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The Hypocrite Reader
The Hypocrite Reader
Eric M Gurevitch
Kālidāsa’s Meghadhūta, or, the
story of a Yakṣa slacking on the
job
ISSUE 31 | STRATEGIES OF TOGETHERNESS | AUG 2013
“Faceless lovers.” Photo by Eric M. Gurevitch. Unfinished pillar relief from the caves at Ellora, Maharashtra,
India
lovers are separated by many miles, but later poems play with the distance represented. Whether
separated by mountain ranges, highways, miles, or yards, the distance hardly matters. As long as
the lovers are not bound by the tight embrace of love they feel restless and unsure and must
communicate with those they are separated from. Whether read in the heyday of the Gupta
Empire, Schlegel’s Germany, or New York’s Upper East Side, Kālidāsa’s verses can strike the
heart of many a lover.
The poem opens with a pitiful image of a nameless Yakṣa (demi-god), exiled, alone, powerless,
wasting away in Central India. He has been brought to this sorry state as a punishment from the
god Kubera. Not long ago our hero had been gainfully employed by the god and lived an idyllic
life with his young wife in the Himalayas. But he became distracted (presumably by the thought
of his lover), slacked off, and was fired—which is even worse if your boss is a god. While exiled
to a monastery on a mountain, the Yakṣa constantly thinks of his lover, neglecting his body and
growing so thin that “his gold bracelet slipped off his wrist.” We are not told how his lover is
faring. As the months wear on and the seasons change, our hero sees the first clouds of summer,
which in India bring the monsoon.
Business and trade come to a halt during the monsoon, when travelling merchants return to their
homes, a fact that makes our Yakṣa (stuck in the monastery until autumn) even more
despondent. In desperation, the Yakṣa calls out to the largest cloud he sees, asking it to carry a
message to his lover. At this point, the narrator butts in to remind us of the absurdity of this
situation:
The Yakṣa begins by describing the journey the cloud is to take across India and ends with a
sweet message for his beloved. Interestingly, the message itself is rather short when compared
with the description of the journey the cloud is to take. Before we can get to the message we are
confronted with a sense-battering display of the land that lies between the two lovers. Everything
the Yakṣa touches is sexualized. The longing that unites the lovers thematizes the land. What was
once homogenous and anonymous space becomes demarcated when the gaze of the Yakṣa
passes over it. Borders are constructed and maps are drawn over the natural territory of the
Indian subcontinent as the cloud bears the message of love. Normally when we gaze out into
space we are confronted by an abyss— our sight extends to the horizon and we are left
wondering what comes next (or we don’t even wonder!). But our Yakṣa knows there is
something beyond the horizon, a lover who grounds him in two places, two “heres” at once.
With these two spots standing powerfully in opposition on the map, the space between them
becomes a reality to be reckoned with, overcome, theorized, and sexualized.
In his book The Erotic Phenomenon, the radical Heideggerian Jean-Luc Marion imagines a situation
similar to that of the Meghadūta, a situation he describes as “exemplary, yet known to all, real or at
least imaginable.” He writes:
I have just left my accustomed home, I have traveled thousands of miles, I find
myself in a land that is foreign in terms of language, surroundings, ways and
customs, and it is in this land that, whether once and for all or for some specified
interval, I am going to live... On site, then, where am I? As a subsistent being, I am
at the intersection of a latitude and a longitude; as a being who uses tools, I am at
the center of a network of economic and social exchanges. But as a lover, where am
I? I find myself there where (or alongside whom) I can ask (myself), “Does anyone
love me?”… The horrors of settling in a foreign country are well known: upon
entering a new apartment, one first looks for the telephone (or equivalent device);
the first concern is to inquire how to work it; the first freedom consists in finally
using it. It is necessary to take these trivial details seriously, because they describe
the incontestable day-to-day experience of a place that is neither interchangeable
nor commutable, a place whose over there will never reduce to a here, because my
physical transport, bag and baggage, from one here to another here, not only retains
in this latter here the status of over there, but reinforces it. (pp. 30-31)
We see these observations come alive in the Meghadūta as the Yakṣa attempts to will himself
through his poetic imagination into the hands of his lover far-away in the Himalayas. Like the
pilgrim’s progress, as we get closer and closer to our final destination, description gets thicker
and the pace gets slower. Tension builds. By bringing the two lovers together conceptually, the
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cloud serves to reinforce the distance between them. By trying to render the space between him
and his beloved insignificant, the Yakṣa actually imparts significance to what was formerly empty
space.1
There are two parallel love stories being told in the poem: that of the Yakṣa and his bride, and
that of the cloud and the land and its inhabitants. It is worth noting that the poem was written in
a period of rapid expansion of the borders of the Gupta Empire when new territories were being
actively integrated into the cultural system of the Gupta kings. Some of the territories mentioned
in the poem were recently conquered and brought into the sway of the expanding empire.
Within the poem cultural differences are glossed over—women are described according to the
cities they live in, but the descriptions of their bodies and their actions doesn’t vary. Any place
the cloud passes over is a place where one can have sexual relations with the land and its
inhabitants. The only difference that is noted is that between naïve village women and the
urbane women of larger centers of commerce, but in the end, both the naïve and the urbane are
sexual beings. Not only the inhabitants, but also the land itself is sexual. The cloud constantly
“unites” with rivers and “waters” plains as he makes his journey north. The cloud transforms the
earth into a gigantic sexual map:
When you, the same color as a wet braid, reach its peak,
The mountain,
Slopes covered with mango groves that glisten with ripe fruit,
Will become worthwhile to be visited by immortal couples.
She will be like the breast of the earth—
Dark in the middle and pale throughout the rest.
And stripping off her clothes (by causing the banks of the Gambhirā River to overflow):
When we finally get to the description of the Yakṣa’s wife, we are presented with an image of
feminine beauty that could be taken out of any number of modern American fashion magazines
(perhaps the mechanical capitalist mode of production hasn’t changed sexual aesthetics as much
as we would like to think):
The picture of beauty presented here is exaggerated and unnatural (a woman with hips so large
she cannot walk straight and breasts so large she cannot stand upright!!), but the poet stresses
that it is a picture that presents nature as perfected, not distorted. The Yakṣa says:
The woman is a collage of the best aspects of nature— an amalgam of the most beautiful natural
images Kālidāsa can conjure up. Her beauty is one that comes from the world around her and
yet exceeds it by displaying the loveliest parts. When we read the poem, we are removed from
the actual woman by the gaze of two men, the poet and the distressed lover he creates. The
woman (nameless like our male Yakṣa) is a reflection of a shadow, obscured by idealized longing
and imagination. The Yakṣa imagines her as so distressed by their separation that she neglects
the social norms of beauty and bodily upkeep. She no longer uses conditioner for her hair, her
nails grow long, her cheeks become rough, clothes dirty, lips chapped, ornaments cast aside,
mascara unapplied. Her state of depression unleashes her natural beauty, which shows even
more because she doesn’t try to cover herself with the sexual instruments of society.
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As I re-read the description of the Yakṣa’s beloved and the message he gives her, I find myself
falling into the rhythms of separation (viraha). The pain and longing of the Yakṣa are so
complete, and he is so helpless (if not a little obnoxious) that I cannot help but feel that I too am
missing something, someone. The Yakṣa invites us on a tour of his mind: first he pictures his
lover in a perfect state, but soon fantasizes her as broken because of her longing for him. There
is nothing he wants more than to be desired back. He proclaims to the cloud:
This is the state the Yakṣa finds himself in and he assumes that his lover must feel the same. She
must miss him as much as he misses her; even though she is in the magnificent city of Alakā and
he in a remote mountain monastery, she certainly will be unable to enjoy the pleasures of her
situation. As the Yakṣa says, the “color will have faded with my separation.” Even in his pain, the
Yakṣa remains lighthearted— not upbeat, but perhaps jovial. After stressing just how pained his
lover will be and how she will neglect basic elements of fashion and hygiene, he turns around
and says:
It is the nighttime when both the mind and lovers wander, and it is the nighttime that worries
our Yakṣa.
Though he paints a rosy picture to the cloud regarding his lover and himself, the Yakṣa is well
aware that women can be unfaithful and seek out other lovers on their own. Of course his lover
would never do such a thing, but other women are given (and encouraged to have) mischievous
erotic agency. He tells the cloud:
The Yakṣa encourages sexuality in modes that aren’t socially accepted, but imagines his lover as
“faithful to her one husband and precisely counting the days.” His fears of unfaithfulness are
only expressed on the level of subtext— in front of the cloud he remains proud though
depressed.
Though we are presented with Yakṣas, gods, and other mythical characters, the Meghadūta is not a
poem of fantasy or magical-realism. At the end we are left with a profound tragic sense of
longing as the cloud (being a cloud) does not respond to the Yakṣa’s entreaties. The lover
acknowledges that the cloud is silent, but does not despair. He cries out:
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Still, reading the poem in the summer, the season the Yakṣa describes, during which love grows
and withers so quickly, leaves us hoping (and perhaps, almost confident) that the Yakṣa’s
message will reach his lover one way or another.
Which is then followed by a series of some sixty-one “who” clauses, explaining these “angel
headed hipsters” who were “the best minds of my generation.” (In fact, the opening of the
Meghadūta can easily be amalgamated into Howl… “I saw some Yakṣa, destroyed by love,
starving, hysterical naked, his bracelet having slipped off his forearm… who, somehow
suppressing his tears howled out to a cloud…”). The use of adjectives to progress the plot is
obvious in Howl, but it can become more complex and convoluted in the Sanskrit poem. These
adjectival sub-clauses and relative-clauses can make translation awkward and unwieldy if not
downright confusing. Here, the use of line breaks can actually be useful to the English translator
—by separating clauses by lines each clause becomes a unit that can be understood and digested
on its own, although this strategy breaks up to the flow of the poem.
The semantic range of Sanskrit words is massive. Most words are over-determined, conveying a
wide range of unrelated meanings. This lends itself very well to punning and double-entendres,
which can be very difficult to capture in translation. A prime example of this is Kālidāsa’s
continual use of the verb saṁgam, which he used to signify “reunion” as well as “sex” (perhaps
the English word “cohabitation” captures some of this meaning, but it is awkward to use. In its
own way, the English phrase “coming” bears its own difficulties.). Kālidāsa uses words with
multiple meanings to link verses together. While it is considered bad form to use the same word
twice in the same verse, it is the mark of a good poet to use the same word in different meanings
in verses close to each other. Unlike most languages, Sanskrit possesses a large store of “true
synonyms,” words that convey the exact meaning of another word with no lexical distinction
(most synonyms in English only approximate the meaning of another word). Thus, there are
dozens of words for the concept “house,” none of which display meaning distinct from one
another, but which make poetry more interesting.
The entire Meghadūta is written in a single metre and can be chanted. The emphasis on chanting
historically led to the poem being broken apart. Single verses can be chanted out of context and
rearranged to fit a certain performance, recitation, or dance. This is reflected in the content of
each verse, which expresses a single enclosed moment or image. Each verse acts as a semi-
autonomous, self-contained unit both thematically and syntactically. Traditional Sanskrit literary
critics assigned each poem a rasa, a flavor or mood. This rasa applied to the entire poem but also
to each particular verse, which was supposed to express the mood of the poem in toto. In the
case of the Meghadūta, the traditional rasa assigned is viraha, abandonment or separation.
Sanskrit poetry does not contain verse rhymes, but often employs internal rhyming, consonance,
and assonance. We are greeted with such beautiful compounds as taryestiryag, kanakamalaiḥ, and
ciraparicitam. I have not tried to emulate such operations in the specific instances in which
Kālidāsa employed them, but have tried to intersperse them into the poem where the English
language allowed it.
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While it is fundamentally a poem of ‘secular’ love, many of the images in the Meghadūta draw on
mythological and religious themes/stories that would have been familiar to the ancient Indian
but which can be challenging to express to the modern English reader without disrupting the
flow of the poem. These images make up the general literary landscape and are important to
include. Rather than trying to explain each mythological reference in an endnote, I have added a
few explanations into the poem itself, but have left many of the references unexplained. If the
reader desires to track them down, all she will need is a computer connected to the Internet.
We have already mentioned Yakṣas and the god Kubera, it is also important that we are
acquainted with the gods Śiva and Viṣṇu. Śiva is a terrifying god who is said to live in the
Himalayas. His throat is blue from having drank poison (to save the universe), and his hair is
ragged (perhaps dreadlocked) and provides a resting place for both the moon and the Milky Way,
which is said to flow down onto his hair and form the Ganges on earth. One of the most
powerful images in the poem shows Śiva dancing with his hands raised in the air while wearing a
bloody elephant skin in a victorious post-battle celebration. This is much to the chagrin of his
wife Pārvatī, who looks on aghast at the horrid scene. The two of them have a child named
Skanda, who was born when a drop of Śiva’s semen was entrusted to Agni, the god of fire, who
is incapable of handling the powerful semen. Agni drops the semen into some reeds along the
Ganges, where Skanda is born. He is often associated with his vehicle, the peacock. However,
the poem is not the product of a sectarian Shaivite setting. The god Viṣṇu appears in the
Meghadūta in many forms, or avatāras. At one interesting moment we are given four verses in a
row (56-59) that alternate between images of Śiva and Viṣṇu. The most powerful image of Viṣṇu
is given at the end of the poem (verse 107). The Kubera’s curse will end when Viṣṇu wakes up
from his four-month long sleep in his cosmic form, resting in the cosmic ocean on the serpent,
Śeṣa while he dreams existence. Most of the gods are not addressed with their common names,
but are instead referenced obliquely, either by epithets or by descriptions of their actions. In my
translation I have inserted the common name of the god and retained the descriptive epithet for
the ease of the non-specialist. Many other references are made to general mythological figures as
well as events from the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, but
discussing these here would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say that the language and
landscape of the epics recurs throughout the Meghadūta and provides the setting for the message
to take place (the Yakṣa is compared to Rāma separated from Sītā).
I put much personal effort into this translation, but it could not have come to fruition without
motivation and assistance provided me by Professor Gary Tubb. While each verse is my own, I
do not think there is a single sentence that he did not provide input on. That being said, he did
not read the final manuscript and I took liberties in both my presentation and translation of the
text. He should not be blamed for any errors, and this should not be read as a purely scholarly
project.
The themes of Meghadūta can be appreciated if not by anybody, then by anybody who has ever
been in love and who has an ear for poetry. Over the centuries, many different people have read
the poem in many different ways (some better than others), and I hope it can continue to be
read and re-interpreted for years to come. I leave you with a verse Goethe penned in meditation
on it:
The Poem
A Yakṣa slacking on the job
Had his powers removed by his boss’ curse,
(Which was heavy because it separated him from his lover).
He took up residence in the ashram at Rama’s mountain,
Covered in dense shade trees,
Water pure because Sītā, the daughter of Janaka, bathed there.
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I know that you are a shape shifter, and are really a minister of Indra,
You were born in the world-renowned lineage of apocalyptic clouds.
Being far from my family because of the power of the curse,
I make myself your supplicant—
Useless begging from those of good qualities is better than productive begging from the lowly.
The wives of travelers will lift up their bangs and breathe easy when they see you,
Borne by the Jetstream.
When you are ready for action,
Who would overlook his wife,
Miserable because of separation?
Even if that separation is voluntary, unlike mine, which depends on another.
Your path clear, you will certainly see my wife, your sister-in-law,
Not yet dead, faithful to her one husband, and precisely counting the days.
The hearts of women have a tendency to fall during separation—
They must be propped up like a flower bound by hope.
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Royal geese
(Provisioned for the long journey to Mount Kailāsa with pieces of shoots and sprouts),
Fly up together in the sky and become your companions
When they hear your roar,
Beautiful to the ear,
Making the earth flower with śilindhrā plants.
When you, the same color as a wet braid, reach its peak,
The mountain,
Slopes covered with mango groves that glisten with ripe fruit,
Will become a destination for immortal couples.
She will be like the breast of the earth—
Dark in the middle and pale throughout the rest.
Since you have poured out your rain, you should take her water,
Whose flow is obstructed by groups of jambhū trees,
Which is infused with the fragrant rut fluid of forest elephants,
And go!
The wind will not be able to raise you, overladen with moisture;
For everything inconsequential is light and the complete become weighty.
Having seen the green and brown nīpa flowers with their emerging stamens,
And the kandalī trees, whose first buds are appearing along the shore,
And having smelled the sweet scent of the wet earth in the dry wilderness,
The deer will show the way for you as you free droplets of water.
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You body will be magnified by the perfume powder that flows out of women’s windows,
Trained peacocks will give an offering of dance for you out of familial love.
When your inner self is worn out from the journey,
And you have spent the night in her palaces
(Fragrant with flowers, marked with red lac from the feet of graceful women),
You will be seen reverentially by the multitudes who think,
“He is dark like the throat of Śiva, out protector!”
You should go to the holy home of Candeśvara, the lord of the three worlds,
And to the park that is fanned by winds,
Fragrant from the bathing of young women playing in the water of the Gandhavi,
Scented with the pollen of water lilies.
Prostitutes,
Their belts clattering with their dance steps,
Their arms worn out from the graceful shaking of decorated fly-whisks,
Their scratch marks soothed by the first drops of your rain,
Will let loose glances towards you like a line of bees.
At that moment the water in the eyes of abandoned women will be pacified by their lovers;
The sun has returned to remove the tear of dew from their faces,
Please avoid his path—
He would be quite upset if you obstructed the reach of his rays.
Your naturally beautiful reflection will enter the clear water of the Gambhirā River
As if entering a pure mind.
Though you are stubborn, don’t make her glances useless,
Jumping like excited fish,
Bright lotuses.
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When you have passed each of those wonders near the Mount of Snow,
You should slip north through the Krauñca pass,
Which serves as a doorway for migratory geese,
And as a path for Paraśurāma, the lord of the Bhṛgus.
Stretched horizontally, you will be beautiful,
Like the black foot of Viṣṇu, rising to subdue the demon Bali.
As you take the water of Lake Mānasa, pressing out golden lotuses,
As you will yourself into a pleasing veil for the elephant Airava,
As you blow off the fine garment of the kalpa tree with your wet wind,
You will enter the crystal mountain,
Divided and refracted.
As you wander about and see the city Alakā once again,
Her negligee the Ganges slipped off as if on the lap of her beloved,
You will certainly recognize her tall palaces,
As she bears massive clouds discharging water,
Like a lover whose hair is strung with a net of pearls.
Her palaces can be compared with you in each one of their aspects—
You are full of thunder, they contain playful women;
You bear the rainbow, they are colorful;
They have beaten drums, your sound is dark and slippery;
You contain water, they are comprised of crystal;
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You are up high, they lick the clouds with their towers.
Young women display flowers from the six seasons all at once—
There are play-lotuses in their hands,
Their hair is full of young jasmine,
Their beautiful faces are whitened by the pollen of the rodhra,
In their tufts of hair they have young kuavakas,
In their ears, śirīṣa,
And in the parting of their hair a nipa flower, produced by your arrival.
Clouds like you are led by their leader the ever-moving wind,
To the top floor of the palaces.
Their drops of fresh water ruin the paintings there;
At that moment, seized by fear,
They depart through the windows,
Torn to pieces, skillfully hiding behind a smokescreen.
Our house is there, just north of the estates of the lord of wealth,
Visible from afar with its arch as lovely as the rainbow;
At one end there is a young mandara tree,
Bent over with clusters of blossoms accessible to the hand—
It was raised by my lover as an adopted child.
Listen sādhu!
You will recognize my house with these signs places in your heart,
When you see the shell and lotus drawn elegantly on our doorposts!
I imagine the color will have faded with my separation;
It is well known that lotuses do not display their beauty when the sun has gone.
Or, having placed her guitar on the neglected clothes of her lap,
And somehow having tuned the strings wet from the water of her eyes,
Desiring to sing a song containing my name,
She will forget the melody again and again,
Though she wrote it herself.
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With a sigh that injures that buds that are her lips she scatters her hair,
Hanging down to her cheek,
Rough because she bathes only with pure water.
That very night that passed in only an instant when she was with me and her desires,
She now passes with passionate tears in her bed of separation.
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Attending her,
Holding back your thunder.
While my beloved is engrossed in dreams of me,
Do not shake the tight embrace of her vine arms from my neck.
Far away, his path obstructed by hostile fate, with his desires he enters—
Your slender body with his slender body,
Which is distressed with his that is powerfully distressed,
Which sheds tears with his that also has tears,
Which is continually longing with his that longs,
Which has burning sighs with his whose sighs are even greater.
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2 Translated by Michael J Franklin in The European Discovery of India: Key Indological Sources of
Romanticism.
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