Kalidasa's World and His Plays

Image: The lord Shiva's dance is the rhythm of the universe -- a universe that moves according to the beat that Shiva drums. From the Badami Caves, India, 7th or 8th century CE.

1. Read Kalidasa's play Sakuntala, (5th c. CE), in Theater of Memory
3. Barbara Stoler Miller, "Kalidasa's World and His Plays" in Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa, Pages 3-41 (especially Pages 12-41) 

ASSIGNMENT and reading response : Observe something that strikes you as beautiful or poignant in some way. Take five minutes to sit quietly and pay an observant kind of attention in the presence of this beauty. Then, either shut your eyes or go somewhere where you can be quiet and alone or continuing to be in the presence, but focusing softly, of the thing you are observing.  Meditate on the thing you have chosen for at least 15 minutes (do 20 minutes if you can). To “meditate” can mean many different things. You can decide what makes the most sense for you. The point is to deeply sense the “thing” even, perhaps, when not looking at it, and to hold your concentration in a suspended and relaxed mode. If your mind wanders, just watch where it goes, but gently bring it back if it seems to stray to everyday worries. The process here is more important than the product, so don’t skimp on the meditation time. After meditation, work organically to find a physical gesture that captures the affect or experience of that beautiful or poignant thing. By organically I mean the following: try not to work solely from your critical, objective, analytical faculties (though of course these can be called “organic” as well), but include your faculties of intuition and physical sensation. The gesture should be “not intended to imitate nature realistically, but rather to recreate the experience” (you'll find this quote in the Miller reading for  class). That is, you need to meditate on the beautiful or poignant thing and experience it or re-experience it in gesture/movement/stillness/pose. Rather than a picture or representation of the thing, the gesture/movement should conjure the sensation of it. Be prepared to show us your gesture in class and to discuss the process of discovering this gesture. For some of you this will be an excruciatingly hard – others will find it a pleasure -- just try! Write a response paper on the following: Write about what it was like to find the gesture assigned above.



Reading response -- choose from the following:

1. Return to your mediation on a beautiful thing and your finding of the gesture. Does your experience with the process resonate in any way with the Kalidasa essay from Miller? Use at least two quotes from the Miller essay on Kalidasa to discuss relative to your gesture work. Did that exercise affect your reading of the play?

2. Work on pages 112-116. From the King's line: "This place is enchanted by the wind" to the bottom of 116. See if you can chart the string of metaphoric and/or metonymic substitutions that turn the wind into writing and the writing into bodies. Write up that chain.

3. Using The Bacchae and Sakuntala as examples, what, for you, is the most significant difference between these two traditions, and how does this difference affect your experience of the two plays as a reader?

4. Or answer the following: What is the antelope?

Further interest:  Kutiyattam and other Indian Theatre links
*Sanskrit literature
*Review of Sakuntala from contemporary Kutiyattam festival
*The Lotus Flower and the Bee
*Kutiyattam demonstrated and discussed
*Stage Manager's Entrance in Kutiyattam
*Mudras diagram
*Mudras lesson
*Odissi dance -- notice the storytelling
* Preface to Kutiyattam performances
*Documentary about Kutiyattam as "Intangible Heritage" 

Though this could be subtitled: "A couple of Caucasian Americans sitting around talking about Ancient India," if you are interested in cave analogies and comparisons between East and West then it might be interesting. In this clip,  Joseph Campbell compares the Sistine Chapel to 8th-century sculpture of the godhead in a cave in Bombay as a way of discussing differing orientations to divinity. Given Plato and the parable of the cave as an orientation to mimesis and masking (masking as removed from truth), this is interesting to consider for its different (?) perspective:

 

Gajasurasamhara: A frieze depicting the god Shiva slaying Gajasura the demon in the Chennakeshava temple at Belur