The Recognition of Sakuntala

Precognition, foreknowledge, and intuition are important thematic elements in the play, as are omens and prophecies. The supernatural is ever-present, whether in the form of Sakuntala’s celestial parentage, the demons threatening the sages, or Dusyanta’s trip to heaven. All these elements explore the interplay between human free will and divinely ordained fate.

In Act I, an ascetic informs Dusyanta that Kanva has gone for a pilgrimage “to appease the Gods on [Sakuntala’s] behalf, and avert her hostile fate” (9, emphasis added). This suggests Kanva has sensed his daughter is headed for a difficult time. When Kanva learns of Sakuntala’s marriage and pregnancy, he is pleased instead of angry, saying, “through the greatest good fortune, the offering fell straight into the fire” (46). Kanva can foresee that Sakuntala’s marriage will lead to great good, and therefore blesses it. Similarly, in the last act of the play, though Marici sends news of Sakuntala and Dusyanta’s reconciliation to Kanva, he says that Kanva knew about the turn of events all along.

Even though characters know they and their loved ones may suffer for their actions, they take action anyway, asserting the role of human will and agency in fulfilling their destiny. For instance, Dusyanta’s visit to Kanva’s ashram may be considered both an act of free will and a trick of destiny: In choosing to visit the hermitage, he took the first step toward fulfilling his divine destiny of becoming Sakuntala’s husband and Sarvadamana’s father. When actions are rightful and meant to lead to auspicious outcomes, the human and the divine come together, as in the poetic sequence when the trees themselves shed jewels for Sakuntala’s trousseau in Act IV. The supernatural occurrence shows that Sakuntala’s secret actions will prove right in the end, and her suffering will be rewarded.

The gods and other celestial elements often directly intercede in the lives of humans too. Maneka whisks away Sakuntala to a celestial realm, saving her from humiliation and shame. When Sanumati the nymph discovers Dusyanta’s truth, she tells Indra, the king of the gods, to intervene so he can get Dusyanta to visit heaven to kill demons, and then meet Sakuntala. Even Durvasas’s curse is an example of a supernatural occurrence changing the course of destiny, although Priyamvada’s quick-thinking intervention—an act of human will—ensures that there is a way to break the curse in the end. Thus, free will and destiny act in a circular fashion, and it is impossible to tell one from the other.

Memory and forgetting drive the play’s action and flesh out the central love story between Dusyanta and Sakuntala. Both elements heighten the sringara rasa, or the romantic mood in the play, while also adding the tragic dimension of viraha or separation to it. Since love is so tinged by the tragic element, it becomes all the more resonant and precious, thereby linking memory and forgetting to the experience of love and loss.

The conflict between memory and forgetting recurs throughout the plot to underline this pathos. When Sakuntala and Dusyanta part in Act III, an offstage voice remarks, “Red goose, take leave of your gander” (40). Proverbially, red geese or sheldrakes were fated to be together during the day, but cursed to be apart at night. The symbol of the red geese is again used for Dusyanta and Sakuntala in Act IV by Sakuntala herself, when she tells Anasuya that “the wild goose honks in anguish because her mate is hidden by lotus leaves” (52).

Dusyanta’s forgetting of Sakuntala is a terrible blow to her because it reenacts the trauma of her birth. In a sense, her birth parents’ abandonment of Sakuntala is a forgetting. Dusyanta mirrors this traumatic act, and so do Sakuntala’s kinsfolk in Act V, when they refuse to take her back to the hermitage with them. Forgotten by so many of her loved ones, Sakuntala is established as the tragic heroine. Dusyanta’s forgetting of Sakuntala—though explained by the curse—makes him unusually harsh when he denies his wife, forming a strong contrast to his gentility and tenderness during his wooing of her. He calls Sakuntala’s words treacherous, meant to “lure over-excited youths” (65). Dusyanta’s lack of courtesy is symbolic of him “forgetting” himself as well as his love. Thus, forgetfulness acts on multiple levels in the play.

Acts of forgetting are also mirrored across the narrative. Sakuntala’s forgetting of the ring of Dusyanta when she absent-mindedly lets it slip from her finger is mirrored in Dusyanta’s inability to remember her image fully in Act VI. Madhavya willfully forgets what Dusyanta told him about his love for Sakuntala in the grove, while Priyamvada and Anasuya willfully forget to tell Sakuntala about Durvasas’s curse. Just as Dusyanta fails to recognize Sakuntala in his court, Sakuntala fails to know him immediately in the celestial hermitage in Act VII.

A single act of recognition dispels the fog of forgetting and takes characters back to memory and, with it, love. In Act VII, Marici says the tarnished mirror of Dusyanta’s impaired memory has been restored: “[W]ith polishing it all becomes clear” (103). The pathway toward Dusyanta and Sakuntala’s reconciliation is thus cleared through acts of memory and recognition, restoring both their power of memory and recognition alongside their love for one another.