Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4

“The Hero and the Nymph”

A note on Kalidasa's "The Hero and the Nymph" (translated by Sri Aurobindo), staged at the Ashram Theatre on December 1st and December 3rd 1971.

The story of Kalidasa's "The Hero and the Nymph" is the eternal legend of the marriage of heaven and earth upon earth. The Heavenly Beauty can descend upon earth and be united to a human soul only, as it appears, under a malediction; for heaven and earth are normally understood to be opposites and contradictories. The malediction means that the union can happen under certain limitations. First of all, there is the limitation of time, that is to say, the union does not last long, it can be only for a more or less short duration: even the span of human life is too long for it. It is not in the nature of supreme love to linger long on our murky earth:

"Only a little the God-light can stay:"¹

Secondly the limitation is that of a mixture, a dilution. The quality and nature of Divine Love entering earth suffers an alteration, a diminution and pollution. It is mixed with baser elements of human nature. Kalidasa too mentions these – foremost of all is jealousy – jealousy that caught Urvasie like a wild fire and made her run helter-skelter and enter straight into the arms of self-oblivion and infra-consciousness – she turned into a soulless plant. Thirdly, the limitation that the very intensity and turbulence of passion bring – it is not only turbulence but turbidity, love gone mad, love becoming lunacy – that is Pururavas and his cry:

¹ Savitri, Book I, Canto I.

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"Halt, ruffian, halt! Thou in thy giant arms

Bearest away my Urvasie!.." ¹

This cry almost verges on King Lear's heart-rending frantic yell: "Blow, winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!"² relieved, one may say in Kalidasa, by his sheer poetry – but in Shakespeare also not less so, although in a different hue and tune. This tumult of the soul, the raging raving wild thing that man becomes – this seems to be, in Kalidasa, the price that mortality has to pay for a touch of divinity – it is the churning of the ocean that yields at last immortality. It may be suggested here that the queen is a foil, a hark back to wisdom and poise, to steadiness and normalcy. She symbolises also the consent of the mere human to the divine Dispensation.

A Shakespearean tragedy Kalidasa avoids by finding a way out of the impasse – a happy marriage between heaven and earth is possible if with heaven agreeing to come down upon earth, earth too on its side agrees to go up to heaven. The heavenly Bride can stay here on earth as companion to Pururavas only if Pururavas agrees to go up to heaven, consents to take up the gods' work.

The earthly mixture presumably gives to the pure heavenly love a zest, a strange homely taste which otherwise it could not have. The white diamond with this immixture of the earthly ray becomes as it were a ruby.

Here was a human soul, a rare human soul, a soul of beauty and bravery. Even on earth he was in the service of the gods and as a reward he was given the chance of lifting the divine trophy and treasuring it in his earthly home: he succeeded in possessing the treasure as he continued to be in the service of the Divine.

¹ Vikramorllasie, Act IV, Sc. II.

² King Lear, Act III, Sc., II.

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