Contents · 5 sections · 6 min
Key Ideas
Love at first sight in a hermitage — desire and the discipline of the forest.
Durvāsas’s curse — forgetting as the obstacle to love.
The ring of recognition (abhijñāna) — memory restored by a sign.
Nature shares human feeling — the trees and fawn weep at Śakuntalā’s departure.
Bharata, the son of Śakuntalā, after whom India is named.
Abhijñānaśākuntalam (“The Recognition of Śakuntalā”, or “Śakuntalā and the Ring of Recognition”) is a Sanskrit play in seven acts by Kālidāsa, probably composed in the fourth or fifth century CE. It is the most celebrated drama of classical India, and one of the first Indian works to be read in Europe, where its translation in 1789 by Sir William Jones caused a sensation among the Romantics. It dramatises a story from the The Mahābhārata — the love of King Duṣyanta and Śakuntalā, a girl raised in a forest hermitage, parents of Bharata, the emperor after whom India (Bhārata) is named — and transforms it with the device of a curse that makes the king forget his wife, and a ring that restores his memory. It is a play about desire and its purification, about memory and recognition, and about the bond between human beings and nature.
Plot summary
The hunt and the meeting
The play opens, like all Sanskrit dramas, with a benediction and a prologue in which the stage manager and an actress discuss the coming performance and sing of summer. King Duṣyanta of the Puru dynasty is hunting in his chariot, pursuing a terrified black antelope, when hermits stop him: the deer belongs to the hermitage of the sage Kaṇva, and must not be killed. The king lays down his bow and is invited into the hermitage. Kaṇva is away on a pilgrimage, having left his foster-daughter Śakuntalā to welcome guests.
Entering the grove quietly, the king sees three young women watering the trees: Śakuntalā and her two friends, Anasūyā and Priyaṃvadā. He is struck by Śakuntalā’s beauty, wonders if he may love her (as a Kṣatriya, he can marry only a Kṣatriya’s daughter, not a Brahmin’s), and watches from hiding. A bee, attracted by her face, buzzes around her; frightened, she calls for help, and the king steps forward to “rescue” her. Conversation reveals that Śakuntalā is not Kaṇva’s natural daughter but the child of the royal sage Viśvāmitra and the nymph Menakā, abandoned at birth and protected by birds (śakuntas) until Kaṇva found her. She is a Kṣatriya’s daughter. The king, without revealing his identity, says he is an officer of the king. They fall in love.
Love in the hermitage
In the second act, the king, comically, confides to his jester Māḍhavya — a gluttonous Brahmin who complains about the discomforts of hunting — that he has lost his heart. He stays at the hermitage to protect the hermits from demons. In the third act, Śakuntalā, lying ill with love on a bed of lotus leaves, writes a love letter on a lotus leaf; the king overhears her confession to her friends, reveals himself, and they are married privately by the gāndharva rite — the marriage of mutual consent. Called back to his capital, the king gives her his signet ring engraved with his name, promising to send for her.
The curse
The fourth act is the emotional heart of the play. Śakuntalā, lost in thought of her absent husband, fails to hear the arrival of the irascible sage Durvāsas, who demands hospitality. Enraged at being ignored, he curses her: “He of whom you are thinking, to the neglect of a guest of my austerity, will not remember you, even when reminded, as a drunkard does not remember what he said before.” Her friends beg for mercy; Durvāsas softens the curse: the memory will return when the king sees a token of recognition. The friends, relieved — she has the ring — do not tell Śakuntalā.
Kaṇva returns, learns of the marriage through a heavenly voice, blesses it, and decides to send the pregnant Śakuntalā to her husband. Her farewell to the hermitage is the most famous scene in Sanskrit drama. The trees give her silken garments and ornaments; the cuckoo’s call is their farewell; the peahens stop dancing; the creeper vines drop their pale leaves like tears; the fawn she raised tugs at her robe to stop her. Kaṇva, an ascetic, is overcome with a father’s grief: “If such is the grief of a forest hermit at parting from a foster-daughter, how much greater must be the grief of householders at parting from their daughters!” He gives her advice for her new life: serve your elders, treat your co-wives as friends, do not oppose your husband even if he wrongs you. She leaves with two hermits and Kaṇva’s sister, the ascetic Gautamī.
Rejection
In the fifth act, at the royal court, Duṣyanta — under the curse — does not recognise Śakuntalā. When she lifts her veil, he finds her beautiful but cannot remember marrying her, and, as a man of honour, will not accept another man’s pregnant wife. Śakuntalā reaches for the ring — but it is gone: it slipped from her finger when she was bathing at the holy pool of Śacī on the way. She reminds him of their love in the hermitage; he accuses her of the tricks of women. Humiliated, she cries out against him; the hermits leave her at the court, saying a wife belongs to her husband. As she weeps, a shining figure of light descends and carries her away into the sky.
The ring
The sixth act opens with a comic scene: a fisherman is arrested for possessing the royal ring, which he found in the belly of a fish he caught. When the ring is brought to the king, his memory returns in a rush. Overwhelmed by remorse, he cancels the spring festival, grows thin, and tries to console himself by painting Śakuntalā’s portrait. He realises that he has no heir. Then Mātali, the charioteer of the god Indra, arrives to ask the king’s help against demons.
Reunion
In the seventh act, returning victorious from heaven in Indra’s chariot, Duṣyanta stops at the hermitage of the sage Mārīca (Kaśyapa), father of the gods, on the golden mountain Hemakūṭa. There he sees a bold little boy playing roughly with a lion cub, prising open its mouth to count its teeth. He feels an inexplicable affection. An amulet on the boy’s wrist, which would turn into a snake if touched by anyone but his parents, stays harmless when the king picks it up. The boy is his son, Sarvadamana (“all-subduer”) — later Bharata. Śakuntalā appears, pale and austere in widow’s dress. The king falls at her feet and begs forgiveness. Mārīca explains the curse; no one was to blame. The family is reunited, and the play ends with a blessing.
Themes
Desire and its purification
The first acts are full of erotic delight — the king’s gaze, the bee, the lotus-leaf letter. But this love is impulsive, secret and unsanctioned; it ignores duty (the king forgets his kingdom; Śakuntalā forgets her guest). The curse and the separation purify it: the reunion in the seventh act is the reunion of a chastened king and a dignified mother, in a heavenly hermitage. Love passes from desire to dharma.
Memory
The play’s title names its theme: abhijñāna, recognition, the sign by which one remembers. Kālidāsa transforms the Mahābhārata story, in which Duṣyanta simply lies to avoid embarrassment, by making his forgetting the result of a curse — preserving his honour and turning the drama into a meditation on memory, forgetting and recognition, on what we know without knowing that we know it.
Nature
Nature in the play is alive and sympathetic: the hermitage’s trees are Śakuntalā’s sisters, its animals her children. The farewell scene gives one of literature’s most moving pictures of the bond between a person and a place.
Rasa
Following the theory of Rasa, the play’s dominant flavour is śṛṅgāra, the erotic, in both union and separation; the heroic (the hunt, the war with demons), the comic (the jester, the fisherman) and the pathetic (the farewell, the rejection) are woven around it.
Reception
Śakuntalā has been performed in India for some fifteen centuries. Sir William Jones’s English translation (1789) — from which Georg Forster made a German one (1791) — made it the most famous Indian work in Europe. Goethe praised it in a celebrated epigram and modelled the “Prelude in the Theatre” of Faust on its prologue; Herder, Schiller and the Schlegels admired it. Rabindranath Tagore wrote an essay on it (1907) contrasting it with The Tempest: in both, love is tested; but Kālidāsa’s lovers must lose each other to find a deeper union. Modern Indian theatre directors (Ratan Thiyam, K. N. Panikkar) and filmmakers have staged and adapted it many times.
In conversation
The farewell scene answers the question of what home means: when Śakuntalā leaves, even the creepers drop their leaves like tears. And the ring is literature’s oldest image of the token that makes us remember what we have forgotten we love.
The Recognition of Śakuntalā in two minutes
Love is forgotten and remembered, lost and found — and only grief makes it true.
Kālidāsa’s seven-act masterpiece — a king and a hermit girl fall in love in a forest, a curse erases his memory, a lost ring restores it, and the lovers are reunited in heaven. The most celebrated play in Sanskrit, which astonished Goethe and Europe.
- Love at first sight in a hermitage — desire and the discipline of the forest.
- Durvāsas’s curse — forgetting as the obstacle to love.
- The ring of recognition (abhijñāna) — memory restored by a sign.
- Nature shares human feeling — the trees and fawn weep at Śakuntalā’s departure.
- Bharata, the son of Śakuntalā, after whom India is named.
Curiosities
did you know?- Goethe (1791): ‘Wouldst thou the young year’s blossoms and the fruits of its decline… Wouldst thou the earth and heaven itself in one sole name combine? I name thee, O Śakuntalā, and all at once is said.’
- Sir William Jones’s translation (1789) went through five editions in twenty years and was translated into German, French, Danish and Italian.
- Camille Claudel’s sculpture ‘Sakountala’ (1888) and Franz Schubert’s unfinished opera Sakontala were inspired by it.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Why does the king forget — the curse, or his own carelessness?
- Is the reunion in heaven a happy ending, or a consolation?
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