Pururavas, a mortal, sees and loves the nymph Urvashi.  She consents to live with him on earth so long as he shall not break certain trivial conditions.  Some time after the birth of a son, these conditions are broken, through no fault of the man, and she leaves him.  He wanders disconsolate, finds her, and pleads with her, by her duty as a wife, by her love for her child, even by a threat of suicide.  She rejects his entreaties, declaring that there can be no lasting love between mortal and immortal, even adding:  “There are no friendships with women.  Their hearts are the hearts of hyenas.”  Though at last she comforts him with vague hopes of a future happiness, the story remains, as indeed it must remain, a tragedy—­the tragedy of love between human and divine.

This splendid tragic story Kalidasa has ruined.  He has made of it an ordinary tale of domestic intrigue, has changed the nymph of heaven into a member of an earthly harem.  The more important changes made by Kalidasa in the traditional story, all have the tendency to remove the massive, godlike, austere features of the tale, and to substitute something graceful or even pretty.  These principal changes are:  the introduction of the queen, the clown, and the whole human paraphernalia of a court; the curse pronounced on Urvashi for her carelessness in the heavenly drama, and its modification; the invention of the gem of reunion; and the final removal of the curse, even as modified.  It is true that the Indian theatre permits no tragedy, and we may well believe that no successor of Kalidasa could hope to present a tragedy on the stage.  But might not Kalidasa, far overtopping his predecessors, have put on the stage a drama the story of which was already familiar to his audience as a tragic story?  Perhaps not.  If not, one can but wish that he had chosen another subject.

This violent twisting of an essentially tragic story has had a further ill consequence in weakening the individual characters.  Pururavas is a mere conventional hero, in no way different from fifty others, in spite of his divine lineage and his successful wooing of a goddess.  Urvashi is too much of a nymph to be a woman, and too much of a woman to be a nymph.  The other characters are mere types.

Yet, in spite of these obvious objections, Hindu critical opinion has always rated the Urvashi very high, and I have long hesitated to make adverse comments upon it, for it is surely true that every nation is the best judge of its own literature.  And indeed, if one could but forget plot and characters, he would find in Urvashi much to attract and charm.  There is no lack of humour in the clever maid who worms the clown’s secret out of him.  There is no lack of a certain shrewdness in the clown, as when he observes: 

“Who wants heaven?  It is nothing to eat or drink.  It is just a place where they never shut their eyes—­like fishes!”