Sakuntala's Farewell

Sakuntala's Farewell, drypoint on paper, dated only broadly to the 1920s by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the sheet is now held; Mukul Chandra Dey (1895–1989). Long before Dey ever touched a copper plate, he had absorbed this particular story as a schoolboy at Santiniketan, where he arrived at eleven to study directly under Abanindranath Tagore. The same Abanindranath who, in 1895, had rendered Kalidasa's Sanskrit drama into a Bengali prose retelling for children, a text that circulated through the very curriculum built around him. Santiniketan's art training was never separated from its literary one; the ancient courtly and devotional stories Rabindranath had insisted on placing at the center of the school's imagination were the same stories his nephew set the boys to illustrate, so that a subject like Sakuntala's parting from her forest home was less a personal choice for the young Dey than a kind of inherited assignment, absorbed at the same age and by the same hand that was just then learning to draw. He would have known the scene before he ever thought to engrave it: the hermit-raised girl, natural daughter of a nymph and sage, leaving the only home she has known to seek out the husband who forgot her. The tool he eventually used to render it belonged to an entirely different education. W. W. Pearson had given him his first copper plates and steel needle years earlier, sending the results off to London to be proofed, and by 1916 Dey was travelling with Rabindranath Tagore himself to Japan, studying briefly at Yokohama before crossing to Chicago, where Bertha Jaques and Blanding Sloan trained him properly in the etcher's craft, and finally to London, where he worked in Muirhead Bone's studio and trained further under Frank Short. He was the first Indian artist to cross the world expressly to master a printmaking technique. It was somewhere in this same decade abroad, the 1920s the museum's own dating settles on, that this particular plate was very likely cut: an Indian hand, now fluent in a wholly European medium, reaching backward across the ocean for a Sanskrit court poet's heroine rather than forward into anything he was encountering in London or Chicago. A print about departure, made by a man who had himself departed, carries its own quiet irony, whether or not Dey intended it. The image withholds none of the play's most famous single moment. Sakuntala stands beneath the spreading canopy of a great tree, one arm raised into its foliage as if in the act of touching it one last time. The "leave-taking of the trees" that Kalidasa gives her before she ever reaches the hermitage gate while her other hand holds a small rounded vessel close to her body, the kind of plain water-pot an ascetic's foster-daughter would carry rather than any princess's ornament. Her sari falls in long incised folds down the length of her figure, its border built up through dense, patterned hatching that reads as fine embroidery even in monochrome, a hint of the nobility of her actual, still-undiscovered birth beneath the plainness of forest dress. At her feet, a doe turns its head toward her, muzzle lifted toward the hem of her garment: this is the fawn Sakuntala herself nursed on handfuls of grain, and in the play's own text it is precisely this animal that delays her, catching at her clothing and refusing to let her walk on until Kanva himself must ask it to release her. Dey has chosen, of every possible instant in the scene, the one in which the natural world itself resists her going. Behind them both, a calm stretch of water opens toward the horizon, a single small boat visible on its surface, the larger world she is walking out into, indifferent and already waiting. What the print ultimately holds is the specific ache Sanskrit poetics calls viraha, the pain of parting that is also, paradoxically, proof of how completely a place or a person has been loved: Sakuntala's sorrow is not at leaving something worthless behind but at the trees, the deer, and the whole quiet order of the hermitage each making a claim on her that only grief can measure. Dey's needle, trained in a Western academy to render exactly this kind of accumulated, tender line, turns that training toward an old and specifically Indian understanding of departure. That a person only discovers the full weight of a home in the instant of its loss. A young artist, soon to leave his own country for years at a stretch, engraving a heroine who cannot leave her forest without the forest itself objecting: the coincidence, if it is one, is difficult to look past.