The Birth of the War-God (Kumārasambhava)

Overview

Author

Kālidāsa, the most celebrated poet and dramatist of classical Sanskrit, probably active around 400 CE under the Gupta kings; the Aihole inscription of 634 CE already names him as a famous poet

Language and genre

Sanskrit verse; a mahākāvya, or 'great poem', the courtly epic of descriptive set pieces, elaborate figures and varied metres

Subject

How the goddess Pārvatī (Umā), daughter of the Himalaya, wins the ascetic god Śiva as her husband, so that their son Kumāra (Skanda) may be born to destroy the demon Tāraka

Extent

Seventeen cantos in the printed vulgate; the first eight are generally accepted as Kālidāsa's, and cantos IX–XVII, which tell of Kumāra's birth and victory, are widely regarded as a later continuation

This edition

Ralph T. H. Griffith's verse translation of the first seven cantos, in rhymed couplets, first published in 1853 and revised for Trübner's Oriental Series in 1879; it condenses and paraphrases freely

Setting

The Himalaya and its peaks; Brahmā's heaven and Indra's world; Śiva's hermitage grove; the mountain city of Himālaya; Mount Kailāsa

Main figures

Pārvatī (Umā); Śiva; Himālaya and his queen Menā; Kāma, god of love, his wife Rati and his friend Spring (Vasanta); Indra, Brahmā and the gods; the demon Tāraka; the Seven Sages and Arundhatī

Key episodes

Pārvatī's birth and beauty (I); the gods' appeal to Brahmā (II); the burning of Kāma (III); Rati's lament (IV); Pārvatī's austerities and the disguised suitor (V); the betrothal (VI); the wedding (VII)

Other works

The Raghuvaṃśa (a second mahākāvya), the Meghadūta (The Cloud Messenger), and three plays: Abhijñānaśākuntala, Vikramorvaśīya and Mālavikāgnimitra

Key translations

Griffith (1853; 2nd ed. 1879); Hank Heifetz, The Origin of the Young God (cantos I–VIII, 1985); David Smith, The Birth of Kumára, Clay Sanskrit Library (all seventeen cantos, 2005)

Context

Almost nothing certain is known of Kālidāsa's life. Indian legend made him a dull youth turned great poet by the grace of the goddess Kālī, and placed him among the 'nine jewels' at the court of a king Vikramāditya; neither story can be trusted. The evidence of his works, their language and their echoes in later poetry and inscriptions points to the Gupta age, and most scholars place him around 400 CE, perhaps in the reigns of Candragupta II and Kumāragupta I. A firm limit is given by the Aihole inscription of 634 CE, whose poet boasts of rivalling Kālidāsa and Bhāravi (Mirashi 1969) (Keith 1928). Besides the Kumārasambhava, Kālidāsa is credited with a second long poem, the Raghuvaṃśa, the short Meghadūta, and three plays, of which Śakuntalā became the most famous Sanskrit work in Europe (Miller 1984).

The Kumārasambhava is a mahākāvya, the genre that Sanskrit critics later treated as the summit of poetry. A great poem in this sense tells a story drawn from legend, divided into cantos (sargas), and gives full scope to set descriptions: mountains, seasons, sunrise and moonrise, love in union and in separation, councils, embassies, weddings and wars. Its pleasure lies less in plot than in the poet's ornament, above all simile and the fanciful conceit (utprekṣā), and in the emotional flavour, rasa, that the whole is designed to produce. Kālidāsa's two epics became models for the genre, and his verses were quoted for centuries by anthologists and theorists (Lienhard 1984) (Warder 1977) (Ingalls 1965).

The myth behind the title is old. The Sanskrit epics tell how the gods, oppressed by demons, needed a general who could only be born from Śiva's seed, and how that seed passed through Agni, the river Gaṅgā and the six Kṛttikās before Skanda, also called Kumāra ('the Boy') and Kārttikeya, was born (Goldman 1984) (van Buitenen 1975). The cult of Skanda as war-god flourished in northern India in the centuries before Kālidāsa, and it may not be chance that two Gupta rulers bore the names Kumāragupta and Skandagupta (Mann 2012). Kālidāsa's originality was to shift the weight of the story from the war to the marriage: what the poem as we have it narrates is not a birth but a courtship, in which an ascetic god must be brought to love and a young woman must make herself worthy of him (O'Flaherty 1973).

The poem's extent is a famous problem. Printed editions contain seventeen cantos, but the great commentator Mallinātha, whose glosses accompany most traditional editions, wrote only on the first eight, and the later cantos are found in fewer manuscripts and are not quoted by the classical theorists. Most scholars therefore accept cantos I–VIII as Kālidāsa's and regard IX–XVII, which describe the birth of Kumāra and his war against Tāraka, as the work of a later hand (Kale 1995) (Heifetz 1985) (Smith 2005). The eighth canto, which describes the love-making of Śiva and Pārvatī after the wedding, is itself controversial, not for its authorship but for its subject.

Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith (1826–1906), a Sanskritist who spent most of his career at the Government College at Benares and later translated the Rāmāyaṇa and the Vedic hymns, published The Birth of the War-God in 1853 and revised it for Trübner's Oriental Series in 1879 (Griffith 1879). He rendered only the first seven cantos and stopped at the wedding, before the eighth canto's description of the divine honeymoon. His version is in English rhymed couplets, and it is a paraphrase rather than a verse-for-verse translation: Griffith compresses, expands, and adds Victorian turns of phrase and moral reflection of his own. It should be read as an English poem of its age, and for the sense of particular verses students should compare a modern translation such as Heifetz's or Smith's (Heifetz 1985) (Smith 2005).

Plot overview

The demon Tāraka, made almost invincible by a boon of the creator Brahmā, has conquered the three worlds and humiliated the gods. Brahmā tells them that only a son of Śiva can defeat him. But Śiva, since the death of his first wife Satī, lives as a solitary ascetic on a Himalayan peak, indifferent to love. Satī herself has been reborn as Pārvatī, also called Umā, the beautiful daughter of the mountain-king Himālaya and his queen Menā, and the sage Nārada has foretold that she will be Śiva's bride. Her father sends her to wait on the god in his hermitage.

Indra, king of the gods, enlists Kāma, the god of love, to break Śiva's meditation. With his wife Rati and his friend Spring, Kāma enters the grove and makes the season bloom out of time. At the moment when Pārvatī offers Śiva a rosary, Kāma looses his flower arrow; Śiva feels a stir of passion, masters it, sees the archer, and burns him to ashes with the fire of his third eye. Pārvatī is carried home by her father, humiliated. Rati laments her husband and prepares to die on his pyre, until a voice from heaven promises that Kāma will receive his body again once Śiva marries.

Pārvatī concludes that beauty alone cannot win such a husband and resolves to win him by tapas, ascetic austerity. Against her mother's pleas she goes to the mountains, wears bark, sits between fires in summer and lies in the rain and snow, and at last refuses even fallen leaves, earning the name Aparṇā. A young Brahmin student visits her, learns her purpose and pours scorn on Śiva as a homeless, snake-wreathed haunter of cremation grounds. Pārvatī defends the god with passion and turns to leave, and the visitor reveals himself as Śiva, declaring himself her slave.

Śiva sends the Seven Sages and Arundhatī, wife of Vasiṣṭha, to ask Himālaya for his daughter. Himālaya consults Menā with a glance and gives his consent, and the wedding is fixed for the fourth day. In canto VII Pārvatī is bathed and adorned, Śiva's terrible ornaments are transformed into wedding finery, and he rides in procession with the gods to Himālaya's city, where the women crowd to the windows to see him. The couple walk around the sacred fire, the gods bless them, and at their plea Śiva agrees to restore Kāma. Griffith's version ends as the bride is led to the bridal chamber; in the Sanskrit, canto VIII goes on to describe their love-making.

Canto by canto

Characters

Himālaya's household

Pārvatī (Umā, Aparṇā)

Daughter of the mountain-king and Menā, and in a former life Śiva's wife Satī. The first canto presents her as perfect beauty, but the poem's real interest is her development from object of admiration to agent: after Kāma's death she wins Śiva by her own tapas and by her proud defence of him. Her modesty, her anger and her steadiness are all shown through gesture and speech.

Himālaya

The mountain-king, at once a range of peaks and a royal person with a city, a queen and kinsmen. He is a loving father who does not dare to offer his daughter to Śiva unasked and who receives the Seven Sages with humility. Kālidāsa's opening description makes him the poem's first hero.

Menā

Himālaya's queen and Pārvatī's mother. She opposes her daughter's austerities ('u mā', 'O, do not!'), gives her consent to the marriage with a look, and weeps as she dresses her for the wedding.

The gods

Śiva

The great ascetic god, three-eyed, blue-throated, crowned with the crescent moon, wreathed with snakes and smeared with ashes. Mourning Satī, he meditates on a Himalayan peak, and he destroys Kāma when love tries to take him by surprise. He is won not by desire but by Pārvatī's austerity, and in canto V he tests her in disguise. In the wedding cantos he appears as a gracious bridegroom whose terrifying attributes become ornaments.

Kāma

The god of love, armed with a bow of flowers strung with bees, and his arrows of blossoms. Eager to serve Indra, he boasts that even Śiva must yield to him, and is burned to ashes by the god's third eye. His destruction and promised return frame the second half of the poem.

Rati

Kāma's wife, whose name means 'delight' or 'love's pleasure'. Her lament over his ashes in canto IV is the poem's great expression of grief, and the voice from heaven persuades her to live in hope of his restoration.

Spring (Vasanta, Madhu)

Kāma's friend and ally, who makes the season bloom out of time in Śiva's grove. In canto IV he comforts Rati and is asked to build her pyre.

Indra

King of the gods, the thousand-eyed wielder of the thunderbolt, humiliated by Tāraka. He leads the gods to Brahmā and commissions Kāma's fatal errand.

Brahmā

The four-faced creator, praised by the gods in canto II as the source of all things. Bound by the boon he gave Tāraka, he cannot destroy him himself and reveals that only a son of Śiva can.

Bṛhaspati

The gods' preceptor and speaker ('the Most Eloquent' in Griffith), who describes Tāraka's tyranny to Brahmā in canto II.

Kumāra (Skanda)

The son of Śiva and Pārvatī, the war-god of the title, who is to kill Tāraka. In the eight cantos generally accepted as Kālidāsa's he is not yet born; his birth and victory are told only in the later cantos IX–XVII.

The demons

Tāraka

The demon whose boon makes him master of the three worlds. He never appears in the first seven cantos; his power is known only through Bṛhaspati's description, and his defeat lies beyond the part of the poem Griffith translated.

Sages

Nārada

The wandering sage who prophesies in canto I that Pārvatī will become Śiva's wife, sharing half his body.

The Seven Sages, Arundhatī and Aṅgiras

The seven ancient seers, identified with the stars of the Great Bear, who carry Śiva's proposal to Himālaya. They are accompanied by Arundhatī, Vasiṣṭha's wife, model of the faithful wife; Aṅgiras speaks for them.

Śiva's household

Nandin

Śiva's attendant and doorkeeper, who silences the grove with a gesture in canto III and in canto VII supports the god as he mounts his bull.

Themes

Asceticism and desire

The poem stages a conflict between tapas, the heat of ascetic discipline, and kāma, desire. Śiva represents the first in its purest form, and when desire attacks him by surprise it is destroyed. Yet the poem does not conclude that asceticism is simply superior. Desire is necessary to the world, since the gods need a son, and it returns in a new form once it has been purified by Pārvatī's own tapas and by marriage (O'Flaherty 1973).

This resolution is typical of Kālidāsa, whose works repeatedly reconcile the values of renunciation and of worldly life. Daniel Ingalls described the poet as the voice of an age confident that pleasure, wealth and duty could be held together in balance (Ingalls 1976).

Beauty and its limits

Pārvatī's beauty is described with every resource of poetry, and it fails. In canto V she curses it as useless, and she wins Śiva only when she has set aside her jewels and exposed her body to fire and rain. The poem thus questions the very ornament it delights in, while keeping its delight: even in her penance, the poet admires her.

This double attitude extends to the poem's own style. Kālidāsa's descriptions are ornamental, yet they are always tied to feeling and action, so that ornament serves the story rather than replacing it.

Marriage as cosmic order

The wedding of Śiva and Pārvatī is the union of the father and mother of the world, as Aṅgiras says in canto VI, and on it depends the safety of the gods. Kālidāsa therefore describes it with the full ritual of a human Hindu wedding, so that a domestic ceremony becomes an image of cosmic harmony. Arundhatī's presence, the pole star and the priestly blessing all make marital fidelity the poem's central value (Smith 2005).

The divine in nature

The poem's first hero is a mountain, and throughout it nature takes part in the action: spring comes out of season, the grove falls silent at Nandin's gesture, the earth trembles when Śiva wakes, the mountain's caves echo Himālaya's welcome. Kālidāsa's world is one in which landscape, gods and feeling are continuous, which is why his similes so often move between the human and the natural.

Women's agency

The poem is driven by its women. Pārvatī chooses her husband and wins him; Rati determines to die and is persuaded to live; Menā resists and then consents; Arundhatī moves Śiva towards marriage; the women at the windows give their verdict on the bridegroom. Tubb's reading of Pārvatī as the poem's hero has made this aspect central to modern criticism (Tubb 1984).

Motifs

The seasons

Spring in canto III, the cycle of summer heat, rain and winter in canto V, and the autumn imagery of the wedding canto mark the stages of the story. In the Sanskrit, canto VIII measures the couple's love in seasons that pass like a single night.

Messengers and go-betweens

Much of the action is done through intermediaries: Nārada's prophecy, Indra's commission to Kāma, Pārvatī's companion who speaks for her, the Seven Sages who carry the proposal, the friend who carries Pārvatī's request in canto VI. The decorum of indirect speech is part of the poem's courtly world.

Ornaments put on and taken off

Pārvatī lays aside her jewels for bark in canto V and is adorned again in canto VII; Śiva's snakes and skull become jewels for his wedding. Changes of ornament mark changes of state.

The gaze

Eyes govern the poem: Himālaya's insatiable gaze on his daughter, Śiva's gaze on Pārvatī's lips, the fire of the third eye, Menā's glance of assent, the women's eyes at the windows, and the bride and groom who hardly dare to look at each other.

Heavenly voices

At critical moments a voice from the sky intervenes: the gods' vain cry for mercy before Kāma is burned and the voice that stops Rati from dying.

Symbols

Śiva's third eye

The fire of the eye in Śiva's forehead is the destructive power of ascetic concentration. In canto VII it becomes a mere mark of beauty on the bridegroom's forehead.

Kāma's flower bow

A bow of flowers strung with bees, with arrows of blossoms: love's power is gentle in its instruments and irresistible in its effects, except against Śiva.

The ashes

Kāma's ashes, which Rati embraces, and the ashes of the cremation ground with which Śiva smears himself, connect love, death and asceticism; Pārvatī insists that the ashes Śiva touches become holy.

The lotus

The poem's commonest image of beauty, it is also the toy Pārvatī holds when the sages ask for her hand and the plant whose place she takes in the winter streams.

The pole star

Shown to the bride during the wedding, the unmoving star (Dhruva) is the emblem of steadfast marriage.

The rosary

Pārvatī's offering of a rosary of lotus seeds is the moment Kāma shoots; later her hands are worn by telling her own rosary. The object marks her passage from serving an ascetic to becoming one.

Critical debates

Did Kālidāsa write cantos IX–XVII?

The seventeen-canto text printed in many editions continues the story through the birth of Kumāra and his war with Tāraka. But Mallinātha comments only on cantos I–VIII, the later cantos are rarer in the manuscripts, and the classical theorists do not cite them. Most scholars therefore regard IX–XVII as a later continuation by a less accomplished poet (Kale 1995) (Keith 1928).

The later cantos were first printed in 1866 by an editor who presented them as genuine, and the question is not wholly closed. David Smith's complete translation lets readers judge the later cantos for themselves (Smith 2005).

Is the poem complete at canto VIII?

A poem called 'the birth of Kumāra' that ends before Kumāra is born seems unfinished, and a popular legend says that Kālidāsa was cursed by Pārvatī for describing her love-making and could not go on. Some scholars accept that the work was left incomplete.

Others argue that the eight cantos form an artistic whole: the marriage, the restoration of Kāma and the promise of heroic sons already imply the birth, which Sanskrit poetics would allow the poet to suggest rather than narrate. Pratap Bandyopadhyay has re-examined the evidence for and against completion in a study devoted to the question, and Heifetz's translation of the eight cantos presents them as a satisfying whole (Bandyopadhyay 1986) (Heifetz 1985).

The propriety of canto VIII

The eighth canto's description of the love-making of Śiva and Pārvatī troubled some traditional readers, since the couple are the parents of the world. Ānandavardhana, the ninth-century theorist of suggestion, cited this description as an example of impropriety, a fault that is concealed by the poet's genius (Ingalls 1990).

Commentators were divided, and some are reported to have passed over the canto. Modern translators such as Heifetz include it as an integral part of the poem, and many critics see in it the natural fulfilment of a design in which love within marriage resolves the conflict between asceticism and desire (Heifetz 1985). Griffith's decision to stop at canto VII shows the same problem from a Victorian angle (Griffith 1879).

Who is the hero?

Sanskrit poetics expected a mahākāvya to have a hero of noble character, and Śiva seems the obvious candidate. Gary Tubb argued instead that Pārvatī is the poem's true hero: it is her effort and her tapas that drive the action and bring about its resolution, and her story is shaped like a hero's quest (Tubb 1984).

Tubb compared the poem with a later play on the same subject, the Pārvatīpariṇaya, to show how Kālidāsa's emphasis differs. The reading has encouraged attention to the poem's female figures more generally (Tubb 1984) (Smith 2005).

Asceticism and eroticism in the myth of Śiva

Kālidāsa's poem is a literary version of a myth told in many forms in the epics and the Purāṇas. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty showed that these myths do not simply oppose the ascetic and the erotic Śiva but hold the two in a cycle, in which heat stored by austerity is released as desire and desire returns to austerity (O'Flaherty 1973).

Read in that light, the burning of Kāma and his restoration are two phases of one movement, and Pārvatī's tapas is the means by which desire is reconciled to discipline. Critics differ on how far Kālidāsa shares the theology of his sources and how far he adapts the myth to the courtly ideals of his age (Ingalls 1976).

The poem and the Gupta court

Kālidāsa's date is not certain, but the dominant view places him in the Gupta age. Some scholars have linked the choice of subject with the dynasty: a poem on the birth of the war-god Kumāra might suit a court whose kings were named Kumāragupta and Skandagupta, and whose coinage shows devotion to Skanda (Mirashi 1969) (Mann 2012).

Such connections remain conjectural. More broadly, Sheldon Pollock has described the kāvya of this period as part of a culture in which Sanskrit poetry expressed and shaped royal power (Pollock 2006).

Griffith's translation

Griffith's Birth of the War-God belongs to the first generation of English verse translations from Sanskrit. His rhymed couplets give the poem a recognisable English form but impose their own rhetoric: he abridges the descriptive sequences, expands moments of feeling, adds generalising morals, and uses Christian or biblical vocabulary, such as the 'Three Persons' of the gods' hymns (Griffith 1879).

Modern translators have tried other methods: Heifetz a free-verse English that follows the Sanskrit verse by verse, and Smith a literal version for the Clay Sanskrit Library with facing text (Heifetz 1985) (Smith 2005). Comparing their versions with Griffith's shows how translation choices shape a reader's sense of Kālidāsa.

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does Kālidāsa begin a poem about gods with a long description of a mountain?

   Consider Himālaya as father and king, and the link between his peaks and Śiva's hermitage in canto I.

2. Pārvatī's beauty is lavishly described in canto I, yet it fails to win Śiva. What does the poem suggest beauty can and cannot do?

   Compare the portrait in canto I with the opening of canto V, where she curses her beauty.

3. Is the burning of Kāma a victory of asceticism over desire?

   Look at Śiva's momentary passion in canto III, the heavenly voice in canto IV and Kāma's restoration in canto VII.

4. How does Rati's lament use the natural world to express grief?

   Note the moon, the cuckoo, the creeper and the lightning in canto IV.

5. What does Pārvatī achieve by tapas that she could not achieve by beauty? Does the poem make her its hero?

   Read canto V with Tubb's argument in mind.

6. Why does Śiva come to Pārvatī in disguise, and what does her answer reveal about her and about him?

   List the student's charges against Śiva and set them beside Pārvatī's replies.

7. How does the poem use ritual, especially in cantos VI and VII?

   Consider the embassy of the sages, Menā's glance, the circling of the fire and the pole star.

8. What is the effect of the scene of the women at the windows in canto VII?

   Think about the change of perspective and the tone of the women's praise, and note that the passage also appears in the Raghuvaṃśa.

9. Is the Kumārasambhava complete without the birth of Kumāra?

   Consider the title, the legend of the curse, the gods' plea in canto VII and the arguments about cantos VIII–XVII.

10. Where does Griffith's translation seem to add a Victorian voice of its own?

    Look at the end of canto VI, the 'Three Persons' of cantos II and VII, and his decision to stop before canto VIII.

Further reading

• Bandyopadhyay, Pratap. 'Did Kālidāsa Complete the Kumārasambhava?' Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 3 (1986): 559–64.
• Goldman, Robert P., trans. The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India. Vol. 1, Bālakāṇḍa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
• Griffith, Ralph T. H., trans. The Birth of the War-God: A Poem by Kalidasa. 2nd ed. Trübner's Oriental Series. London: Trübner, 1879.
• Heifetz, Hank, trans. The Origin of the Young God: Kālidāsa's Kumārasaṃbhava. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
• Ingalls, Daniel H. H., trans. An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyākara's Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa. Harvard Oriental Series 44. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
• Ingalls, Daniel H. H. 'Kālidāsa and the Attitudes of the Golden Age.' Journal of the American Oriental Society 96, no. 1 (1976): 15–26.
• Ingalls, Daniel H. H., Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and M. V. Patwardhan, trans. The Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Harvard Oriental Series 49. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
• Kale, M. R., ed. and trans. Kumārasambhava of Kālidāsa, Cantos I–VIII, with the Commentary of Mallinātha. Reprint. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1995.
• Keith, A. Berriedale. A History of Sanskrit Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928.
• Lienhard, Siegfried. A History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit. A History of Indian Literature 3.1. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984.
• Mann, Richard D. The Rise of Mahāsena: The Transformation of Skanda-Kārttikeya in North India from the Kuṣāṇa to Gupta Empires. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
• Miller, Barbara Stoler, ed. Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kālidāsa. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
• Mirashi, V. V., and N. R. Navlekar. Kālidāsa: Date, Life, and Works. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1969.
• O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Śiva. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
• Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
• Smith, David, trans. The Birth of Kumára by Kali·dasa. Clay Sanskrit Library. New York: New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2005.
• Tubb, Gary A. 'Heroine as Hero: Pārvatī in the Kumārasaṃbhava and the Pārvatīpariṇaya.' Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, no. 2 (1984): 219–36.
• van Buitenen, J. A. B., trans. The Mahābhārata. Vol. 2, Book 2: The Book of the Assembly Hall; Book 3: The Book of the Forest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
• Warder, A. K. Indian Kāvya Literature. Vol. 3, The Early Medieval Period (Śūdraka to Viśākhadatta). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977.