Makaranda Madhukar Anand Mahendale Festshrift

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

Page 189

178
Leela Arjunwadkar
Makaranda
writers from diverse points of view-pragmatic, realistic, idealistic.
Kautilya, not a poet but a third century B. C. theoretician, took an entirely pragmatic view of nature when he wrote on the science of statecraft. From that point of view he recommends how sites should be selected for the capital, for the royal palace, how particular plants and trees as also birds and animals be kept to protect the king from fire, poison and snakes. He tells us about how the king should use rivers, mountains, forests, lakes, trees to fix up boundaries. How, further, he should use barren land and develop special sanctuaries for elephants and deer. He has sharply decried addiction to hunting. But that is because it spoils the king, not because of any ecological awareness. In such details, we find, Kautilya is utilizing every detail and contour of nature for the benefit of the king.
I have heard of a manuscript on the science of animals and birds (Mrgapaksiśāstra), a remarkable text of the 14th century. A king, who was fond of hunting, felt one day that if such unrestricted hunting continued all the beasts and birds would get destroyed. So he asked a Jain Pandit in his court to write down their descriptions, habits, habitats etc. This is a remarkable piece of awareness for nature. The fear of that king came into reality during the one hundred and fifty years of British rule, when because of too much hunting tigers, cheetas etc. actually became endangered or extinct species.
Nature descriptions in the Rāmāyana are generally realistic or photographic. But there, too, the mental frame of the person concerned is not entirely absent. Kālidāsa's nature pictures emerge as if from the brush of a painter, but still nature is a living reality for him. He expresses human emotions in terms of nature, and natural phenomena in terms of human emotions.
Even in stray verses we have ideas and figures of speech that prove how macrocosm and microcosm merge into each other. In fact most of the imagery of Sanskrit poets, be they epic poets, dramatists or poets composing stray verses, is inspired and shaped by nature. If sun, moon, stars, sky, clouds, mountains, rivers, ocean, birds, animals, flowers—especially lotus,-fruits, trees etc. were to be left out, what would the poets do? Several figures of speech in Sanskrit literature mostly derived their material from nature.