The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The Cloud Messenger (Meghadŭta) is a poetic monologue in 210 stanzas; if one were to place it approximately in a genre of European verse, one could call it a pastorale. The conceit of the poem is that a young nobleman in the guise of a yaksa (a minor nature deity) for some unspecified offense has been exiled to a remote mountain. He misses his beautiful young bride, and imagines that she is pining for him as well at their palace in the Himalayan foothill city of Alaka. Seeing a passing cloud on the mountaintop, he asks it to float to Alaka and deliver a message of love and comfort to his wife. This gives the poet, in the voice of the young yaksa, a chance to describe the rivers and mountains, towns and cities that the cloud will pass on its way to deliver the message; the poem is a sort of travelogue in the form of a love letter. The tone of the poem, and the highly formal structure of the verse itself, is elevated and refined; the fanciful mission entrusted to the cloud mes­senger seems paradoxically ali the more passionate for that air of elegant restraint.

Sakuntala and the Ring ofRecognition, usually called simply Sakuntala, is a play that one might classify as a heroic romance. Like so much of Indian theater, its plot is derived from one of the many subplots of the Mahabharata [16]. Briefly, it concerns a kmg's love for a beautiful maiden, Sakuntala, daughter of a nymph and a sage-king. She has been raised in the forest, in total innocence, by an ascetic priest. One day, while out hunt- ing, King Dusyanta spies Sakuntala, and immediately falls in love with her; they become lovers, and she becomes pregnant by him. But duty calls, and he must return to his capital; before he does, he gives her a ring by which he will always recognize her. Later she traveis to his court, but loses the ring along the way; when she arrives, he thinks she looks vaguely familiar, but he can't place her. Eventually, after many difficulties, the ring is recovered and the lovers reunited, to the satisfaction of ali.

In one way at least the comparison of Kгlidгsa and Shakespeare [39] is apt: Both were masters of writing in char- acter, from the most royal and refined monarchs to the most bawdy and vulgar clowns. Kгlidгsa in fact had an advantage over Shakespeare, because he had two languages at his dis- posal; in his plays, the most aristocratic characters speak classi- cal Sanskrit, while the rest speak vernacular Prakrit. (It is as if in the plays of Moliиre the principal male characters spoke Latin, and everyone else spoke French.) I would suggest another Shakespearean comparison as well. The principal ten- sion in Sakuntala is between duty and passion, between socially prescribed modes of behavior and spontaneous love. Shakespeare explored the same themes in The Tempest; it is an interesting exercise to read the two plays in close succession.

Sakuntala was first translated into English by Sir William Jones, a pioneer Western scholar of Sanskrit and the father of modern scientific linguistics; his translation was greatly admired by Goethe [62]. There have since been other excel- lent translations of the works of Kгlidгsa, who deserves to become much better known in the West.

J.S.M.

24

Revealed to MUHAMMAD

completed 650 The Koran

Western Arabia during the early centuries of the Common Era was a prosperous part of the larger Semitic world, a land where the caravan trade from Yemen to the Levant created a cos- mopolitan and lively society. Jews and Christians were a part of the local community, and the Torah and the New Testament were well known. Many, perhaps most, people in that part of the world considered themselves descendants of Abraham through his son Ishmael. Into that community, in the city of Mecca, Muhammad was born around the year 570. The first forty years of his life were unremarkable; he married a pros- perous widow and was a respectable member of Mecca's mer- cantile class.

In 610 Muhammad began to preach what he described as messages given to him by God; he had, he said, been selected to warn the people that God's final revelation was at hand. He was a charismatic preacher who gathered many followers but also made enemies; the latter plotted to murder him in 622, but he was warned of the plot and fled to the nearby city of Medina. There he founded a theocratic state in accordance with the word of God as it had been revealed to him; the year 622 of the Common Era is the Year One of the Islamic calendar.