Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Two. On Literature
The Poetry of Kalidasa
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 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 our life1, its heat and light, its joy, colour2 and sweetness.
And since to all quality there must be a corresponding defect, they not only gifted this3 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 Ujjaini4, 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 Avunti5 had always played a considerable part in our ancient history6 for which the genius, taste and high courage of its inhabitants fitted it and Ujjaini7 their future capital was always a famous, beautiful and wealthy city; but until the rise of Vikrama it seems8 to have been disunited and therefore unable to work out fully the great destiny for which the taste, genius [ ]9 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 and emotional,10 of the eastern nations which produced Janaca11, Valmekie12 and Buddha, nor the bold intellectual temperament, heroic, ardent and severe, of the 
Central nations which produced Draupadie13, Bhema14, Urjouna15, 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 Chedies16 and Haihayas and from the north by Coshalas17 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 tenderest18, 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 crude19, but20 practical and active religions as those of Nanak 
and Dayanunda21 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 Mahrattas22, perhaps the strongest and sanest race in India today, present a very peculiar and interesting type; they are southwestern 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 the 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 sunk24 towards hedonism and materialism, the centre of its culture and national life began to drift westward.
Transferred by Agnimitra in the second century to Videsha25 of the Dasharnas close to the Malavas, it finally found its true equilibrium in the beautiful and aesthetic city of Ujjaini26 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 Ujjaini27 enjoyed until the nation began to crumble under the shock of new ideas and new forces and the centre of gravity shifted southwards to Devagirrie28 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 BC, and from that moment dates the age of Malava preeminence, the great era of the Malavas afterwards called the Samvat era.
It was doubtless subsequent to this date that Kalidasa came to Ujjaini29 to sum up in his poetry, the beauty of human life, the splendours of art and the glory of the senses.