Sri Aurobindo. Vikramorvasie. The Characters [15] // Early Cultural Writings (1890-1910)

Sri Aurobindo

Early Cultural Writings

(1890 — 1910)

Part Two. On Literature
The Poetry of Kalidasa

Vikramorvasie. The Characters

Vikramorvasie. Minor Characters [15]

Ayus and Urvasie in this play were certainly not intended for the dramatic picture of mother and child; this mother has abandoned her child to the care of strangers; this child is new to the faces of his parents. Such a situation might easily have been made harsh and unsympathetic but for the fine dramatic tact of the poet which has purified it from everything¹ that might repel and smoothed away all the angles of the incident. But here the circumstances excuse if not² justify Urvasie. Acting under hard conditions, she has chosen the lesser of two evils; for by keeping Ayus, she would have lost both her child and Pururavus³; by delivering him into wise and tender hands she has insured his welfare and for her part only anticipated the long parting which the rule of education in ancient India demanded from parents as their sacrifice to the social ideal. Knowing that the child was in good hands she solaces herself with the love of her husband, but it⁴ is not from maternal insensibility that she bears quietly the starvation of the mother within her. When he returns to her, there is a wonderful subdued intensity characteristic of her simple and fine nature in the force with which that suppressed passion awakes to life. She approaches her son, wordless, but her veiled bosom heaves⁵ towards him and is “wet⁶ with sacred milk”; in her joy over him she forgets even that⁷ impending separation from the husband to avert which she has sacrificed the embrace of his infancy. It is this circumstance, not any words, that testifies to the depth of her maternal feeling; her character forbids her to express it in splendours of poetic emotion such as well spontaneously from the heart of Pururavus⁸. A look, a few ordinary words are all; if it were not for these and the observation of others, we should have to live with her daily before we could realise the depth of feeling behind her silence.

Ayus himself is an admirable bit of dramatic craftsmanship. There is a certain critical age when the growing boy is a child on one side of his nature and a young man on the other, and of all psychological states such periods of transitional unstable equilibrium are the most difficult to render dramatically without making the character either a confused blur or an illjoined piece of carpenter’s work. Here Kalidasa excels. He has the ready tact of speech gradations, the power of simple and telling slightness that can alone meet the difficulty. By an unlaboured and inevitable device the necessary materials are provided. The boy comes straight from the wild green and ascetic forest into the luxurious splendours⁹ of an Oriental court and the presence of a father and mother whom he has never seen; a more trying situation could not easily be¹⁰ imagined; he inevitably becomes self-conscious, embarrassed, burdened with the necessity of maintaining himself against the oppressions¹¹ of his surroundings. He attempts therefore to disguise his youthful nervousness behind the usual shield of an overdone and¹² formal dignity, a half unconscious pompousness and an air of playing the man. We are even aware¹³ of a slight touch of precocity not unbecoming in one who has been put through the “complete education of a prince” by the mightiest scholar and sage of his time¹⁴. Confronted with all these new faces making claims upon him to which his past consciousness is an alien, the whole adult side of his nature turns uppermost. But fortunately for our comprehension of his true state of mind, something of the green forest which is his home has come with him in the person of his fostermother, Satyavatie. With her he feels as a child may feel with his mother. When he turns to her or speaks to her, he is again and instinctively in manner, utterance and action the child who ran by her side clutching the skirts of her dress in the free woodland. He speaks like a child, thinks like a child, acts docilely at her bidding like a child. Nothing could be more finely artistic in execution or more charmingly faithful to nature in its conception.