Earth as Text: Ecological Yearnings in
Kalidasa’s Meghadutam and Abhay K’s Monsoon: A Poem of Love
and Longing
Dr. Basudhara Roy
Assistant Professor
Department of
English
Karim City College,
Jamshedpur,
Jharkhand, India.
Abstract: The Meghadutam which inaugurated in Sanskrit literature
the genre of the messenger-poem or the sandesa kavya, is regarded by most
scholars as the most ambitious work in Kalidasa’s literary oeuvre. Abhay K’s Monsoon: A Poem of Love and Longing, a single poem constituting hundred
and fifty quatrains, describes the journey of the south-west Monsoon from the
island of Madagascar across the Indian Ocean and the Indian subcontinent to the
Himalayas. Its literary inspiration, quite obvious to most readers, is derived
from Kalidasa’s Meghadutam. The
present paper attempts to undertake a reading of both texts from the point of
view of contemporary theories in Ecocriticism. It shall endeavour to examine
the poems as deep ecological texts which rather than privileging man’s place in
the natural world, craft a bio-centric narrative of love within which man,
along with the myriad elements of nature, is intricately, inseparably, and
humbly woven. By closely mapping the emotions of love, longing and desire in interrelationship
with the elements of nature, both texts invest ecological landscape with a life
of its own and bring thereby, the human and non-human worlds in a close and
symbiotic structural alliance.
Keywords:
ecocriticism, nature, deep ecology, landscape, love
Man’s relationship with nature has been, for
a long period in human history now, complex and turbulent. While on the one
hand, the physical bounty of nature has been universally acknowledged to be
integral to human survival on earth, on the other, nature has almost always
been culturally constituted as man’s ‘Other’- an entity outside of man that
must be subdued, defeated, dominated and priced for its infinite secrets so
that the end of human control over the natural world might be attained. While almost
all ancient and pre-modern societies in human civilization, had based their
worldviews on the belief that human beings constituted a minor and non-special
part of the wide and all-encompassing fabric of natural life, the very idea of
modernity particularly in the West, seems to have established itself on the
premise of man’s exclusion from and superiority over other elements in the
natural world, an idea responsible for forging the dangerous binary of
Man/Nature which, as many ecological critics have pointed out, complicate our
responsibility and ethical stance towards the eco-system that we inhabit. The
questioning of man’s place within the framework of the natural world has
therefore been one of the fundamental areas of ecocritical enquiry since the emergence
of the discipline in the 1960s, leading to the generation and development of
multiple and often conflicting points of view on the subject. The various
approaches taken by scholars and environmentalists on this issue may roughly be
divided into two camps – the anthropocentric view of nature which accords
greater significance to human beings and their values on the scale of existence
and the bio-centric or earth-centric view of nature which formulates that
humans share the universe with an infinite number of species to none of whom is
allotted greater claim over its assets and resources.
The latter point of view is today better
understood in Arne Naess’s terms as ‘deep ecology’ and is an approach
characterized, as Naess states, “by our
deep relationship with the environment and a joyful acceptance of this
relationship.” (131) While the anthropocentric view of nature, also often
termed as ‘shallow ecology’, insists on the active preservation and protection
of the environment in the interests of man, and the longevity of his race on
earth, deep ecology reads the human species as merely one strand in the entire
web of natural life and concentrates on the protection of nature not for the
sake of humans but for its own immense and intrinsic value. For the deep ecologist, as
Naess points out, “the whole planet, Gaia, (that) is the basic unit, and every
living being has intrinsic value.” (135) In the
words of Naess:
The deep ecology movement
is a total view. It covers our basic assumptions, our life philosophy, and our
decisions in everyday life. I have also called the total view an “ecosophy” in
order to distinguish it from ecology as a science. Sophia is Greek for wisdom. So, ecosophy means eco-wisdom, and
wisdom has always been related to practice. (134)
Deep
ecology bases itself on the inviolable premise that the human self is basically
ecological and intuitively attuned to the consciousness of nature so that the
protection and nurturing of the natural environment are not goals extrinsic to
human well-being but acts compulsive and integral to our lives on this planet. Deep ecologists in contrast
to shallow ecologists believe that the world’s environment problems cannot be
solved by science and technology alone but by going deep within our self and by
cultivating and trusting our basic intuitions towards nature. As Bill Devall
states:
As we discover our ecological self, we will joyfully
defend and interact with that with which we identify; and instead of imposing
environmental ethics on people, we will naturally respect, love, honor and
protect that which is our self. (43)
Read in
the light of the principles of deep ecology then, Kalidasa’s Meghadutam seems to manifest itself as a
literary embodiment of Naess’s ecosophy, for the text through its expanse,
description and intention, offers to the reader an experience which aims at
extending the frontiers of realization beyond the immediate level of the human
ego to a large-scale embracing of the landscape and the environment as a whole.
The Meghadutam which inaugurated in
Sanskrit literature the genre of the messenger-poem or the sandesa kavya, is regarded by most scholars as the most ambitious
work in Kalidasa’s literary oeuvre. Rendering immortal the love-message sent
through a cloud by a despairing yaksha,
pining in punished separation from his distanced beloved, the poem stands
unchallenged in world literature till date in its exquisite craftsmanship, its
effusive lyricism and its profound explorations of the vipralambha sringara, the emotion of love-in-separation. The lush,
luxuriant and erotic descriptions of the natural world that accompany the yaksha’s elaborate directions to the
cloud concerning the geographical path to Alaka,
his mythical home where his wife suffers in isolation their painful
bereavement, have called forth the admiration and critical engagement of
readers and scholars in almost every generation. My reading of the text,
however, shall attempt to interpret its natural descriptions not as ornamental
imagery that heighten the impact of the human subject of love explored by the
poem but as the central subject of the poem itself. The chief intention of this
paper shall lie in its establishment of the poem not merely as a message of
human love as it is generally supposed to be, but as an erotic awakening of
nature at the call of the monsoons into which the human narrative of love and
longing too is seen to be indistinguishably woven. Having thus made a case for
reading the poem as an earth-centric love narrative, the paper shall insist
upon its status as a deep ecological text that attempts to humble rather than
exalt man’s place in nature by looking upon the entire natural world with its
abundant elements and inhabitants inclusive of man, as a single, seamless and
integrated whole.
Most
critical commentaries on the Meghadutam
in Sanskrit credit it with being the harbinger of a new poetic genre, that of
the sandesa kavya or the ‘messenger
poem’ whose plot involves two separated lovers and constitutes in the sending
of a message by the one to the other. There are reputed to be around 250 sandesa kavyas in Sanskrit, all inspired
by the Meghadutam and each, following
the structure of Kalidasa’s poem, is divided into two parts – the first part
describing the messenger and the route to be taken while the second enlightens
the reader about the destination, the recipient and the message itself. Another
significant characteristic of these poems following Kalidasa, is the use in all
of them of a non-human messenger to convey the message of love. While it is
certain that Kalidasa had precedents of the use of non-human messengers before
him such as in the epical use of the monkey-god Hanumana to convey Lord Rama’s
message to Sita in the Ramayana or in
the use of a goose to convey a message of love between Nala and Damayanti in
the Mahabharata, the use of an
inanimate element of Nature such as a cloud for the purposes of communication
between lovers had never been conceived in literary imagination before.
Kalidasa himself is aware of this literary innovation and in the fifth stanza,
at the very beginning of the poem, he inserts a sort of narrative aside trying
to pass off his protagonist’s use of the cloud for communication as an instance
of pathetic fallacy, an erroneous identification made by the yaksha in a
love-lorn state:
What! A cloud? A tumble of vapour, heat, water, wind
To deliver a message from sentient living beings
Not figuring that the eager yaksha
Asked it – him – cloud
The lovelorns’ nature is such – poor things –
They cannot discriminate
between animate-inanimate (7)
However,
if one reads the poem in the context of the historical culture that produced
it, there is no element of pathetic fallacy here for Kalidasa’s text was
intended to speak to a culture that was still acutely aware of pantheistic
ideas and in which elements of nature like the sun, clouds, certain plants,
trees etc. were known to be in possession of special powers and capable of granting
human wishes. Besides, if pathetic fallacy characterizes the yaksha’s mistaking
of the cloud as animate, then it can be said to characterize a good deal of the
entire poem which treats mountains, flowers, trees, rivers and birds with the
same sensitivity as is accorded to the scant human figures who fleetingly
register their visibility in the text. In fact, I would like to argue that the
use in figurative terms of pathetic fallacy which prompts the yaksha to call
upon the cloud to act as messenger, is central to the ecosophical approach of
the poem, for the cloud, a product of the union between earth and sky,
air-borne and capable of traversing whole landscapes in its task of bearing and
shedding water, functions as, perhaps, the best symbol of ecological
interrelatedness. The cloud as messenger communicates to the entire world of
nature the message of the arrival of the monsoons and calls forth, as the poem
documents, a response rich and nuanced in its diversity and beauty. It is no
wonder then that the despondent yaksha too, separated from his beloved for one
whole year by the irrevocable punitive order of his lord, Kubera, invokes the
mighty cloud to carry to his wife a message of his well-being. The use of the
cloud as a messenger for human emotions militates against a worldview that
compartmentalizes the human and non-human worlds, seeking rather to bring them
into ecological contiguity. There is no pathetic fallacy in this, for as Neil
Evernden insists,
“…once we engage in the extension of the boundary of the self into the
“environment” then of course we imbue it with life and can quite properly
regard it as animate – it is animate because we are a part of it.” (101) The
pathetic fallacy is thus, as Evernden insists, “a fallacy only to the ego-clencher.”
(101)
Abhay K’s Monsoon traces the path of
the monsoon which originates near Madagascar and traverses the Indian Ocean to
reach the Himalayas and back to Madagascar. As monsoon travels across the
Indian Ocean islands, the Western Ghats, East and North India, Bhutan, Nepal
and Tibet, it traverses a rich geographical, cultural and linguistic territory
in a way reminiscent of Kalidasa’s Meghdutam. Here, the idea of a
letter sent through the cloud-messenger is only a thinly veiled contrivance for
professing a love of another kind, one that is both profoundly ecological and
staunchly territorial. The ecological thrust of Abhay K’s work is not far to
seek. Monsoon abounds in the fecundity and glory of all forms of plant
and animal life – terrestrial, aquatic and aerial. There is, throughout the
book, a rich sampling of the biota of the various geographical regions that the
cloud traverses and lest these connections should be missed by readers, the
poem is accompanied by elaborate footnotes that enhance our repertoire of
geographical information in compound ways. Thus, Mantellas, we come to know,
are golden or multicoloured poison frogs of the Madagascar and that the Sifaka,
also known as the dancing lemur, is a critically endangered species of lemurs.
The range of geographical references in Monsoon is stunning and encyclopaedic. Yet the urge that dominates the poem is
not the catalogic or the documentary. What is, rather, at work here is a keen
ecological activism that seeks to offer due space, value and representation to
the intense drama of the non-human world that largely goes unseen and ignored.
Through the aerial
and egalitarian vision of the monsoon, Abhay K
notes the complex interpenetration of land, locality, nature, culture,
community, biosphere and more. Accompanying
his ecological concern in Monsoon is a focused territorial concern. Every
landscape, with its ecological and human wealth, is a distinct cultural script
that articulates a heritage. A locality is an identifiable coordinate not only
on the geographical map but on the cultural map of the globe as well.
Localities are created by idiosyncratic and multilayered umbilical
relationships between geography, nature and culture. As such, every locality
constitutes a unique geographical and cultural fingerprint. Abhay K realizes
the threat to the local in a global world and attempts to resurrect in Monsoon
the vibrant localities of, as he puts it in his Introduction, “the Indian Ocean
islands of Madagascar, Réunion, Mauritius, Seychelles, Mayotte, Comoros, Zanzibar, Socotra,
Maldives, Sri Lanka, Andaman & Nicobar and the Indian subcontinent into one
poetic thread.” (i)Unlike the cloud-messenger in the homologous world of
Kalidasa’s Meghadutam,
the contemporary cloud-messenger traversing a passage from Madagascar to
Srinagar must bear witness to the mini-narratives of postcolonial and
postmodern diversity that characterize this terrain and must speak for the rich
localities that it encounters enroute. Hence, ecological descriptions in Monsoon fuse with sharp territorial signifiers of
landmarks, monuments, cuisines, languages, fashion, rites and rituals. Thus,
Kerala’s kettuvallam cruises, Karnataka’s Tulu language, the hot springs
of Rajgir, Bihar’s laai, tilkut, anarsa, Kumbhalgarh’s Badal Mahal,
Chandigarh’s Sukhna Lake and old Delhi’s Ghalib ki Haveli at Gali Ballimaran,
to mention just a handful, come together in this poem to reinstate the
anthropological value and charm of locality in public memory. Idyllic as this
mode of memory-making is, it is not naive of the region’s history of migration
and loss. Thus, the whiffs of old Bhojpuri and Gujarati carried by the monsoon
from the Indian Ocean islands will always remind the Indian speakers of these
languages of a past that can, perhaps, be recovered only in the imagination.
Experiencing
an essential nonduality of spirit awakens us to the realization that our human
and non-human worlds are coterminous, mark each other dialogically, and are
firmly embedded in one other. Both Meghadutam
and Monsoon, if one technically analyzes them, are plot-less, consisting
in the mere verbal instructions to a cloud to deliver a message of love, the
actual physical delivery of the message being secondary to their purposes.
Besides, the greater part of the poems is seen to be devoted to describing the
cloud’s journey rather than the message which should, in generic terms,
constitute the central motivation of the poem. The poems are clearly more
obsessed with the cultural fact of the cloud as messenger of nature and with
the cloud’s particular aerial point of view as it traverses extensive
geographical territories than the human pain of separation. In describing the
cloud’s detailed journey to their homelands, both poems seem to be evoking
nostalgia of another kind - that of the exile in whose subconscious, memories
of home and family are closely intertwined with geographical memories of the
native landscape. Besides
being alive to the geographical, botanical and zoological wealth of the
landscape, the poems are also acutely aware of the land’s rich cultural history
and fuse details from epics, myths and legends which have been enacted on this
sacred ground. Thus, Kalidasa directs the reader’s attention to the waters
where Sita bathed, to the sacred places marked by Lord Rama’s footprints, to
the towering shrine of Mahakala (Lord Shiva) at Ujjainito Devagiri - the seat
of Skandha, to the sacred battleground of Kurukshetra, and to Shiva and
Parvati’s mythical home in Kailasa. The reader is reminded of the various
narratives of the land – the descent of the river Ganga on earth; the story of
Parasurama whose axe flung, cleft the mountain; the story of Bali whose pride
was shattered by the Vamana avatar of Vishnu; the story of Ravana attempting to
uproot the Himalayas in a bid to plant it his own garden and so on. Similarly,
Abhay K. calls our attention to the rich bio-diversity of the Indian Ocean
Islands and the Indian Subcontinent: “Radiated tortoises
carrying galactic maps/ Soumanga sunbirds sipping nectar/ white
Sifakas dancing in herd/ ring-tailed lemurs feasting on Baobab flowers/ Vasa
parrots courting their mates” (3) The
subject of deep ecological writing is this dialogue between man and nature.
In discussing about the place of humans in
nature, eco-theorist Christopher Manes writes:
As hominids, we dwell at
the outermost fringes of important ecological processes such as photosynthesis
and the conversion of biomass into usable nutrients. No lofty language about
being the paragon of animals or the torchbearer of evolution can change this
ecological fact – which is reason enough to reiterate it as often as possible.
(24)
He insists that it is the discourse of
humanism since the ages of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that has
culturally legitimated Man’s power over nature and its reduction in turn, to a
passive subject. It is high time, in his opinion, that humans renounced this
anthropocentric language in favour of another tongue “free from the
directionalities of humanism, a language that incorporates a decentered,
postmodern, post-humanist perspective”, a language, in other words, of
“ecological humility”. (17) It is my opinion that Meghadutam and Monsoon, in portraying the entire
natural world as inspirited, articulate, intelligible and communicative rather
than as passive and inert, seek to offer for our understanding and appreciation
just such a language of “ecological humility”. By inspiriting and lending voice
to entire landscapes with their teeming ecological fertility and by humbling
man’s place in it in treating him as a definite though not distinctive strand
in the web of natural life, both texts seem to be definitely espousing a deep
ecological stance, vitally necessary for our times.
Works Cited
Devall, Bill. Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology. Salt Lake
City, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, 1988.
Evernden, Neil. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place,
and the Pathetic Fallacy” in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in
Literary Ecology. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. (92-104)
K.
Abhay. Monsoon: A Poem of Love and Longing. Sahitya Akademi, 2022.
Kalidasa. “Meghadutam” in Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader:
Selected Poetry and Drama. Translated by Mani Rao. New Delhi: Aleph Book
Company, 2014. (1-44)
Manes, Christopher. “Nature and Silence” in
Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds. The
Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: U of Georgia P,
1996. (15-29)
Naess, Arne. “The Basics of Deep Ecology” in
John Button ed. The Green Fuse: The
Schumacher Lectures. London: Quartet Books, 1990, (130-37).