The Cloud Messenger (Meghaduta)

Overview

Author

Kalidasa, the most admired poet and dramatist of classical Sanskrit; probably active in the later fourth or the fifth century CE, though his dates are uncertain

Language and form

Classical Sanskrit kavya (court poetry); a single poem of a little over a hundred stanzas, the exact number varying between about 110 and 120 in the different recensions

Metre

Mandakranta ('slowly advancing'), a stanza of four lines of seventeen syllables each, with a fixed pattern of long and short syllables, used throughout

Parts

Two: the Former Cloud (Purvamegha), describing the cloud's route north, and the Latter Cloud (Uttaramegha), describing Alaka, the wife and the message itself

Speaker

An unnamed yaksha, a semi-divine servant of Kubera, god of wealth, exiled for a year for neglecting his duty; apart from the opening stanzas and a closing line in some versions, the whole poem is his speech

Setting

Ramagiri, a hill in central India where the yaksha lives in exile, and Alaka, Kubera's city in the Himalayas near Mount Kailasa, where his wife waits

Genre

The model for the duta-kavya or sandesha-kavya, the 'messenger poem', imitated in Sanskrit and in many Indian languages for more than a thousand years

Key themes

Love in separation (viraha); memory and imagination; the monsoon as the season of longing; landscape seen as a lover; friendship and the duty to help; time and the ending of a curse

Translation quoted

Arthur W. Ryder (1912), in rhymed five-line stanzas; Ryder sometimes condenses or expands the Sanskrit, and two stanzas of the Former Cloud survive only in part in the text used here

Context

Almost nothing certain is known about Kalidasa's life. Later Indian legend made him a court poet of a king Vikramaditya of Ujjain, and many scholars connect him with the Gupta dynasty, often with Chandragupta II (reigned c. 375–415 CE), whose title was Vikramaditya. The firm evidence is slighter: an inscription at Aihole dated 634 CE already names Kalidasa as a famous poet, and the polish of his Sanskrit, the political world of his plays and his evident knowledge of central and northern India fit the Gupta age well. Most scholars therefore place him somewhere in the fourth or fifth century CE (Keith 1928) (Warder 1977) (Mirashi 1969).

Six works are generally accepted as his: three plays, the Malavikagnimitra, the Vikramorvashiya and the famous Abhijnanashakuntala (the recognition of Shakuntala); two long court epics (mahakavya), the Raghuvamsha on the dynasty of Rama and the Kumarasambhava on the birth of Shiva's son; and the Meghaduta. A poem on the six seasons, the Ritusamhara, is attributed to him but its authorship is doubted. Across this body of work Kalidasa became, for later Sanskrit critics, the model of a poet whose ornaments never obscured feeling, and his plays were among the first Sanskrit works to reach Europe (Miller 1984) (Lienhard 1984).

The Meghaduta belongs to kavya, the learned poetry of the courts, which valued compressed expression, elaborate figures of speech (alamkara) and the evocation of a dominant aesthetic mood (rasa). Its mood is the erotic (shringara) in its form of separation (vipralambha or viraha), which Sanskrit theorists regarded as the most moving variety of love poetry. The whole poem is composed in one metre, the mandakranta ('slowly advancing'): each line has seventeen syllables in a fixed pattern, four long syllables, then five short, then the group long-long-short twice, and two final longs, with pauses after the fourth and tenth syllables. Its heavy opening and slow pace suit a lover's lament, and later critics singled out Kalidasa's handling of it. The poem is short, but it carries a great deal of learning: myth, geography, the customs of cities and villages, and the conventions by which Sanskrit poets read nature as a set of signs of love (Ingalls 1965) (Gerow 1971).

The text has come down in many manuscripts and with numerous commentaries. The earliest surviving commentary is that of Vallabhadeva of Kashmir (probably tenth century), whose text is somewhat shorter than the version read by Mallinatha, the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century South Indian commentator whose text became the standard one in modern printed editions. Scholars agree that some stanzas were added by later hands, but they disagree over which; S. K. De's critical edition of 1957 attempted to sort the evidence (Hultzsch 1911) (De 1957).

The first English translation, by Horace Hayman Wilson, appeared in Calcutta in 1813, and Goethe, who read it, praised the poem warmly. Arthur W. Ryder, who taught Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley, published the version quoted here in 1912 in a volume of Kalidasa translations. Ryder renders the four-line Sanskrit stanzas as rhymed English stanzas of five lines, the last an alexandrine, and keeps the poem's stanza-by-stanza structure, though he sometimes simplifies its proper names and mythological allusions (Wilson 1813) (Ryder 1912).

Plot overview

A yaksha, one of the semi-divine attendants of Kubera, the god of wealth, has neglected his duties and has been cursed by his master to spend a year in exile, far from his young wife. He lives among the hermitages on Ramagiri, a hill in central India hallowed by memories of Rama and Sita. After some months of grief, at the beginning of the rainy season, he sees a great cloud resting on the peak. Distracted by longing, he decides to send it as his messenger to his wife in Alaka, Kubera's city in the Himalayas.

In the first part, the Former Cloud, the yaksha greets the cloud with flowers and flattery and then describes the route it must take northwards: across the Vindhya hills and the Narmada river, through the country around Vidisha, by a deliberate detour to the city of Ujjain and its temple of Shiva, across a series of rivers each imagined as a woman awaiting her lover, over the old battlefield of Kurukshetra, to the place where the Ganges comes down from the mountains, and finally through the Himalayan pass to Mount Kailasa and the city of Alaka.

In the second part, the Latter Cloud, he describes the splendours of Alaka, a city of endless pleasure, and then his own house and garden, by which the cloud will recognise it. He imagines his wife wasted with grief, counting the days, trying to sing or to paint his portrait, and lying awake at night. He then gives the cloud the message itself: he lives, he suffers as she does, he sees her likeness everywhere in nature, the curse will end in four months, and their love has only grown in absence. He closes by asking the cloud to grant his request and wishing that it may never be parted from its own beloved, the lightning.

Part by part

Characters

Speaker

The yaksha

An unnamed attendant of Kubera, banished for a year for neglecting his duty. The poem does not say exactly what his fault was; later commentators supplied stories, for example that he left his post to be with his wife. He is passionate, learned, courteous to the cloud and wholly absorbed in his longing, and almost the entire poem is his speech. His knowledge of the route, the gods and the city makes him a kind of poet within the poem.

Messenger

The cloud

A great monsoon cloud, addressed as a friend, a brother and a noble person of high birth able to take any form it likes. It never speaks. The yaksha imagines it as a traveller, a lover of the rivers, a worshipper of Shiva and, in the end, the husband of the lightning. It is the poem's means of travel and also its silent audience.

Alaka

The yaksha's wife

Also unnamed, she appears only in the yaksha's imagination: young, beautiful, faithful and wasted with grief. He describes her trying to pass the time, painting his image, singing about him, counting the months, and sleepless at night. She is both the goal of the journey and a model of the separated heroine of Sanskrit love poetry.

Kubera

God of wealth and lord of the yakshas, whose capital is Alaka. He is the yaksha's master and the source of the curse, but he never appears. The poem mentions him as a distant authority whose 'royal wrath' (Former Cloud, st. 7) has caused the separation, and whose gardens and palace dominate Alaka.

The gods

Shiva

The great god whose presence runs through the poem: his crescent moon lights Alaka, his temple at Ujjain receives the cloud's thunder as a drum, his footprint and his mountain Kailasa lie on the route. He and his consort Parvati (Gauri) are the divine model of wedded love that the poem's human lovers lack.

Myth

Rama and Sita

The hero and heroine of the Ramayana, who lived in exile and were later separated when Sita was abducted. They do not appear in the action, but Ramagiri, the yaksha's place of exile, is named after Rama, and their story of separation and messages stands behind the poem.

Themes

Love in separation (viraha)

Sanskrit theory divided erotic poetry into love in union and love in separation, and held the second to be the richer source of feeling. The Meghaduta is its classic expression. Nothing happens in the poem except longing: the lovers are apart at the beginning and still apart at the end, and the whole work consists of what the separated lover imagines, remembers and hopes.

Separation in the poem is creative. It drives the yaksha to invent the cloud's journey, to picture his wife, to paint her portrait and to compose his message, so that the poem itself is presented as a product of absence. His final claim, that love grows rather than dies in separation, turns suffering into a kind of proof of love (Ingalls 1965).

Nature as lover

The landscape of the poem is full of desire. Mountains, rivers, trees and birds respond to the cloud as lovers or as friends, and the language of the body is applied to the earth throughout. This is not a private eccentricity but a convention of kavya, in which seasons and natural phenomena have fixed emotional associations, and the rainy season is above all the time when separated lovers suffer and travellers hurry home.

Kalidasa uses the convention with unusual consistency. Because every feature of the landscape is seen through the yaksha's longing, the poem's descriptions of nature are also descriptions of his mind, and the parallel between the rivers waiting for the cloud and the wife waiting for her husband binds the two halves of the poem together (Nathan 1976).

Imagination and memory

Almost everything in the poem is imagined. The yaksha has not seen the route from the cloud's height, cannot see his wife, and does not know how the cloud will be received. The poem repeatedly reflects on this: the wife draws his image and talks to a bird, he paints her on a rock and sees fragments of her in the world. Images are what separated lovers have, and they are never enough.

Memory gives the imagination its material. The account of the house and garden, and the closing recollection of the wife's jealous dream, rest on remembered detail, and the poem suggests that such intimate memories are the only reliable token of identity and of love.

Friendship and service

The yaksha's appeal to the cloud is framed in the language of friendship and of the duty of the great to help those in distress. He flatters it, promises it pleasures, and reminds it that 'kindness is its own reward' (Latter Cloud, st. 38). The poem thus links the private world of love to a public ethic of generosity, which it also illustrates in the hospitality offered to the cloud by the mountains it serves with rain.

Motifs

Women and rivers

The rivers of the Former Cloud are imagined as women, flirtatious, shy, deserted or eager, who receive the cloud as a lover. The motif anticipates the wife of the Latter Cloud and turns the geography of India into a sequence of love scenes.

Birds

Cranes and swans accompany the cloud, peacocks dance to its thunder, the chataka bird is said to live on raindrops, and the wife keeps a pet starling and a peacock. Birds act as companions and as images of mated or separated pairs.

Shiva and his worship

Shiva's temples, moon, mountain and footprint recur along the route and in Alaka. The motif gives the journey a devotional dimension and offers, in Shiva and Parvati, a picture of united love.

Signs and tokens

The house is to be recognised by signs, the conch and lotus by the door and the coral-tree; the message is to be believed because of a private memory. The motif reflects the old use of tokens in messenger stories, such as the ring Hanuman carries to Sita in the Ramayana.

Symbols

The cloud

The monsoon cloud brings rain to a parched land and is the traditional sign that travellers should return home. It stands for fertility, renewal and hope, and also for the poem itself, which travels from the lover to the beloved.

The lightning

The cloud's 'bride', always with it. The yaksha's closing wish that the cloud may never be parted from its lightning measures his own loss against a union that nature makes permanent.

The single braid

A wife whose husband was away traditionally wore her hair in one plain braid, to be loosened only on his return. It marks the rivers of the Former Cloud and the wife of the Latter Cloud as women in separation.

The lotus

The lotus opens by day and closes at night. In the poem it marks beauty, the auspicious wealth of Kubera's city, and in the yaksha's comparison of his wife to a lotus withered by frost, the effects of grief.

Critical debates

Kalidasa's date

Estimates of Kalidasa's date once ranged from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE. The older tradition linked him with a King Vikramaditya and a legendary era of 57 BCE; most modern scholars favour the Gupta period of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, because of his language, the cultural world of his works and the inscriptional evidence that he was famous by the early seventh century (Keith 1928) (Mirashi 1969).

No contemporary source names him, so the question cannot be settled with certainty. The Meghaduta has been used as evidence: its affectionate treatment of Ujjain has suggested to some readers that the poet lived there, and its geography of central India has been compared with the extent of Gupta rule. These arguments are suggestive rather than conclusive (Warder 1977).

The text and its interpolations

The poem's popularity encouraged imitation within the text itself. The versions known to the commentators differ in length: the Kashmiri commentator Vallabhadeva knew a shorter text than Mallinatha, whose version underlies most printed editions. Several stanzas are absent from the older witnesses and are widely regarded as additions (Hultzsch 1911) (De 1957).

Deciding which stanzas are genuine is not merely a technical matter, since the added stanzas often elaborate the erotic or descriptive passages and so affect the proportions of the poem. Translators have had to choose a text, and their versions differ in length: Ryder's has 115 stanzas, 63 in the first part and 52 in the second. Editions with the Sanskrit printed beside the English, such as the Edgertons', allow students to see the problem for themselves (Edgerton 1964) (Mallinson 2006).

The real geography of the route

The cloud's route can largely be traced on a map: the Narmada, Vidisha, Ujjain, the Chambal, Kurukshetra, the Ganges at Kanakhala and the Himalayan passes are real places, and many of the poem's names have been identified with confidence. The starting point, Ramagiri, is disputed; it is most often identified with Ramtek near Nagpur, though other sites associated with Rama have been proposed (Mirashi 1969).

Critics also debate how far the route should be read literally. The detour to Ujjain shows that the order of places is shaped by the poem's interests as well as by geography, and the journey has been read as a celebration of the cultural map of northern India, joining court, temple, village and sacred battlefield into a single world. This fits a wider argument that Sanskrit court poetry imagined a shared cultural space reaching far beyond any one kingdom (Pollock 2006).

Eroticism and devotion

The poem's sensuality, in its descriptions of women, rivers and the pleasures of Alaka, was fully in keeping with Sanskrit court taste, but it has been read in different ways. Some commentators and modern readers stress its devotional passages on Shiva and treat the journey partly as a pilgrimage; others see the religious references as part of the decorative and cultural richness of court poetry rather than as a spiritual allegory (Lienhard 1984).

European readers of the nineteenth century often found the poem's frankness surprising, and early translators sometimes softened it. Modern translators have generally tried to restore its physical immediacy while keeping its tenderness (Nathan 1976) (Schwab 1984).

Does the message arrive?

The poem ends with the yaksha's request and blessing; it does not say whether the cloud agrees or delivers the message. Some versions add a final stanza stating that the curse was lifted and the lovers reunited, but such endings are generally regarded as later additions (De 1957).

The open ending can be read as part of the poem's meaning. The work exists entirely in the space of hope and imagination between separation and reunion, and its value for the speaker lies in the act of speaking. The silence of the cloud leaves the reader, like the yaksha, waiting (Nathan 1976).

Goethe and European reception

H. H. Wilson's English verse translation of 1813 made the Meghaduta one of the first Sanskrit poems known in Europe after the Shakuntala. Goethe read it with enthusiasm; in the notes to his West-östlicher Divan he named it among the Indian works he most admired, and the stanza of his later poem in honour of the meteorologist Luke Howard that invokes 'Camarupa', the Indian power of taking any shape at will, is usually traced to Wilson's notes on the cloud's 'changing forms' (Wilson 1813) (Goethe 1819) (Willson 1964).

For German Romantic writers the poem confirmed an image of India as a land of natural poetry and tender feeling, an image that told as much about European longings as about Sanskrit literature. Later scholars have stressed instead the poem's learning and artifice as court poetry, and in India its reception never depended on Europe: it was imitated, commented on and retold continuously, and modern writers such as Rabindranath Tagore returned to it as a classic of their own tradition (Schwab 1984) (Willson 1964).

Origins of the messenger poem

Kalidasa did not invent the idea of a messenger between lovers. The Ramayana tells of Hanuman carrying Rama's message and ring to Sita, and the Mahabharata contains the story of a swan carrying messages between Nala and Damayanti. The Meghaduta's first stanza alludes to Rama and Sita, and the parallel with Hanuman was noted by the commentators (Mallinson 2006).

What the Meghaduta seems to have created is a genre: a self-contained poem in which a lover describes a messenger's route and then the message. Later poets copied its structure closely, often in the same metre, replacing the cloud with the wind, a swan, a cuckoo, a bee or a parrot, and some poets in Jain tradition even wove the lines of the Meghaduta into new poems on other subjects (Lienhard 1984) (Warder 1977).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does the poet admit, in the fifth stanza, that a cloud is an unsuitable messenger?

   Consider how the admission prepares for the way the rest of the poem treats nature, and what it says about the lover's state of mind.

2. How does the Former Cloud's description of rivers as women prepare for the portrait of the wife in the Latter Cloud?

   Look at the river with its 'single braid' (Former Cloud, st. 29) and compare the wife's braid in Latter Cloud, st. 29.

3. Why does the yaksha insist on the detour to Ujjain?

   Think about what the city offers the cloud, about devotion as well as pleasure, and about what readers have inferred about the poet.

4. What is the function of the long description of Alaka before the yaksha reaches his own house?

   Consider contrast: public pleasure and private grief, a city of lovers and one separated household.

5. The wife is described entirely through her husband's imagination. How does this affect our view of her?

   Ask whose feelings the portrait expresses, and whether the conventions of the separated heroine leave room for an individual.

6. What is the role of the gods, especially Shiva, in the poem?

   Look at Ujjain, Kailasa and Alaka, and at Shiva and Parvati as a model of married love.

7. Why might the yaksha end his message with the memory of his wife's jealous dream?

   Think about tokens of identity in messenger stories and the difference between grief and intimacy.

8. Is the poem's ending, with no word on whether the message is delivered, a weakness or a strength?

   Consider the later stanzas that supply a happy ending and what the poem gains by remaining in the time of waiting.

9. How does Ryder's rhymed five-line stanza compare with what you can learn about the mandakranta metre of the original?

   Think about pace, length and the effect of rhyme, which Sanskrit verse does not use.

10. Why do you think the Meghaduta became the model for a whole genre of messenger poems?

    Consider the structure of journey and message, the scope it gives for description, and the adaptability of the messenger figure.

Further reading

• De, Sushil Kumar, ed. The Meghadūta of Kālidāsa. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1957.
• Edgerton, Franklin, and Eleanor Edgerton, trans. Kalidasa: The Cloud Messenger. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964.
• Gerow, Edwin. A Glossary of Indian Figures of Speech. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.
• Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. West-östlicher Divan. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1819.
• Hultzsch, E., ed. Kālidāsa's Meghadūta, Edited from Manuscripts with the Commentary of Vallabhadeva. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911.
• Ingalls, Daniel H. H., trans. An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyākara's Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa. Harvard Oriental Series 44. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
• 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.
• Mallinson, James, trans. Messenger Poems by Kālidāsa, Dhoyī and Rūpa Gosvāmin. Clay Sanskrit Library. New York: New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2006.
• 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.
• Nathan, Leonard, trans. The Transport of Love: The Meghadūta of Kālidāsa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
• 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.
• Ryder, Arthur W., trans. Kalidasa: Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works. Everyman's Library. London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1912.
• Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
• Warder, A. K. Indian Kāvya Literature. Vol. 3, The Early Medieval Period (Śūdraka to Viśākhadatta). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977.
• Willson, A. Leslie. A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964.
• Wilson, Horace Hayman, trans. The Mégha Dúta; or, Cloud Messenger: A Poem in the Sanscrit Language by Cálidása. Calcutta, 1813.