What are some of the major themes in "The Recognition of
Shakuntala"? (What is the book saying about love in particular?)
Another major theme of the play is that the course of true love is
often fraught with complications and misunderstandings.
In the story, King Dushyanta is so smitten with the beauteous
Shakuntala that he promises to make her his queen. Of course, King
Dushyanta already has a whole host of wives, but he aims to make
Shakuntala the head of them all. However, in his infatuation, the king
neglects to consider the complications Shakuntala will bring to his already
crowded household. When Queen Hamsapadika pouts over King
Dushyanta's preoccupation with the younger wives, he sends his clown
Madhavya to pacify her. After all, King Dushyanta has to have Queen
Hamsapadika's cooperation if he wants to ease Shakuntala's entry into the
household.
For Shakuntala's part, she needs to ask her foster father, Kanwa, for
permission before she can legally marry King Dushyanta. In the meantime,
King Dushyanta marries Shakuntala in secret, and he gives her a ring to
seal the deal, promising that he will receive her as a queen when she
comes to the palace. Meanwhile, Shakuntala is so ecstatic at her change
in fortune that she neglects to properly perform the rites of hospitality for
a visiting sage, Durvasas. Enraged, Durvasas curses Shakuntala.
Accordingly, she will not be recognized by King Dushyanta unless she has
the ring he gave her before his departure.
On her journey (true to the curse), Shakuntala loses the ring in the
woods. So, when she stands before King Dushyanta at his palace, he
refuses to acknowledge her. Without the ring, Shakuntala cannot move
the king with her pleas. She engages in bitter recriminations against the
king and accuses him of playing fast and loose with her affections.
Meanwhile, the king accuses Shakuntala of trying to pass herself off as his
queen. To complicate matters, Shakuntala is pregnant with the king's child.
A court priest convinces the king to let Shakuntala stay at the palace until
the baby is born. The priest reasons that, when the baby is born, it can
then be examined for evidence of its royal heritage.
King Dushyanta consents to this plan, but Shakuntala is carried off
to the heavens before she can give birth. In the meantime, the ring of
recognition is found when a fisherman confesses that he retrieved it from
the belly of a carp. When he sees the ring, King Dushyanta is immediately
freed from the constraints of the curse. He now remembers who
Shakuntala is and mourns for her loss.
Meanwhile, the nymph who took Shakuntala to heaven sees King
Dushyanta's misery and sends a chariot to earth to convey the king to
heaven. When he arrives, King Dushyanta sees a little boy wrestling with a
lion cub. In the midst of his match, the boy's amulet falls off, and King
Dushyanta picks it up for him. Mysteriously, the king finds himself drawn
to the boy. Meanwhile, the heavenly attendants have begun to guess that
King Dushyanta is the boy's father. Since the amulet is dangerous to all
but the boy and his parents, King Dushyanta is acknowledged as the boy's
true father. With his paternity determined, the boy can now join his
mother, Shakuntala, at the palace with King Dushyanta.
So, it can be seen that a major theme of the story is that the course
of true love is often fraught with complications that are caused by human
miscalculation and error.
Kalidasa's The Recognition of Shakuntala is the story of how the king,
Dushyanta, meets and secretly marries Shakuntala, the daughter of a sage.
When he leaves, he gives her his ring, but she loses it and when she shows
up in court with his son, Bharata, she doesn't recognize her until the gods
intervene.
One of the themes may be the importance of paying attention to
details. Shakuntala loses the ring because she is distracted while attending
to the irritable sage Durvasa, and he curses her. But a more important
theme is the theme of honesty and integrity. When Shakuntala and
Bharata appear before Dushyanta, he at first does not recognize them or
his secret marriage because the ring is lost, but then the gods call him out.
Given that Shankuntala must rely on a token, the ring, to remind
Dushyanta of their love and their secret marriage vows before he will
recongize her and his son, I'd say that this story takes a rather cynical view
on love. It is written so that the characters are not entirely resposible for
the mess their relationship is in (i.e. a sage's curse seems to be the problem
between them), but the point seems to be that they cannot act on their
love without some public recognition of it. A more idealistic view would
say that love conquers all: because they love each other, they can
overcome the sage's curse.
Why do you think Kalidasa adopted the story of Shakuntala for his play
Abhijnansakuntalam?
I think that there might be several reasons for the attraction to the
narrative of Shakuntala. One of the first is that Kalidasa enjoyed writing
about the Hindu Puranas and philosophical tenets. In writing in Sanskrit,
he would have learned about the narrative of Shakuntala in the
Mahabharata, and this would have provided him an excellent opportunity
to delve into the nature of dharma and adherence to structure in the
drama that is Shakuntala's narrative. At the same time, I think that the
poetry involved in the retelling enables Kalidasa to explore so much in way
of aesthetic inquiry. The myth and the drama that he is able to construct
around it show how the most powerful of men such as Sages and Kings
must deal with the very basic of human reactions such as love, separation,
and the hope for reconciliation with that which defines human
identity. These are elements that Kalidasa is able to evoke and bring out
in his analysis. In the process, there is much within his writing that is able
to delve into an aesthetic appreciation of the concepts within Hinduism.
