Early Cultural Writings

The Malavas

Once in the long history of poetry the great powers who are ever working the finest energies of nature into the warp of our human evolution, met together and resolved to unite in creating a poetical intellect & imagination that, endowed with the most noble & various poetical gifts, capable in all the great forms used by creative genius, should express once & for all in a supreme manner the whole sensuous plane of our life, its heat & light, its joy, colour & sweetness. And since to all quality there must be a corresponding defect, they not only gifted this genius with rich powers and a remarkable temperament but drew round it the necessary line of limitations. They then sought for a suitable age, nation and environment which should most harmonise with, foster and lend itself to his peculiar powers. This they found in the splendid & luxurious city of Ujjaini, the capital of the great nation of the Malavas, who consolidated themselves under Vikramaditya in the first century before Christ. Here they set the outcome of their endeavour & called him Kalidasa. The country of Avunti had always played a considerable part in our ancient history for which the genius, taste and high courage of its inhabitants fitted it & Ujjaini their future capital was always a famous, beautiful & wealthy city; but until the rise of Vikrama it seems to have been disunited and therefore unable to work out fully the great destiny for which the taste, genius [ ] marked it out. Moreover the temperament of the nation had not fitted it to be the centre of Aryan civilisation in the old times when that civilisation was preponderatingly moral and intellectual. Profoundly artistic and susceptible to material beauty and the glory of the senses, they had neither the large, mild and pure temperament, spiritual & emotional, of the eastern nations which produced Janaca, Valmekie & Buddha, nor the bold intellectual temperament, heroic, ardent and severe, of the

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Central nations which produced Draupadie, Bhema, Urjouna, Bhishma, Vyasa and Srikrishna; neither were they quite akin to the searchingly logical, philosophic & scholastic temperament of the half Dravidian southern nations which produced the great grammarians and commentators and the mightiest of the purely logical philosophers, Madhva, Ramanuja, Shankaracharya. The Malavas were Westerners and the Western nations of India have always been material, practical & sensuous. For the different races of this country have preserved their basic temperaments with a marvellous conservative power; modified & recombined they have been in no case radically altered. Bengal colonised from the west by the Chedies & Haihayas & from the north by Coshalas & Magadhans, contains at present the most gentle, sensitive and emotional of the Indian races, also the most anarchic, self-willed, averse to control and in all things extreme; there is not much difference between the characters of Shishupal and that thoroughly Bengali king & great captain, Pratapaditya; the other side shows itself especially in the women who are certainly the tenderest, purest & most gracious & loving in the whole world. Bengal has accordingly a literature far surpassing any other in an Indian tongue for emotional and lyrical power, loveliness of style & form and individual energy & initiative. The North West, inheritor of the Kurus, has on the other hand produced the finest modern Vedantic poetry full of intellectual loftiness, insight and profundity, the poetry of Suradasa & Tulsi; its people are still the most sincerely orthodox and the most attached to the old type of thought & character, while the Rajputs, who are only a Central Nation which has drifted westward, preserved longest the heroic & chivalrous tradition of the Bharatas. The Dravidians of the South, though they no longer show that magnificent culture and originality which made them the preservers & renovators of the higher Hindu thought & religion in its worst days, are yet, as we all know, far more genuinely learned & philosophic in their cast of thought & character than any other Indian race. Similarly the West also preserves its tradition; the Punjab is typified by its wide acceptance of such crude, but practical & active religions as those of Nanak

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& Dayanunda Saraswati, religions which have been unable to take healthy root beyond the frontier of the five rivers; Gujarat & Sindh show the same practical temper by their success in trade & commerce, but the former has preserved more of the old Western materialism & sensuousness than its neighbours. Finally the Mahrattas, perhaps the strongest and sanest race in India today, present a very peculiar & interesting type; they are south-western & blend two very different characters; fundamentally a material and practical race—they are for instance extremely deficient in the romantic & poetical side of the human temperament—a race of soldiers & politicians, they have yet caught from the Dravidians a deep scholastic & philosophical tinge which along with a basic earnestness & capacity for high things has kept them true to Hinduism, gives a certain distinction to their otherwise matter-of-fact nature and promises much for their future development.

But the Malavas were a far greater, more versatile and culturable race than any which now represent the West; they had an aesthetic catholicity, a many sided curiosity and receptiveness which enabled them to appreciate learning, high moral ideals and intellectual daring & ardour and assimilate them as far as was consistent with their own root-temperament. Nevertheless that root-temperament remained material and sensuous. When therefore the country falling from its old pure moral ideality and heroic intellectualism, weakened in fibre & sunk towards hedonism & materialism, the centre of its culture & national life began to drift westward. Transferred by Agnimitra in the second century to Videsha of the Dasharnas close to the Malavas, it finally found its true equilibrium in the beautiful and aesthetic city of Ujjaini which the artistic & sensuous genius of the Malavas had prepared to be a fit & noble capital of Hindu art, poetry and greatness throughout its most versatile & luxurious age. That position Ujjaini enjoyed until the nation began to crumble under the shock of new ideas & new forces and the centre of gravity shifted southwards to Devagirrie of the Jadhavas and finally to Dravidian Vijayanagara, the last considerable seat of independent Hindu culture & national greatness. The consolidation of

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the Malavas under Vikramaditya took place in 56 BC, and from that moment dates the age of Malava pre-eminence, the great era of the Malavas afterwards called the Samvat era. It was doubtless subsequent to this date that Kalidasa came to Ujjaini to sum up in his poetry, the beauty of human life, the splendours of art & the glory of the senses.

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