Shakuntala Disclosing Her Feelings of Love For Dushyant to Her Friends Anasuya and Priyamvada

Grappling with feelings of intense love, Shakuntala is bewildered by the intensity of emotions she was hitherto unacquainted with. Overwhelmed by her feelings, Shakuntala languishes into a state of “wasting away”. Her love-suffering reaches a stage where she looks pallid and sick. The inmates of the hermitage attribute Shakuntala’s affliction to exhaustion from heat and nurse her accordingly with cooling elements but to no avail.

While the heat of the sun is believed to be the ostensible cause of Shakuntala’s indisposition, her friends Ansuya and Priyamvada suspect that the real cause of Shakuntala’s debilitating condition is brought by her pining for Dushyant and her ‘lovesickness’. As the poet Kalidas says about the condition of Shakuntala, “…Love burns young women like summer heat.”

In Kalidasa’s description about the condition of Shakuntala brought about by her lovesickness, he describes her frail “Limbs lying among crushed petals,
Like fragile lotus stalks,
Are weakened by pain”

tormented by love, she is sad but beautiful to see, “like a jasmine creeper when hot wind shrivels its leaves.”

Her friends encourage Shakuntala to reveal her true feelings, as “sharing sorrow with loving friends makes it bearable”, unaware that Dushyant, hiding behind a clump of trees is overhearing their conversation. After an initial hesitation and much prodding by her friends, Shakuntala finally relents and reveals her feelings for Dushyant. Upon hearing Shakuntala's confession of her love for him, Dushyant is filled with delight.

In the folio, the artist renders Shakuntala and her friends as earthy village women in their attire and mannerisms, rather than the textual descriptions of Shakuntala which describe her exquisite otherworldly beauty deriving from her celestial ancestry, she and her friends wearing clothes fashioned from the bark of trees.

As a dejected Shakuntala sits with her head bowed, her legs folded close to her body huddling in her abject state, she seems more sad than in a state of torment and gripped by the “intensity of her passion” for Dushyant. Her robust form presents a contrast to Kalidasa’s image of “her limbs wasting away with only the shadow of her beauty remaining…”