The Indian Tragedy

European literary critics and auteurs have considered the tragedy to be the sine qua non of drama inheriting some of the tradition of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. As Oscar Wilde said, “There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.”

Even in the pre-Christian era, we had Aristotle saying “For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality“

Tragedy then for the western dramaturgist is the confrontation of the reality of the human condition on the stage. It is serious, sad and hapless. It is also then the gravest and hence the most philosophical expression of art there is. If the search is for a Hamlet or an Oedipus Rex in Indian kāvya, then it is not hard to see why westerners are so often disappointed with classical sanskrit kāvya. To them, the world of the kāvya is devoid of unhappy endings –– it is purely fantastical & magical. A fairy-tale in every play and every scene. A dance of the Gods. It catches the eye but it misses the mark as it isn’t real. There is no seriousness. There are no wellsprings of sorrow in kāvya, they say. A distinction is made between the Indian epics (itihāsa) and later classical kāvya. It is said that the former are much like the epics of Greece in content; they’re tipped to the rim with sorrow, blood, gore, violence and heartbreak. The myriad of emotions that make up the human condition. However, the latter (kāvya) is denigrated as the zenith of la-la-land. Judgement is laid down; grief is true confrontation with truth. As kāvya lacks tragedy, it lacks the means to use art as a medium to confront the truth of human nature.

This facile viewpoint, however, is flawed for some reasons. We must first understand what the tragedy really is seen from the western perspective. Western tragedy is understood with its design, the frame which is nihilistic. It has always the unhappy ending, with the debacle of death (lacking which it becomes a “tragicomedy”). Lofty characters with balanced emotional distributuons who with their own indelible hamartia (ἁμαρτία) or fatal flaw (or sometimes by pure chance) will unravel the whole narrative and end in a nadir of despair. There is one trope, which the characters will lead up to with suffering at the end of the play. There is existential anxiety and moral conflict, caused often by the tragic flaw of the protagonist.

Armed with this brief knowledge, we must ask ourselves how the ancient Indians viewed the tragic? In kāvya, tragedy is an inner process, an inner response to grief with its own telos. The human condition is tragic, (duḥkha the mark of life as the bauddhas say) and it is tragically subject to endless rebirth. Tragedy is not a structure or dramatic external trope, it is the inner failure that is experienced upon finding oneself in helpless circumstances. It is then the poet’s representation of the various states of consciousness as they confront and explain loss or failure. It’s a psychological perturbation that alters the spirit. We are dealing here with the phenomenology of grief. Tragedy is something that is a part of the narrative development and not the end of the drama in itself. The tragic middles of Kālidāsa are truly tragic for they deal with the character’s response to a tragic event, with the full kaleidoscope of experiences leading to a tragic breakage in the middle, which may lead to a structural resolution in the end. So, upon broadening our conception of what makes up the tragedy –– we think of it less as something structural defined by an ending and more as something experiential. As consciousness encountering & being readied by the world. The European conception of tragedy suggests that something is tragic not by virtue of how the character feels, however significant and altering, and how he or she may choose to learn from this feeling but by delimitation of the contextual structure that leaves them with no choice to respond but gives only one negative consequence: destruction. Western tragedy then makes the mistake of looking for suffering at the end of the play and not inside it.

It is fitting then that the traditional first-poet (ādikavi) of sanskrit kāvya, Vālmīki composed the first verse of classical sanskrit poetry (ādi-śloka) mired in grief upon seeing a hunter slay the male partner of a couple of krauñcha birds in the guileless act of lovemaking. Seeing the female bird heart-broken, her idyllic irreparably splintered – Vālmīki cursed the hunter.

mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhāṁ tvam agamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ
yat krauñcamithunād ekam avadhīḥ kāmamohitam

It was “grief that became poetry” (śokaḥ ślokatvam āgataḥ). Poetry then, arose from the tragic.