Reading a Cloud

Kalidasa’s Cloud Messenger (Meghadūta) had an extraordinary career. It attracted commentaries, adaptations, translations, allegories, parodies, sequels, prequels, imitation stanzas that Kalidasa wannabees sneaked into the poem, and ample attention from literary theorists and anthologists. More importantly, it inspired centuries of creativity in a variety of languages. Some of these later poems are modeled very closely on it, some only loosely, in what is one of the most popular genres in premodern Asian literature. Very few works in world history can boast originating such a multilingual and multiregional genre. With the help of the insights of some of the Cloud’s medieval commentators such as Vallabhadeva, Dakshinavartanatha, Mallinatha, and Purnasarasvati, this chapter explores the cohesiveness of the poem on the formal, lexical, and figurative levels, and analyzes its program. Unlike in other works by Kalidasa, the Cloud boldly abides within the chasm of its anonymous couple’s separation and does not attempt to bring them together. The poem consists entirely of the most ethereal of matters: an airy cloud (which is isomorphic with the poem) and the stuff of imagination. These expand to fill the chasm of the poem to its brim, so that this immensely emptyful abundance is tightly held together, more than in Kalidasa’s other works, and forms a strong manifesto on the powers of literature.