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Appointment with Kalidasa
who had absolutely no interest in the charm of material things. If the logical principle is like cause like effect', Urvasi must have been fashioned from Moon, Spring season or the god of love Madana, says Purüravas.38 The incomparable beauty of Śakuntalā and the equally wonderful story of her birth from a celestial nymph satisfy the logical mind of Duşyanta, because he is convinced that lightning which trembles with lustre cannot spring from the surface of earth.39 Duşyanta further thinks that the Creator god must have used an unusual process when he created Sakuntalā. He must have first drawn a picture of the most beautiful girl, improving it continuously till it was absolutely perfect; and when he was sure that it was perfect and flawless, then he must have breathed life into the picture and given to the world as Sakuntalā !40
It is necessary to understand this unusual sense of beauty that Kālidāsa shows. Without such an understanding one would fail to understand Kālidāsa's heroes, because the poet endows them with this sense; and then one would equally fail to understand Kālidāsa and his art. This sense of beauty has a close association with love. Both beauty and love, in their intensity, have a profound impact on some souls making them lose themselves. This is not a question of traditional or current morality. The failure to understand this is to miss the art of Kālidāsa. The miserrable loss will be our own. For, the unusual sense of beauty is a very vital trait of Kālidāsa's personality.
(c) The third trait of Kalidasa's personality is his feeling for nature. Nature has a great and very important place in Kalidasa's literature. Řtusamhära is, in a way, the story of nature's life. In the first part of his Meghadūta the numerous and varied pictures of nature throw into relief Yakşa's deep feeling of love in separation; in the second part nature serves as a golden frame to the figure of Yakşa's wife, pale and emaciated by the tortures of separated love. Kālidāsa describes, in his Kumārasambhava and Raghuvamsa, different rivers and mountains, creepers and trees, birds and beasts, with colourful imagination and striking realism; he also presents the Spring in its full grandeur.41 Nature is always present in his dramas too; and in Sukuntala nature seems to have assumed the vitality and dignity of a character. The conventional and mechanical manner in which nature descriptions occur in later Sanskrit poetry is not to be found in Kālidāsa's writing. One gets the impression that Kālidāsa did not look at nature through books or a composer's fancy but lived in close contact with nature. The poet who described the long journey of the cloud from Rāmagiri or Ramtek to Alakā with wonderful pictures of nature, who gave us a tour of the whole of India through Raghu's triumphant military campaign, who presented a version of Bhārata and of its water-drenched, fruit-loaded and harvest-green lands through the eyes of Räm travelling in the Puspaka aerial car from Lankä to Ayodhya, 42 could hardly be imagined to have been looking at nature through the window of his apartment. One must assume that either Kálidāsa travelled extensively observing different
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