Kalidasa
Sri Aurobindo
The Harmony of Virtue
Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910
Section Five
Kalidasa
Kalidasa
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 and imagination that, endowed with the most noble and various poetical gifts capable in all the great forms used by creative genius, should express once and for all in a supreme manner the whole sensuous plane of life1, its heat and light, its vigour2 and sweetness.
And since to all quality there must be a corresponding defect, they not only gifted the3 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 and luxurious city of Ujjayini4, 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 and called him Kalidasa.
The country of Avanti5 had always played a considerable part in our ancient Aryan history6 for which the genius, taste and high courage of its inhabitants fitted it; and Ujjayini7 their future capital was always a famous, beautiful and wealthy city.
But until the rise of Vikrama it seemed8 to have been disunited and therefore unable to work out fully the great destiny for which the taste, genius, force9 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 spiritual and emotional temperament10 of the eastern nations which produced Janaka11, Valmiki12, and Buddha nor the bold intellectual temperament, heroic, ardent and severe of the central nations which produced Draupadi13, Bhima14, Arjuna15, Bhishma, Vyasa and Srikrishna; 
neither were they quite akin to the searchingly logical, philosophic and 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 and sensuous.
For the different races of this country have preserved their basic temperaments with a marvellous conservative power; modified and recombined, they have been in no case radically altered.
Bengal colonised from the west by the Chedis16 and Haihayas and from the north by the Koshalas17 and 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 and great captain, Pratapaditya; the other side shows itself especially in the women who are certainly the gentlest18, purest and most gracious and 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 and form and individual energy and 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 and Tulsi; its people are still the most sincerely orthodox and the most attached to the old type of thought and character, while the Rajputs who are only a central nation which has drifted westward preserved longest the heroic and 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 and renovators of the higher Hindu thought and religion in its worst days, are yet, as we all know, far more genuinely learned and philosophic in their cast of thought and character than any other Indian race.
Similarly the west also preserves its tradition; the Punjab is typified by its wide acceptance of such simple19 and20 practical and active religions as those of Nanak and Dayananda21 Saraswati, religions which have been unable to take healthy root beyond the frontier of the five rivers; 
Gujarat and Sindh show the same practical temper by their success in trade and commerce, but the former has preserved more of the old western materialism and sensuousness than its neighbours.
Finally the Maharattas22, perhaps the strongest and sanest race in India today, present a very peculiar and interesting type; they are south-western and blend two very different characters; fundamentally a material and practical race, — they are, for instance, extremely deficient in the romantic and poetical side of human23 temperament — a race of soldiers and politicians, they have yet caught from the Dravidians a deep scholastic and philosophical tinge which, along with a basic earnestness and 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 and 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 and sank24 towards hedonism and materialism, the centre of its culture and national life began to drift westward.
Transferred by Agnimitra in the second century to Vidisha25 of the Dasharnas close to the Malavas, it finally found its true equilibrium in the beautiful and aesthetic city of Ujjayini26 which the artistic and sensuous genius of the Malavas had prepared to be a fit and noble capital of Hindu art, poetry and greatness throughout its most versatile and luxurious age.
That position Ujjayini27 enjoyed until the nation began to crumble under the shock of new ideas and new forces and the centre of gravity shifted southwards to Devagiri28 of the Jadhavas and finally to Dravidian Vijayanagara, the last considerable seat of independent Hindu culture and national greatness.
The consolidation of the Malavas under Vikramaditya took place in 56 B.C. 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 Ujjayini29 to sum up in his poetry the beauty of human life, the splendours of art and the glory of the senses.
Later edition of this work: The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 1.- Early Cultural Writings (1890 — 1910).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2003.- 784 p.
1 2003 ed.: of our life
2 2003 ed.: joy, colour
3 2003 ed.: this
4 2003 ed.: Ujjain
5 2003 ed.: Avunti
6 2003 ed.: ancient history
7 2003 ed.: Ujjain
8 2003 ed.: seems
9 2003 ed.: [ ]
10 2003 ed.: temperament, spiritual and emotional,
11 2003 ed.: Janaca
12 2003 ed.: Valmekie
13 2003 ed.: Draupadie
14 2003 ed.: Bhema
15 2003 ed.: Urjouna
16 2003 ed.: Chedies
17 2003 ed.: Coshalas
18 2003 ed.: tenderest
19 2003 ed.: crude
20 2003 ed.: but
21 2003 ed.: Dayanunda
22 2003 ed.: Mahrattas
23 2003 ed.: of the human
24 2003 ed.: sunk
25 2003 ed.: Videsha
26 2003 ed.: Ujjain
27 2003 ed.: Ujjain
28 2003 ed.: Devagirrie
29 2003 ed.: Ujjain