Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hung. Volume 66 (1), 1–24 (2013) DOI: 10.1556/AOrient.66.2013.1.1 BEFORE THE STORY BEGINS: ON KUMĀRASAṂBHAVA I AYAL AMER Department of Asian Studies, La Trobe University Victoria 3086, Australia e-mail: [email protected] In this essay I intend to textually and thematically study some of the verses found in the introduc- tory canto of Kālidāsa’s epic poem, the Kumārasaṃbhava, perhaps one of the most famous and oft- quoted works in Sanskrit poetics and yet one of the most contentious and least studied. First, I will be unpacking the main themes and images operating in the descriptions of Himālaya, which is con- sidered according to commentators as the vastunirdeśa of the text, or ‘indication of the plot’ – and thus, ‘what is about to happen in the story’. I argue that these comprise an undermining statement about the poem’s ostensible aim – the so-called ‘love story’ of Śiva and Pārvatī – thus covertly pre- senting an alternate point of view, rather poignant, about the relationship between the hero and hero- ine. Next, I discuss the descriptions of Pārvatī and examine their aesthetical value, their fantasy-like mood, their relationship with Himālaya’s description and the way they reveal the existence of an- other important, generally neglected, integral factor at work within the text, which is the presence of the recipient of poetry outside the text, the rasika, the connoisseur of poetry. I have one major hypothesis about this compelling frame of the poem, which stands as if independent from the rest of the text. I believe that what seem to be the poet’s core statement about the nature of love and its consequences in his poem is encoded within its two descriptive patterns. Key words: Kumārasaṃbhava, Kālidāsa, mahākāvya, vastunirdeśa, rasika, aesthetics. 1. Introduction There is no doubt that the Kumārasaṃbhava (hereafter: KS), ‘The birth of the Son’, is considered as the most celebrated classical Sanskrit kāvya works. The importance and popularity of this poem, which belongs to the genre of court epic poetry (mahā- kāvya), can be attested by the fact that its verses are among one of the most oft- quoted and discussed in Sanskrit poetics (Tubb 1979, p. 17). On the surface Kālidā- sa’s KS appears to be, and has normally been accepted, a mere courtly replica of the 0001-6446 / $ 20.00 © 2013 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 2 AYAL AMER well-known traditional story of the events that lead to the marriage of Śiva and Pār- vatī. In this story the god Śiva marries Pārvatī for the sake of producing a son that will eventually destroy the demon Tāraka, who conquered the world of gods and wreaked havoc by means of a boon granted to him by the god Brahma.1 In general, the mahākāvya poets take the storyline of a well-known traditional myth, make some changes to it, include new materials, elaborate on scenes on the original, add descrip- tive and rhetorical passages and render it in the highly intricate style of kāvya. By do- ing so the poet in fact uproots the story from its original context, in which it is nor- mally held as part of a larger subset of related tales featuring shared themes and mo- tifs, and fits it into a new framework. The results of such literary displacement are myriad but the most salient ones are related to structure and contextual meaning. In terms of structure, a mahākāvya poem is normally considered, and thus criti- cised by scholars, as prolix and shapeless, a jumble of amorphous and uncohesive collations of both independent verses and disparate cantos that lack an organic cohe- sion (Peterson 2003, p. 15). As such we normally encounter in studies of mahākāvya works the unavoidable phrase of “form vs. content” (see, e.g. Winternitz 1967, p. 1) which claims that kāvya is mainly concerned with form, external appearance, long- winded language, poetic ornaments and stereotyped character, and never with real content, with developing a meaningful story focused on a complex plot, characters’ psychological conflicts and their emotional responses. This leads us to the second sa- lient point which is related to the contextual meaning and which is most pertinent here. The result of the literary displacement is, in fact, the creation of new literary contours, a new conceptual framework, new focus and, above all, a new audience that shares a conventional and ideological world-view – that of the rasika, the connois- seur of poetry. Accordingly, the problem that generally troubles kāvya/mahākāvya readers – both indigenous and Westerners – is that when they come to read poetry that is based on a traditional story they normally retain in their mind the ‘original con- text’ of the story along with its plausible and acceptable interpretations, and read the newly innovated text merely as a versified and stylised paraphrase on the original, with no attempt at elucidating a different meaning, or meanings, out of the highly complex descriptive passages. In fact, readers are entitled to think that there is noth- ing new or informative about this type of poetry, which by and large presents a very slender thread of the traditional story linked together by elaborate and intricate string of verses. But to say this actually means to fail to appreciate the poetic qualities of the descriptive passages and their multifaceted relationship with the slender plot they come to ornament and amplify. Perhaps the atypical literary features of this type of poetry have in fact deterred most of us from embarking on a serious exploration of 1 The nucleus of the story appears already in the first book of the Rāmāyaṇa (1.23 and 1.34– 36), where the sage Viśvāmitra relates to Rāma the story of how Śiva burns the god of love, Kāma, in the country of Aṅga, after his marriage to Pārvatī. The Mahābhārata (e.g., 3.212–13) does not mention the love story of Śiva and Pārvati and the burning of Kāma; however, it does elaborate upon the episode of the creation of Kārttikeya (Skanda). The story is fully developed in the Purāṇic lit- erature. See, e.g., Śivapurāṇa (Rudrasaṃhitā) 4.1–2; Matsyapurāṇa 146. Acta Orient. Hung. 66, 2013 BEFORE THE STORY BEGINS: ON KUMĀRASAṂBHAVA I 3 the text and the language employed there. Thus the crucial question to be asked about enigmatic poems like the KS, which only focus on the shifting love relationship be- tween Śiva and Pārvatī, is: Does the innovated text of the KS, along with the required changes made to the archetypal story, endeavour, implicitly or explicitly, to impart any different, if not similar, meaning to the original story within its newly created contours? In fact, the problems about the KS which emerge directly from such literary rearrangement and restructuring mentioned above are much wider and they are by no means limited to issues of meaning and context. One can think about controversial and ambiguous points associated with more formal aspects of the text. Take for ex- ample the text’s title, “the birth of the son”, which promises that the story about to be told is in some sense similar to the original; however, as soon as we read it, we dis- cover that its content reveals a totally different thing. Kālidāsa’s text focuses mainly on the inevitable encounter and subsequent marriage of Śiva and Pārvatī’s, and the text ends in the eighth canto without unfolding the promised story of the birth of Ku- māra and his battle with Tāraka.2 Other formal problematic features that can be found in this text, and which has become of a major concern for the KS’s later commenta- tors and scholars alike, are related to issues of the dominant mood (rasa), goal of the poem (kārya), and the real hero of the poem.3 It is around these issues that controver- sies about this text have emerged. To pursue these problems and establish a definitive idea about this rich text would take us far beyond the scope of this essay. I am not even sure that they are at all conducive to, or have a bearing on, the poet’s motivation behind the text. But discussion of formal characteristics of a poem may be deemed superficial if it is not backed by a detailed and careful analysis of the work’s real con- tent: its complex verses, their elaborate language and imageries. Thus, in this essay I want to challenge the obvious and will examine what I con- sider as the descriptive frame of the text, the descriptions of Himālaya and Pārvatī found in the first canto, wherein Kālidāsa sets the stage and creates the background of this text. This, I believe, is crucial to our understanding of the underlying poetic logic operating in the story of Śiva and Pārvatī. I seek to illustrate how the KS as a kāvya seeks to depart from the conventional meaning of the traditional story by creating a new context, setting its own literary agenda, determining its own aesthetic values, encoding its own interpretation of the story before it even starts. I thus show that when some of the verses are seriously scrutinised and mutually defined in terms of their semantic, figurative, thematic and syntactical value they would reveal a con- sciously constructed inner world with a burden of meaning that will help us to truly start conceptualising the real meaning of this enigmatic, yet clichéd, story of Śiva and Pārvatī. This in turn will reveal the frame’s heuristic role within the poem and will help us re-consider and re-imagine the poet’s motivating world.