Abhijnanasakuntala Analysis

“So here you are, just another mixed-up kid, daughter of a sage and celestial sex worker, clueless like rest of us about your address- hermitage or castle, earth or sky, here or hereafter”

Myth gets a new color, a new shape with each telling, and each age rewrites its own myth. In Hindu mythology the story of Shakuntala is among one such myth which has been twisted, punctuated and given different shades in every age. This paper attempts to show these different shades in varying forms in which the story of Shakuntala has been presented in Mahabharata, and subsequently in Kalidasa’s famous play Abhijnanashakuntala and still later in the twentieth century, stepping in and out of the mythic framework by Arundhathi Subramaniam. Arundhathi Subramaniam,

This made the anger prone sage Durvasa feel insulted and provoked him to curse her of being forgotten by Dushyanta. The second poem from “Eight poems for Shakuntala” mocks at the way Shakuntala’s sufferings were justified as necessary stages for a woman to become pious and virtuous. The only ‘trick’ to be an ideal woman/wife “is not to see it as betrayal…” Arundhathi Subramaniam retells the epic story of Shakuntala by presenting the character as an archetype, someone like us trying to make sense of life. She negates the concept of an erring woman and pushes the readers to mull over Shakuntala’s character with a different perspective. She discards everything which uses ‘sexual submissiveness’ of a woman as a tool to examine her chastity. Sexual desire is a common trait in both men and women regardless of their background and religion. Her inversion questions the imbalance of the traditional norms and codes of behavior led out for male and female characters. She

The persona breaks through the sanctified boundaries of the sacred and the pure. She appears to be a bold woman who rejects the notion of “happy endings” “born of bad bargains”. The mythological character Shakuntala was torn constantly between forest and kingdom, hermitage and court, nature and culture which make her a tragic character on many levels. But the contemporized version of Shakuntala is not a tragic character. Arundhathi Subramaniam presents her as a person like every human being with tremendous possibilities. Shakuntala in Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems through an introspective understanding of her experiences matures into a self-reliant woman. Unlike the mythological character Shakuntala who brims with joy after her acceptance by Dushyanta, Subramaniam’s Shakuntala calls it a “bad” bargain. Arundhathi Subramaniam speaks about her cycle of poem entitiled “Eight Poems for Shakuntala” while delivering the fourth annual James and Shobha Mendonca Lecture on Poetry. About this contemporized version of Shakuntala she