Appointment with Kalidasa

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

Page 81

Appointment with Kalidasa
and love for Siva. But Kalidasa's mind is not unduly partial and sectarian, as his praises of other gods clearly show. Kalidasa's devotion to Siva must, therefore, be taken only as a personal choice prompted by an individual religious faith. Considered from philosophical and poetic angle the divine form of Siva is really enticing. In the Trinity Siva is the deity of destruction (samhara); but he is 'siva', that is, full of auspiciousness and bliss. Accustomed to live in the dreadful inauspicious cemetery grounds, he is the incarnation of the auspicious and the holy. The most beggarly, this god has unlimited splendour. So naive and innocent, his generosity of heart is boundless. He has such love of pleasure that Uma is his better half not in a figurative sense but literally; and yet he is a Yogi par excellence. As a supreme exponent of art, he is the father of tandava and through Uma of lasya dance; in his half-male-half-female form the art of natya has achieved a visible shape. This extra-ordinary form of Siva, full of mutual opposites, and yet firing imagination, stirring emotion and dazzling intellect, has grasped by Kalidasa.14 The characteristic of creating new life and fresh urge of vigour, been lovingly which the union of Siva and Parvati symbolises and which Kalidasa describes in the story of Kumarasambhava, must have a special attraction for the poet's mind.
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The personalistic form of god can be traced to very ancient days. The thinkers of the Upanisads conceived an abstract, impersonal first principle, called it Brahman, and established it as the Ultimate Reality and the ground of all existence. The unification of the two aspects, personal and impersonal, was probably achieved in a convincing way by the Gita, so that the threefold cosmic function of origination of the universe, its preservation and annihilation for the purpose of a new creation, though attributed to three separate gods, the Trinity really was a unity of three cosmic.functions of one basic principle. This view of Unity, One Godhead, was intellectually staisfying and emotionally appealing. It appears that Kalidasa was greatly influenced by this philosophical doctrine of triune unity and particularly by the teachings of Gitä. In the benedictory verse (nåndi) of the vikagnimitra he described Śiva as the supreme goal of man's devotion; in the Sakuntala he enumerated the eight visible forms (atta-tanu) of Siva, thereby proving that the presence of god is not a matter only of Scriptural testimony, logical inference or transcendental perception available by Yoga, but also a matter of understanding and direct perception. It was, in a way, a poetic answer to the atheists and the sceptics. In the nandi verse of the Vikramorvaliya he turned to Vedanta and asserted the unity of the impersonal, non-dualistic First Principle and the personalistic One Godhead. That the Unity breaks into three aspects is stated in the description The One Form split itself into three', which comes in the Kumarasambhava 15 and, more distinctly, in the Prayer addressed to Visņu in the Raghuvamda,16 Rama is conceived as an avatara of Visņu. God descended on earth to kill Ravana; He consented to be born, although Total and Self-sufficient in Himself, for the purpose of saving the world from the tyranny of the unrighteous and as a favour to the distressed mankind.17 Kalidasa writes,