Introduction
The use of the curse motif is a recurrent theme in the works of Kalidasa. The Meghadutam opens against the setting of a curse. The Raghuvamsa begins with a curse, and in Abhigyanashakuntalam too, the curse becomes central issue in the play’s plot. The curse motif in Abhigyanashakuntalam is solely intertwined with Dushyanta’s signet ring. The curse motif in the play drives the central conflict by probing into the deeper philosophical, cultural, and psychological themes.
The Curse of Sage Durvasa
In Kalidasa’s play, King Dushyanta, out hunting, arrives at Kanva’s hermitage, where he meets Shakuntala and her friends. He falls in love with her almost immediately, and so does Shakuntala. They both get married secretly in the forest and share some romantic moments. Summoned by his royal duties, the King leaves Shakuntala alone in the hermitage. While leaving, he gives Shakuntala his signet ring as a token of his love and promises to return as soon as he concludes his duties.
Kalidasa’s achievement of Abhigyanashakuntalam revolves around the pivotal event of the sage, Durvasa’s curse. After Dushyanta leaves Shakuntala to perform his royal duties, Shakuntala gets lost in his thoughts and starts thinking of the happy moment of their reunion. Durvasa, who enters then, does not receive proper offers of customary welcome and respect from Shakuntala, which makes him severely angry. Durvasa is well known for his quick temper and cruel curses in Hindu mythology, and therefore his curse plays the central role in the play. Angered by Shakuntala’s behaviour, Sage Durvasa curses her.
The essence of Durvasa’s curse is that Dusyanta will completely forget about Shakuntala’s existence and the affair they had, the fact that he had married her in the ritual of Gandharva and promised to summon her to the capital. However, he gives a little loose to his curse where he also mentions that the curse will automatically get withdrawn if Dushyanta sees the signet ring that he gave Shakuntala as a token of his love.
The curse of Durvasa generates the main complication of the play through several key developments. One of them was the incident when Shakuntala was traveling to Dushyanta’s court, she realized that the signet ring was missing, and it might have slipped away from her finger while she was taking a bath in the river. Dushyanta, therefore, does not recognize Shakuntala when she finally arrives at his court, and without the signet ring to trigger his memory, he publicly rejects Shakuntala and their marriage, which ultimately leads to humiliation and devastation in Shakuntala’s life.
Durvasa’s curse becomes an inevitable part of Kalidasa’s play. It leads to Shakuntala’s suffering and longing for her lover. However, the curse alone can not be blamed for Dusyanta’s loss of memory about Shakuntala. It is said that the curse becomes a very important factor in showcasing human frailties and forgetfulness. It is Dusyanta’s own fault that he forgot about Shakuntala; the curse, however, just ignited it in a certain manner.
Later, a fisherman finds the signet ring in the belly of a fish and brings it to Dushyanta, who immediately regains his memory and decides to reunite with his long-lost family. The family reunites, and the play ends with a happy note.
The curse, therefore, serves both as the agent of separation and reunion, which transforms a simple love story into a story full of love, suffering, longing, and reunion at the end. The curse of the sage plays a central role in the play that not only helps in the plot development but also makes the story remarkable.
The role of the Ring as a token of recognition
In Kalidasa’s Abhigyanashakuntalam, the recognition token or the signet ring plays the central role, which brings the whole plot to life. It serves as the primary recognition device by bringing out the main essence of the play. King Dushyanta gives his royal signet ring to Shakuntala as a token of his love and promises to send for her once his duties are over. Later, that same ring acts as the symbol of regaining his memory and helps him reunite with his beloved wife and son. The token, therefore, acts both as a symbol of love as well as a symbol of recognition.
The ring’s magical journey from Dushyanta to Shakuntala to the river to the belly of the fish and finally to Dushyanta back establishes the narrative structure essential for the resolution of the curse. The signet ring remains the most important part of the play since it plays the role of bringing the King’s memory back. As soon as he sees the ring, his memory comes into clear view by breaking through Durvasa’s curse. The ring, therefore, remains very important in serving as a trigger in the play, which helps Dushyanta gain his lost memory and reunite with his wife. On a metaphorical level, we can also equate the circular nature of the ring to represent the cyclical nature of love, forgetting, separation, longing, suffering, remembrance, and finally reunion, which remain the core themes of the play. Therefore, the ring foreshadows the cyclical structure of the plot of the play
When Dushyanta rejects Shakuntala in front of everyone in his court, Shakuntala feels insulted and distressed. Unable to display the ring, she fails to bring Dushyanta’s memory back about their affair and secret marriage. Later, when the fisherman recognizes the ring to be the King’s, Dushyanta immediately remembers everything and goes on to reunite with his family. Here, the ring becomes the key element, masterfully acting as the bridge between Dushyanta and Shakuntala’s relationship.
As the title itself suggests, “Abhigyana” means recognition; the curse of Durvasa and the ring of Dushyanta both play a very important role in the recognition of Shakuntala in front of Dushyanta. Readers and critics state that the curse was necessary to bring Shakuntala into recognition. The ring of Dushyanta is not just a mere ring but a token of recognition. However, the actual importance of the ring only comes into view when it gets lost. Thus, besides serving as the recognition token, it gives a lesson in learning the importance of things.
Another important fact is that the loss of the ring is a seemingly minor incident, but again, this minor incident plays the most vital role in the play, ultimately leading to disastrous repercussions. Shakuntala losing the ring and Dushyanta forgetting about their secret marriage become live examples of the role of fate in human life. Shakuntala, therefore, with no solid proof of their marriage, fails to bring Dushyanta’s memory back and therefore suffers from separation and longing.
Besides serving as the token of Dushyanta’s love for Shakuntala, the ring remains as the tangible proof and reminder of the couple’s secret marriage and Dushyanta’s vow to send back for her once his royal duties are over. The token, therefore, implies that human memory and recognition are very delicate and dependent upon their surroundings and conditions, which sometimes help in forgetting and sometimes in remembrance and reunion. Therefore, the recognition token adds to and magnifies the curse motif in the play.
The Curse and the psychology of the characters
In his groundbreaking work, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Sigmund Freud explains the psychological processes behind memory and amnesia. He discusses the intentional aspect of memory, the safeguarding nature of forgetfulness, and how painful memories or displeasing ones can fade into motivated forgetting. He suggests that it is acceptable to forget unimportant things, but forgetting significant things often loses its importance and therefore is disputed.
Freud gives a reference to an example from Ernest Jones’s Psychoanalysis that is similar to Dushyanta’s forgetting of Shakuntala. This relates to how Caesar neglected to bid farewell to Cleopatra when departing Egypt, as depicted in Bernard Shaw’s work Caesar and Cleopatra. This failure is interpreted as a clear sign of Caesar’s indifference toward Cleopatra. In Abhigyanashakuntalam, Dushyanta bids a sweet farewell to Shakuntala, promising to reunite as soon as he finishes his royal duties, and yet, while Caesar forgets only to take leave of Cleopatra, Dushyanta forgets Shakuntala herself.
Kalidasa’s play provides a major platform for the psychological development of the characters by deeply delving into human emotions, love, longing, suffering, relationships, and inner conflicts. From the very beginning of the text, there are visible psychological changes and developments of the characters. For instance, Dusyanta’s attraction towards Shakuntala remains purely sensual and infatuated, which later grew into love and marriage. He states, “The hermit girls seem to be far finer than our court ladies”, which is purely a sensual statement, proving the king’s sense of infatuation.
When we examine the progression of the character of Shakuntala in the play, her extreme strength and stable mental state come from Dushyanta’s rejection and humiliation. Durvasa’s curse inflicts a negative impact on her psyche, which surprisingly brings out and demonstrates brilliant courage in Shakuntala. This not only makes her character strong but also strengthens her mental stability to accept situations.
The psychological developments of the characters remain so intricately linked with the action, that from the beginning of the play, the plot progresses with the progression of the characters’ psychological state. It can be traced along Dushyanta’s having a strong sensual feeling towards Shakuntala, which is a result of his infatuation to fall in love with her and finally marry her, thus developing the psychology. But later, when the couple gets separated and followed by the curse of Durvasa, Dushyanta forgets about Shakuntala’s existence, leading to her suffering and longing, negatively impacting her state of mind and leading to the climactic point of the plot.
This devastating psychological trauma of not being recognized by one’s lover has a very negative impact on one’s psyche. Similarly, Shakuntala too faces this traumatic and devastating situation when Dushyanta rejects her. The plot, therefore, closely traces the psychological progression of Shakuntala, from innocence to falling in love, facing the trauma of rejection and finally healing through reunion- it marks the proverbial ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘end’ of the play, closely tied together with the motif of curse in the play.
According to some critics, Durvasas’s curse brings an element of chance and incalculable happening in the development of the plot. On the contrary, one can argue that the curse is inevitable as the curse did not come merely from Durvasa in the first place; it was born in the mind of Dushyanta as a form of fleeting fancy. The curse, therefore remains as the curse of human conflict. Both the ring and curse become the two pulls of the mind. One helps in forgetting, another in recognition.
Conclusion
The curse motif in Kalidasa’s Abhigyanashakuntalam plays the central role as it helps in a deeper understanding of the character’s inner turmoil and emotion. Besides serving as an aid adding to the dramatic tension, the curse effectively highlights the themes of love, fate, memory, and reunion. However, it is true that initially, the curse makes Shakuntala suffer, but at the same time, it becomes a test of their love and proves that true love must go through obstacles and difficulties in order to attain fulfilment. The curse motif, therefore, acts as the central role in the play, focusing on different areas of the plot leading to a satisfying finale.
