''Nala's messengers to Damayanti are a troop of golden-winged swans that speak with a human voice; he is intercepted on his way by gods who make him their envoy to a mortal maiden; he receives from them gifts more than human; fire and water come to him at his bidding and flowers bloom in his hands; in his downfall the dice become birds which fly away with his remaining garment; when he wishes to cut in half the robe of Damayanti, a sword comes ready to his hand in the desolate cabin; he meets the Serpent-King in the ring of fire and is turned by him into the deformed charioteer, Vahuka; the tiger in the forest turns away from Damayanti without injuring her and the lustful hunter falls consumed by the power of offended chastity. The destruction of the caravan by wild elephants, the mighty driving of Nala, the counting of the leaves ... the cleaving of the Vibhitaka tree; every incident almost is full of that sense of beauty & wonder which were awakened in Vyasa by his early surroundings.
We ask whether this beautiful fairy-tale is the work of that stern and high poet with whom the actualities of life were everything and the flights of fancy counted for so little. Yet if we look carefully, we shall see in the Nala abundant proof of the severe touch of Vyasa, just as in his share of the Mahabharata fleeting touches of wonder & strangeness, gone as soon as glimpsed, evidence a love of the ultranatural, severely bitted and reined in. Especially do we see the poet of the Mahabharata in the artistic vigilance which limits each supernatural incident to a few light strokes, to the exact place and no other where it is wanted & the exact amount and no more that is necessary. (It is this sparing economy of touch almost unequalled in its beauty of just rejection, which makes the poem an epic instead of a fairy tale in verse.)
There is for instance the incident of the swans; we all know to what prolixities of pathos & bathos vernacular poets like the Gujarati Premanund have enlarged this feature of the story. But Vyasa introduced it to give a certain touch of beauty & strangeness and that touch once imparted the swans disappear from the scene; for his fine taste felt that to prolong the incident by one touch more would have been to lower the poem and run the risk of raising a smile.
In another respect also the Nala helps us materially to appreciate Vyasa's genius. His dealings with nature are a strong test of a poet's quality; but in the Mahabharata proper, of all epics the most pitilessly denuded of unnecessary ornament, natural description is rare. We must therefore again turn for aid to the poems which preceded his hard and lofty maturity. Vyasa's natural description as we find it there, corresponds to the nervous, masculine and hard-strung make of his intellect. His treatment is always puissant and direct without any single pervasive atmosphere except in sunlit landscapes, but always effectual, realizing the scene strongly or boldly by a few simple but sufficient words.
He takes the kingdom of Nature by violence. Approaching her from outside his masculine genius forces its way to her secret, insists and will take no denial. Accordingly he is impressed at first contact by the harmony in the midst of variety of her external features, absorbs these into a strong and retentive imagination, meditates on them and so reads his way to the closer impression, the inner sense behind that which is external, the personal temperament of a landscape.
In his record of what he has seen, this impression more often than not comes first as that which abides & prevails; sometimes it is all he cares to record; but his tendency towards perfect faithfulness to the vision within leads him, when the scene is still fresh to his eye, to record the data through which the impression was reached.
We have all experienced the way in which our observation of a scene, conscious or unconscious, forms itself out of various separate & often uncoordinated impressions, which if we write a description at the time or soon after and are faithful to ourselves, find their way into the picture even at the expense of symmetry; but if we allow a long time to elapse before we recall the scene, there returns to us only a single self-consistent impression which without accurately rendering it, retains its essence and its atmosphere. Something of this sort occurs in our poet; for Vyasa is always faithful to himself.
When he records the data of his impression, he does it with force and clearness, frequently with a luminous atmosphere around the object, especially with a delight in the naked beauty of the single clear word which at once communicates itself to the hearer. First come the strong and magical epithets or the brief and puissant touches by which the soul of the landscape is made visible and palpable, then the enumeration sometimes only stately, at others bathed in a clear loveliness. The fine opening of the twelfth surga of the Nala is a signal example of this method. At the threshold we have the great & sombre line वनं प्रतिभयं शून्यं झिल्लिकागणनादितं ।
A void tremendous forest thundering With crickets
striking the keynote of gloom & loneliness, then the cold stately enumeration of the forest's animal & vegetable peoples, then again the strong and revealing epithet in his "echoing woodlands sound-pervaded"; then follows "river & lake and pool and many beasts and many birds" and once more the touch of wonder & weirdness
She many alarming shapes of fiend and snake and giant...... .....beheld;
making magical the bare following lines and especially the nearest, पल्वलानि तडागानि गिरिकूटानि सर्वशः "and pools & tarns & summits everywhere", with its poetical delight in the bare beauty of words.''
Sri Aurobindo - Notes on the Mahabharata
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
