Early Cultural Writings

Appendix: Alternative and Unused Passages and Fragments

Passages and Fragments - I

[An early fragment]

Kalidasa does best in more complicated & grandiose metres where his majesty of sound and subtle power of harmony have most opportunity; his treatment of the Anustubh is massive & noble, but compares unfavourably with the inexhaustible flexibility of Valmekie and the nervous ease of Vyasa.

Passages and Fragments - II

[Alternative opening to "The Historical Method"]

Kalidasa

Of Kalidasa the man we are fortunate to know nothing beyond what we can gather from the evidence of his own writings. There are many anecdotes current throughout India that have gathered around his name, some of them witty, some merely ribald, some purely strokes of scholastic ingenuity; they differ little in character from the stock facetiae which are associated with the name of famous jesters & wits like Akbar's Rajah Birbal; in any case the ascription to Kalidasa is fanciful and arbitrary. Even the date of our chief classical poet is a subject for the unprofitable ingenuity of scholars; fixed yesterday in the 11ṭḥ century B.C., today in the sixth, tomorrow in the 3d, there seems to be not even a remote prospect of any finality in the matter. Even to this day no valid reason has been alleged for questioning the traditional ascription of Kalidasa to the 1ṣṭ century B.C., a date with which nothing

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in his poetry is inconsistent; on the contrary there is much that seems to demand it.

Passages and Fragments - III

[Passages from the manuscript of "The Seasons—I: Its Authenticity" that Sri Aurobindo did not include in the published version.]

The Seasons

Early and immature work of a great poet of which the authenticity is not put beyond doubt by definite external evidence, is always the especial joy of scholars, for it gives an opening to the spirit of denial which is the life-breath of scholastic criticism. To show original scholarship by denying what the past has believed, is easy and congenial, but to establish one's originality by positive & helpful criticism is not so readily done. No one has suffered more in this respect at the hands of European scholars than Kalidasa, about whom we have no external evidence until the artificial revival of Sanscrit literature in the later centuries of the first millennium of the Christian era. Some

Kalidasa's authorship of his earliest extant poem has been first questioned in very recent times by a number of European Sanscritists. It is doubtful whether the spirit of modern criticism, restless, revolutionary, & prizing novelty and inventiveness above truth, is superior in all respects to the saner if less subtle outlook of older scholarship.

The old criticism was cautious and quiet, seldom doubting tradition, except under strong justifying reasons. Modern scholarship on the contrary is ready to pursue the most fleeting will-o'-the-wisp

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of theory across the deepest morasses of assumption and petitio principii and once in pursuit shows a radical violence and obstinacy of prejudice to which the prejudice of the conservative is vacillating and feeble. New theories are born with each revolution of the seasons and each while it lasts is dogmatically & even hotly asserted as alone consistent with sane and enlightened scholarship. The arguments which are

The Seasons is the only production included in the reasonable canon of his work which justifies the slightest doubt as to its authenticity. There is a marked difference between this and the rest of Kalidasa's admitted poetry, consisting mainly in a great inferiority of artistic execution and a far cruder yet not absolutely dissimilar verse & diction which sounds like a rough sketch for the mighty style & movement of Kalidasa. If it is not then an early work of the poet, it must be either a production of an earlier poet who influenced Kalidasa or of a later poet who imitated him. The first hypothesis is hardly credible, unless the writer died young; for it is otherwise impossible that the author of such a work as the Seasons should have executed no later & riper work of a more ambitious & enduring character. A similar difficulty attends though to a less degree the second alternative; a poet who could catch some of the finest characteristics of so great a model without slavishly copying his best work, must have had in him the capacity for much more serious and lasting accomplishment. On the other hand

The imagination of the West has not been trained to recognize that the body is an entity different and initially independent of the spirit within. Yet such a division helps materially to the proper understanding of man & is indeed essential to it unless we rule out a great mass of recorded experience as false or illusory. Each cell out of which the body is built has a life of its own and

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therefore tendencies of its own. These tendencies are largely, if not entirely determined by heredity. The spirit too comes into the womb with an individuality already determined, a future development already built up; and its struggle is to impose the law of that individuality and that development on the plasm of matter in which it has to encase itself. It is naturally attracted to birth in a race & a family where the previous dispositions are favourable to the production of a suitable body; and in the case of great minds this is oftenest where attempts at genius have occurred before, attempts which being unsuccessful have not unfrequently led to madness & physical or moral disease resulting from the refusal of the body to bear the strain of the spirit. Even from the womb it struggles to impose itself on the embryonic plasm, to build up the cells of the brain to its liking and stamp its individuality on every part of the body. Throughout childhood and youth the struggle proceeds; the spirit not so much developing itself, as developing the body into an image of itself, accustoming the body to express it & respond to its impulses as a musical instrument responds to the finger of the performer. And therefore it is that the Upanishad speaks of the body as the harp of the spirit. Hence natural gifts are much more valuable and work with much more freedom and power than acquired; for when we acquire, we are preparing fresh material for our individuality in another existence; when we follow our gifts, we are using what we have already prepared for this. In the first case we are painful & blundering learners, in the second to the extent we have prepared ourselves, masters. This process of subjecting the personality of the body to the personality of the spirit, of finding one's self, lasts for various periods with various men. But it is seldom really over before the age of 30 in men of a rich and varied genius, and even afterwards they never cease sounding themselves still farther, finding fresh possibilities, developing mightier masteries, until the encasing plasm wears away with the strain of life. The harp grows old & shabby, the strings are worn and frayed, the music deteriorates or ceases, and finally the spirit breaks & throws away its instrument and departs to assimilate its experiences and acquirements for a fresh

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existence. But that the man of genius may successfully find himself, he must have fit opportunities, surroundings, influences, training. If he is not favoured with these, the genius will remain but it will be at the mercy of its body; it will express its body and not its self. The most famous ballads, those which never perish, have been written by such thwarted geniuses. Although the influence of romanticism has made it a literary fashion to couple these ballads with Homer, yet in truth ballad-writing is the lowest form of the poetical art; its method is entirely sensational. The impact of outward facts on the body is carried through the vital principle, the sensational element in man, to the mind, and mind obediently answers the knocking outside, photographs the impression with force & definiteness. But there has been no exercise of the higher faculty of understanding, considering, choosing, moulding what it receives. Hence the bare force & realism which so powerfully attracts in the best ballads; but this force is very different from the high strength and this involuntary realism very different from the artistic imaginative & self-chosen realism of great poetry. There is the same difference as separates brilliant melodrama from great tragedy. Another sign of the undeveloped self is uncertainty of work. There are some poets who live by a single poem. In some moment of exaltation, of rapt excitement the spirit throws off for a moment the bonds of the flesh and compels the body to obey it. This is what is vulgarly termed inspiration. Everyone who has felt this state of mind, can recall its main features. There is a sudden exaltation, a glow, an excitement and a fiery and rapid activity of all the faculties; every cell of the body & of the brain feeling a commotion and working in excited unison under the law of something which is not themselves; the mind itself becomes illuminated as with a rush of light and grows like a crowded and surging thoroughfare in some brilliantly lighted city, thought treading on the heels of thought faster than the tongue can express or the hand write or the memory record them. And yet while the organs of sense remain overpowered and inactive, the main organs of action may be working with abnormal rapidity, not only the speech and the hand but sometimes even the feet, so that often the writer cannot

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remain still, but has to walk up and down swiftly or if he sits down, is subject to an involuntary mechanical movement of the limbs. When this state reaches beyond bounds, when the spirit attempts to impose on the mind & body work for which they are not fitted, the result is, in the lower human organisms insanity, in the higher epilepsy. In this state of inspiration every thought wears an extraordinary brilliance and even commonplace ideas strike one as God-given inspirations. But at any rate the expression they take whether perfect or not is superior to what the same man could compass in his ordinary condition. Ideas & imaginations throng on the mind which one is not aware of having formerly entertained or even prepared for; some even seem quite foreign to our habit of mind. The impression we get is that thoughts are being breathed into us, expressions dictated, the whole poured in from outside; the saints who spoke to Joan of Arc, the daemon of Socrates, Tasso's familiar, the Angel Gabriel dictating the Koran to Mahomet are only exaggerated developments of this impression due to an epileptic, maniac or excited state of the mind; and this, as I have already suggested, is itself due to the premature attempts of the Spirit to force the highest work on the body.¹ Mahomet's idea that in his epileptic fits he went up into the seventh heaven & took the Koran from the lips of God, is extremely significant;² if Caesar & Richelieu had been Oriental prophets instead of practical & sceptical Latin statesmen they might well have recorded kindred impressions. In any case such an impression is purely sensational. It is always the man's own spirit that is speaking, but the sensational part of him feeling that it is working blindly in obedience to some

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irresistible power which is not itself, conveys to the mind an erroneous impression that the power comes from outside, that it is an inspiration and not an inner process; for it is as naturally the impulse of the body as of the mind to consider itself the self of the organism and all impressions & impulses not of its own sphere as exterior to the organism. If the understanding happens to be firm and sane, it refuses to encourage the mind in its error, but if the understanding is overexcited or is not sufficiently master of its instruments, it easily allows itself to be deluded. Now when the spirit is no longer struggling with the body, but has become its master and lord, this state of inspiration ceases to be fortuitous and occasional, and becomes more and more within the will of the man and, subject to the necessarily long intervals of repose & recreation, almost a habitually recurring state. At the same time it loses its violent & abnormal character and the outward symptoms of it disappear; the outer man remains placid and the mind works with great power and illumination indeed, but without disturbance or loss of equilibrium. In the earlier stages the poet swears & tears his hair if a fly happens to be buzzing about the room; once he has found himself, he can rise from his poem, have a chat with his wife or look over & even pay his bills and then resume his inspiration as if nothing had happened. He needs no stimulant except healthy exercise and can no longer be classed with the genus irritabile vatum; nor does he square any better with the popular idea that melancholy, eccentricity and disease are necessary concomitants of genius. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Goethe, the really great poets, were men of high sanity—except perhaps in the eyes of those to whom originality & strong character are in themselves madness.

But to arrive at this harmony requires time and effort and meanwhile the work will surely be unequal, often halting, varying between inspiration and failure. Especially will this be the case with a rich, many-sided and flexible genius like Kalidasa's.³

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Passages and Fragments - IV

[Alternative and unused passages from the manuscript of "Vikramorvasie: The Characters"]

We shall now understand why the Opsara is represented as the Hetaira of heaven. They represent all that is sensuous, attractive & voluptuous in the Universe, the element of desire which being unspiritual & non-moral, finds its sphere in the satisfaction of the sense of beauty and for that satisfaction needs freedom

Vishnu, the Almighty Spirit, incarnate in Naraian, the saint and hermit, was meditating in the voiceless solitude of mountains. Indra, always jealous of austerity & sacrifice, sent the Opsaras to allure him & enslave him to the charm of beauty & sensuousness. They came to Naraian in the wilderness and displayed before him all their beauty & every feminine art of conversation, but in vain. Naraian, with an indulgent smile smote his thigh and produced from it a woman of so shining a loveliness that the beauty of all the Opsaras together was as nothing to her beauty

According to this story Naraian, the great Rishi, who is also Vishnu & therefore the type of the World-Saviour when he comes in the guise of the Ascetic, was meditating in the Himalayas. Indra, always hostile to ascetism, always distrustful of the contemplative & philosophic mind, sent the Opsaras to break down the concentration of Naraian's mind and lure him into sensuous feeling. They were the fairest of the world-sisters who went and they displayed before Naraian their most marvellous grace and their sweetest words & arts. So the World Saviour smiled and from his thigh there sprang all the beauty of sensuous existence concentrated into a single form. Then the temptresses covered their faces with their veils & silently returned to heaven. Thus was born Urvasie, she that lay hid in the thigh of the Supreme.

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The grace of childhood seems to have had a charm for the mind of Kalidasa; for whenever he introduces a child it is with a double measure of his magical felicity and naturalness. There is a child in each of his plays; the princess Vasuluxmie in Malavica does not appear on the stage in the course of the play, yet she twice intervenes with considerable effect in its action, and each time what a delightful fragrance of home, of the beauty and innocence and loveableness of childhood, comes breathing about the scene. It is part of the marvellous genius of Kalidasa that packing beauty into each word he writes with so little he can suggest so much. In Ayus we find not quite the same beauty, but the same tender and skilful portraiture and the same loving knowledge of child nature. It seems to me that in two respects at least Kalidasa far surpasses Shakespeare, in knowledge of a mother's heart, in knowledge of the child. Shakespeare's mothers, and how few of them there are! are either null or intolerable. In only one of his plays does Shakespeare really attempt to give us a mother's heart and a child. But Arthur is not a success, he is too voulu, too much dressed up for pathos, too eloquent and full of unchildlike sentimentality & posing. Children are fond of posing and children are sentimental, but not in that way. As for the Princes in King Henry VI and Richard III no real lover of children could endure them; one feels almost thankful to the crookback for mercifully putting them out of the way. Nor is Constance a sympathetic figure; her shrieking, her rant, her selfishness, her bold and bitter volubility, could Shakespeare give us no sweeter & truer picture of a mother?

Urvasie seems at first sight to be deficient in feeling; she sends Ayus away from her at his birth & though there is an indication that she must have visited him occasionally, yet long years of separation are also implied which she appears to have borne with some equanimity. In reality she has no choice. By keeping him she would lose both husband & child, by

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Urvasie sends Ayus away from her at his birth, but it is as the choice between a mixed evil and an unmixed calamity; in sending him away she only anticipates the inevitable separation between a royal child & his parents which the necessity of education in the forest always imposed;⁴ by keeping him she would lose both him and her husband. He returns to her & the mother in her at once wakes to life "her veiled bosom heaving towards him and wet with sacred milk"; so in her joy over her son she even forgets the impending separation from the husband who is all in all to her. It is consistent with Kalidasa's conception of her that she says little or nothing to show her depth of emotion but reveals it rather by her actions & little side touches in her speech.

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