Themes in Abhijnana Shakuntalam (Part-3)

 Prophecies and Curses

Throughout the play, supernatural beings like gods and nymphs (mythological spirits of Nature imagined as a beautiful maiden inhabiting rivers, woods, or other locations.), powerful utterances like sages’ prophecies and curses, and even bodily omens experienced by the main characters are ever-present. In fact, none of the main events would take place if it weren’t for such supernatural interventions into human events. Such interventions appear to work outside the limits of human plans and intentions, suggesting that, in the play, they’re meant to signal to audiences the inscrutability—and inevitability— of divine plans.

Prophecy frames the entire play—specifically, the prophecy that Dusyanta will father a world emperor. When Dusyanta refrains from shooting the deer belonging to the hermitage, one of the forest-dwelling ascetics voices the prophetic wish, “Great Lord of the Lunar Dynasty, / May you have a son / With all your virtues, / Destined to rule the world.” Dusyanta merely thanks the brahmin at the time, not thinking much about it.

At the end of the play, however, when Dusyanta sees the little boy, Sarvadamana, playing with a lion cub in Marica’s realm, he notices the marks of a world ruler on the boy’s body. When his paternity of the child is established, the brahmin’s prediction at the very beginning of the play is likewise confirmed. Therefore, the play’s entire sequence of events—from Dusyanta’s detour into the hermitage, to his marriage to Shakuntala, to Shakuntala’s removal to the celestial realm—is shown to have been directed toward a specific, higher purpose—namely, the future emperor’s birth and celestial upbringing.

In a similar way, the central drama of the play is driven by a curse that estranges the heroic couple, but ultimately can’t prevent their spiritually powerful reunion. The reason Shakuntala and the King initially meet is because her father, the sage Kanva, who would normally have met the King, is not at home, because he has gone on a pilgrimage “to appease the gods on her behalf, and avert her hostile fate.” Though this fate is not named, it’s presumably the curse that will soon be pronounced against Shakuntala by Durvasas. When Shakuntala, distracted after Dusyanta has returned to the business of the capital, accidentally slights the short-tempered sage, he utters: “That man whose brilliance / Robs your thought of everything, including me, / A great ascetic fired by penance— / That man, though prompted, / Shall not remember you at all, / Like a drunken sot, who cannot recall / What he said in his cups the night before.” If Shakuntala hadn’t been distracted by lovesickness and accidentally offended the sage, this curse wouldn’t have been spoken.

 Yet if her father hadn’t had some premonition of the curse and gone on pilgrimage to avert it, she wouldn’t have been home alone to meet and fall in love with Dusyanta in the first place. When the curse goes into effect, it results in the couple’s agonizing yet spiritually fruitful separation—and ultimately leads to their more triumphant reunion in the celestial realm. Like the prophecy of their son’s birth, the curse reverberates across time, seemingly out of proportion to the event that prompted it. These seemingly unavoidable sequences of events suggest that supernatural pronouncements like curses don’t operate according to human intention and can lead to greater consequences (even good ones) than anyone foresees.