Makaranda Madhukar Anand Mahendale Festshrift

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 188

Ecological Awareness in Indian Tradition
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above all, bereft of memory, steadfast love and full of fickle passions.
One poet wonders, like the Duke in Shakespeare's As You Like It, why people seek to wallow in the dirt of city life and go on begging and bowing before vile people when all good things are waiting for them in the forest glades. Nature is to them a living and loving character, a symbol of intense and deep love.
In fact nature was the chief raw material of the Indian poet, who usually treated it in relation to man and rarely described it for its own sake. The phenomena of seasons, day and night, birds and beasts and flowers are employed to frame human emotions or are personified as counterparts of the human subjects of the poet. There are umpteen literary conventions or symbols to this effect. Throughout this literature a deep love of nature is implicit, especially in Kālidāsa, who for this reason among others, has a higher reputation in the West than any other ancient Indian poet. In Indian thought a sharp line is not drawn between the worlds of man and nature. The Universe is an ordered Whole of which man is a part. Imbued with the spirit that is transcendent and immanent, the same life-giving essence that is in man, circulated in every part of it. The propelling force, therefore, in Kālidāsa's poetry is to see nature, not as a setting for man and a backdrop to the human drama, but to perceive it as possessing a life of its own and as related to the human world in many complex ways.
This is very true. To Kālidāsa, not only the seasons, but all nature in all its aspects and moods, was a living being. To him it became a vivid and sentient replica of the human world—expecting and giving love in abundance, displaying intense emotions and attachments. This might be the cause why Lord Siva in his eight-fold form (Astamurti) appealed to him. That form embraces the whole universe. In the absence of this attitude he could not have written several of his beautiful pieces. In fact the ever-changing charms of the seasons, as also the beauty of rivers, ocean, mountains, sunrise and sunset have become a must for Sanskrit epic poetry. Stray verses also display a rich love of nature, though they frame it in the span of only four lines.
It must be mentioned, however, that attitudes change from poet to poet and writer to writer and nature has been viewed by different poets and