CC - I : Justify the appropriation of the title of the play Abhijnanasakuntalam

The title "Abhijnanashakuntalam" underline the central issue in the Play. Sakuntala is recognized by virtue of a token of love, not by love itself. In the absence of concrete, tangible 'proof of love' and marriage, she is lost; she is nothing.  Again there is an interesting parallel with Shakespeare. In Othello, proof of the heroines chastity and love is demanded. Desdemona's chastity hangs on a handkerchief; Sakuntala's on a ring. Both heroines are blissfully unaware of the importance of the token. To them, love is its own proof and a witness to their chastity. It is in acts V and  VI that Kalidasa probes most reply into the heart of his society accepted norms and values.

                  The probing is accompanied by another equal significant question-the question of knowing, which is related to the recognition of Sakuntala at the close of the play. How does one know? Is 'the truest inner prompting', it's own unassailable authority to the Nobel and virtuous? This is the way of knowing that the king claims for herself; but the claim is subjected to irony security and found to be not well-founded.

         What is knowing? The king at first new Sakuntala carnally as an object; and frankly as an object of pleasure. She is a flower to smell, a gem to hold and an ornament to wear. She is hardly a person to him. It is only at the close of the play that he sees her as a person and knows her truly. Something has to be added to his view of her to make him see her s a 'person' of intrinsic beauty and not merely a beautiful object. Priyamvada is able to correlate outer beauty with her inner. But Duhsanta seems to be unable to do this until the long separation and grief at losing her and his son and an intense sense of guilt, give him eyes to see deeply. When Sakuntala stands before him, pale with suffering, the flesh mortified to let the spirit glow forth, the king truly sees her and Knows her. Here is the lady Sakuntala; it is she-"Dressed in dusky garments,/ her face find thin..." 

                        It almost appears as if her exquisite beauty had been a barrier to his understanding of her exquisite beauty had been a barrier to his understanding of her. All he described in images of blooming flowers and tender shoots. Initially, Duhsanta had known Sakuntala only carnally; even while he is setting himself up as the noble and self-restrained man shying away from the touch of another man's wife, his appreciative eye, the trained eye of a connoisseur of feminine beauty sees the sweetness beneath the enveloping veil-"barely-revealed," as she stands "like a bud | not burst into bloom....| a tender sprout among yellowing leaves". 

                The appropriates of the title becomes more apparent in the latter part of the play, when Duhsanta becomes more mature. When he meets Sakuntala again in Marica's hermitage, he sees her, knowing her true worth; it is recognition, or Abhijnanam, the highly suggestive word which forms the first part of the compound word-the title of the play. The carnal knowledge he had of Sakuntala which has carried him to dizzying heights of rapture only to plunge him into deep despair under the weight of an overwhelming guilt, is transformed.

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