's play provides some distinct details about this king-poet. The dramatists Jayadeva and, more than him, Rajasekhara sing their own praises. Scanty as these details are they give, at least, an introduction to a poet. Kālidāsa seems to have risen to pre-eminence in his own lifetime; and later he became an imortal poet of Sanskrit language. But Kālidāsa bas left only his name behind. The only poet who outdid Kalidasa in this kind of reticence appears to be Bhāsa who omitted even his own name from his dramatic prologues.
Why should this happen ? Acquiring fame is one of the urges of writing. Writers of Sanskrit Poetics like Mammața endorse it.1 Kālidāsa could not have been averse to fame. He pleads in his prologue to his first play that old is not always gold, and a new poet must have his chance and must be judged strictly on literary merit.2 He admits at the beginning of his Raghuvamsa that he is soliciting literary fame.3 King Dilipa, offering his own body to the Lion as a substitute for Nandini, the daughter of the celestial Cow, begs him to be merciful to the body of his fame'. It is possible to imagine that Kālidāsa too may have prayed in his youth to the God of Death to spare his yaśaḥsarira : Any way, Time seems to have heard this unuttered praver to bestow immortality on Kālidasa's poetic glory! Silence of the Sanskrit poets about their personal life; therefore, remains a puzzle. It cannot be fully accounted by a poet's modesty. For, even if modesty be a striking virtue of a poet like Kālidāsa, there are other Sanskrit poets who are egotistical enough to blow their own trumpets; and if they checked their tongue or their pen, there are their admiress who would place them at the top and declare them as incarnations of the Goddess of Poetry. There is, of course, some truth in the observation that Sanskrit poets have no sense of time or history; if a few have, it is partial only and exceptional. It may mean, philosophically, that the Sanskrit poets cared more for the survival of their literary work rather than for the knowledge of its authorship or the time when it was produced; after all, men must die; and Time never remains stand-still; what Time and Death cannot touch is an outstanding literary work; Time is endless and the Earth is vast to safeguard and preserve a work of supreme art. Such an attitude to