Appointment with Kalidasa

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

Page 58

Glimpses of Personality
The Bhojaprabandha. compiled by poet Ballalasena for king Bhoja, contains numerous stories of Kalidasa's poetic genius in completing from the given line at verse, which skill he exercised not only for pleasure but also for helping poor Brahmins who had neither the ability nor the learning to recommend themselves for royal favour and gifts.
The imaginative stories and legends with which the name of Kalidasa is surrounded in tradition imply the following details:
(i) Kalidasa was born in a Brahmin family; he was an orphan; he had no education; learning and poetic genius came to him by a miracle, by the favour of goddess Kali.
(ii) Kalidasa came to be connected with a royal family, either by relation or by formal association.
(iii) Kalidasa was a gifted poet; he would also amuse himself and give pleasure to others by playing intellectual games of poetrymaking.
(iv) He was generous in nature and helped poor Brahmins directly or through his patron-king.
(v) His private life was unsteady; he was given to pleasures of women and did not lead a precisely moral life.
(3)
There are no means or evidence in existence to enable us to evaluate the deductions which the legends and popular stories yield. In the absence of real history and reliable records for varification of any personal detail of the poet's life, the only course open to us is to construct the literary personality of the poet and to see how far it is consistent with the picture the legends and stories give.
It must, however, be remembered that the literature of a writer is not his autobiography, nor even his biography and a record of traits of his character or actual happenings in his own life. It must also be acknowledged that the personal life of a writer and the literature he creates can, sometimes, be poles asunder. DH. Lawrence, for example, who gave a rude shock to the contemporary standards of morality by his novels of sex relations, was in reality a simple and straightforward person, almost ascetic in his personal life. Bernard Shaw whose tongue-slashing at the established order of society is notorious was a deep thinker and a vegetarian like an orthodox Indian Brahmin. On the contrary, Leo Tolstoy, who is hailed as a profound philosopher and a sage in the history of literature, led a different kind of private life, as some surprising details of his personal life revealed by later research show. Accepting both these literary principles it may still be conceded that a literary creation generally takes the colours of a writer's personality. The experience which