About the poem

After reading Meghadutam, we have to pause and ask ourselves a few questions:

(a) What effect did this poem have on you?

(b) What has this poem conveyed to you?
(c) Why should we read it today?

To answer the first question, think of the poem as a whole (or the excerpt that you have read).
What is the first image that comes to mind? It would be of a lonely yaksha standing forlorn in
front of a mountain, looking up at a single monsoon cloud in the sky. The anguish he feels is
mainly the yearning for his wife separated from him in a distant city; it is also the nostalgia
he feels for home and all the sights and smells he was used to. The cloud is a reminder of all
that was familiar – he must have seen a similar monsoon cloud in a very different sky of his
home state! All of us who have been forced to leave our familiar surroundings (especially if
you had loved those surroundings) would be able to relate to this feeling.

Added to this melancholy is the stronger sense of grief he feels about his loved one from
whom he was forced to stay away. Love is a human emotion that is felt and understood by
most people, so Kalidasa’s poem will be understood by most human beings, despite cultural
differences.

But his personal misery does not blind the yaksha to other’s misfortunes. He is gracious in his
salutation to the cloud, addresses it as a brother, and asks it to travel slowly but steadily to
Alaka. The route is described lovingly and painstakingly, and Kalidasa’s close observation of
nature and natural phenomena are evident here.

Although the poem starts off on a melancholy note, the beauty of the stanzas depicting
natural beauty leaves the reader with a sense of pleasure. This is heightened when the cloud
finally reaches the city of Alaka. We are also left with a lingering sense of wonder at the
leisurely pace of life in an ancient world that seems to be uniformly beautiful. In fact, this
appears to be a drawback in the poem: that it describes only the beautiful and the leisurely
aspects of life.

The answer to the second question depends completely on the type of person you are. If you
are not somebody who likes poetry, you might have felt that this is a thoroughly boring poem.
If you are a romantic, then you would have liked the soft sentimentality that it brings to you.
However, beneath all the soft and sensuous beauty, the poem depicts human emotions. The
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pathos of the yaksha is heightened against the background of nature that is celebrating love
and new life with the arrival of the monsoons. He appears to be lonelier. Does this bring to
mind the plight of the exiles and the refugees, starting from migrant labourers in India to
refugee immigrants across the globe?

However, despite the sorrow, the poem conveys the virtue of compassion and empathy for
your fellow beings. This is an aspect that I touched upon while discussing the poem.

Why should we read this ancient poem today? Primarily because it is a beautiful poem. But if
you are not a person who is keen on aesthetic pleasure, you can look for a worldview that
could be emulated today, which is the sense of oneness with nature and all the seemingly
trivial parts of nature. The cloud is a brother to the yaksha and there is no sense that it is an
entity at a lower level.

The cloud is also a symbol of the give and take relationship that exists in nature. It is the
giver of much-needed water to the land and the workers on the land. It takes water from the
streams, but also replenishes them when they run dry. The yaksha, the cloud, the chataka
birds, kutaja flowers, hills covered with mango trees, deer, elephants, peacocks, the women
working in the fields – all are connected together in a mutually sustaining bond.

This oneness of nature and with nature is a feature of a pre-industrialized world, a quality that
we lost when we became more ‘developed’. The love and respect for nature, rather than greed
and arrogance, would perhaps be the factors that can save us from major ecological disasters.
Kalidasa was not teaching us a lesson on nature conservation through his Meghadutam, but
this is a subtle message that we can draw from the poem today.

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