The Sanskrit drama

The number of Bhāsa’s dramas, and the variety of their themes, indicate the activity and originality of his talent. Even the limitations imposed by the choice of epic subjects are often successfully surmounted. In the Rāma dramas only is there lacking any sign of his ability; the Abhiṣekanāṭaka is a somewhat dreary summary of the corresponding books (IV–VI) of the Rāmāyaṇa, nor is the Pratimānāṭaka substantially superior. The variations are in the main few and unimportant; the two struggles between Sugrīva and Vālin are condensed into one, which leaves the treacherous slaying of Vālin without shadow of excuse, and casts a blemish on Rāma’s character which later dramatists avoid. The pathetic scene of the epic in which Tārā, his wife, laments Vālin’s death is omitted, Vālin forbidding any woman to gaze on him in his fall. The two efforts of Rāvaṇa to deceive Sītā, first by showing her Rāma’s head, and later Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa bound and seemingly dead, are reduced to one, the showing of the heads of both, and Sītā’s constancy is made inhuman by denying her the comfort of a consoler. To secure a happy ending, Agni is made to vindicate Sītā by the test of fire, and to hand her over to Rāma as Lakṣmī and his fit mate. The characters remain stereotyped and dull; Rāvaṇa is nothing more than a miles gloriosus, if not comic, and Lakṣmaṇa cuts a very poor figure.30

The pieces based on the Mahābhārata shows more invention [106]and interest. The Madhyamavyāyoga exploits neatly the theme of Hiḍimbā’s longing to see her husband of many years before, and the obedience of a son to a mother exemplified both by Ghaṭotkaca and by Madhyama; a mother’s bidding outweighs even that of a father. The struggle of father against son, both unknowing, is original, though not tragic. In the Karṇabhāra the nobility of the haughty Karṇa is emphasized; in the epic he surrenders his armour to Indra, but demands a price, the lance that never fails; in the play it suffices the prince that he has conferred a boon on the god himself. There is the same martial spirit, evoking the sentiment of heroism in the audience, in the Dūtaghaṭotkaca where the joy of the Kurus is contrasted effectively with the doubts of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, and the grave warning which Ghaṭotkaca brings of the revenge to be wreaked by Arjuna for his son’s death. The Dūtavākya is admirable in his contrast between the character of Duryodhana and the majesty of Kṛṣṇa; the picture motif is effectively elaborated, and the deep admiration of the poet for Kṛṣṇa as the embodiment of the highest of gods Viṣṇu, of whom he was an adorer, is plainly manifest. In the Ūrubhan̄ga Duryodhana’s hauteur to the highest of gods meets with its just punishment; Duryodhana is the chief subject, but not the hero, of the piece which manifests the just31 punishment of the impious. The death of Duryodhana is admirably depicted; his child who loved to sit on his knees comes to him, but must be repulsed; the touch that brought joy aforetime would now be an agony.32 But Duryodhana, with all his demerits as a man, remains heroic in his death.

The Bālacarita reveals the originality of Bhāsa’s genius; the entr’acte to the second Act is extremely effective in its terrors, and the poet has no hesitation in asking the audience to conceive for themselves the strange figures of the attendants of Viṣṇu or the host of the goddess Kārtyāyanī, or the bull Ariṣṭa, or the snake demon Kāliya, all of whom appear on the stage, but doubtless in costumes which left most to the mind’s eye. The miracles of the light emanating from the child Kṛṣṇa, the crossing of the Yamunā, and the water springing from the ground, are innovations on the tradition, as is the apparent death and revival of the child of Yaçodā. Kṛṣṇa is heroism incarnate, Kaṅsa [107]without merit, and his slaying just, but the heroic sentiment is blended with the erotic, and with that of wonder. As a drama, however, the play suffers unquestionably from the wholly undeniable disparity between the two opponents; Kṛṣṇa is never in danger, and his feats are too easily achieved to produce their full effect.

The Avimāraka is a drama of love, primitive in its expression and intensity; Bhāsa’s love for rapid action is here, as always, strongly marked, as is also his willingness to repeat incidents and situations; the hero twice seeks suicide, and the heroine does so once. The dénouement is artificial, though something of the kind was necessary to secure the possibility of the marriage of the pair. There is a far more interesting hint of youthful love in the amours of Udayana and Vāsavadattā in the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa, where the rapidity of action is in entire harmony with the skill attributed to the minister, whose address, courage, and loyalty, make him an attractive figure. The Svapnavāsavadattā itself reveals Udayana as a faithful and devoted husband, very different from the careless if courteous gentleman of Harṣa’s dramas. His love for the queen he imagines lost ennobles and elevates his character, while motives of statecraft and the affection shown him by Padmāvatī easily explain his wooing of that maiden. Vāsavadattā herself is not the jealous if high-minded wife of Harṣa’s plays; she is the devoted and self-sacrificing lover who is willing to postpone her own feelings and wishes to the good of her husband. The king and queen are the finest products of Bhāsa’s characterization of lovers. In the Cārudatta, however, we have clever studies in the hetaera, the merchant and the minor figures, though the value of the play must seem less to us than when completed and elaborated in the Mṛcchakaṭikā.

Bhāsa undoubtedly excels in suggesting heroism; this characteristic is admirably depicted in Yaugandharāyaṇa, and above all in Duryodhana, who in the Dūtaghaṭotkaca effectively replies to the menaces of the envoy by promising an answer in deeds, war, not in harsh words. But his power is not confined to heroism, love, pathos, or the marvellous. The Vidūṣaka in his hands attains the characteristics which mark him in the later drama, and, though much was doubtless traditional, it may [108]safely be assumed that he tended by his example to stereotype the figure. In the Avimāraka33 he distinguishes himself by devotion to his master; he is set on finding him, dead or alive, when he is missing, and he is prepared if need be to follow him beyond the grave. Avimāraka himself portrays the character of his friend; he places first, doubtless deliberately, the amusement he produces in social intercourse (goṣṭhīṣu hāsyaḥ), but he describes him also as brave in battle, a wise friend, a comforter in sorrow, a violent foe to his enemies. If in the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa34 he seems to abandon the idea of succouring his master, it is only because he is convinced that Vatsa is dead, and that nothing can be done to save him. The other side of his character is his devotion to the pleasures of the table and his feeble attempts at wit and humour. Vāsavadattā he remembers fondly because she used to see that he never lacked sweetmeats.35 When in the Avimāraka36 the heroine weeps in love-sorrow, he would like to weep also in sympathy; but no tears come, and he recalls that, even when his own father died, he could hardly weep. When addressed as a man, he insists that he is a woman. He is, however, a Brahmin in his prejudices; he will not drink brandy, a pleasure which he permits to the Gātrasevaka, the disguise assumed by one of Yaugandharāyaṇa’s following in the attempt to rescue Udayana. This worthy favours us with a eulogy of drink, which is an interesting fragment of the drinking songs which must have existed in ancient India:37

‘Blessed those that are drunk with drink, blessed those that are soaked with drink; blessed those that are washed with drink, blessed those that are choked with drink.’ Amusing also is the figure of Yaugandharāyaṇa as an Unmattaka, devoted to eating and dancing, and of Rumaṇvant in his guise of a Çramaṇaka. There is genuine humour in the scene in the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa38 between the Gātrasevaka and the servant, when the former makes ready the elephant Bhadravatī, which is to be [109]the means of carrying off the king and Vāsavadattā beyond the reach of all pursuit, without raising any suspicion on the part of the entourage of Mahāsena. Quiet humour is shown in the episode of the bringing of Bhīma by Ghaṭotkaca to his mother Hiḍimbā; Ghaṭotkaca has difficulty in describing his victim, and is much amazed to find his mother, whose curiosity is aroused by his lack of precision, finding him to be his deity and hers in his capacity as husband and father.39 In the same vein is the compliment paid by Rāma to Sītā, when the latter accurately predicts the action he would take when his father offered him the throne: ‘Thou hast guessed well; few pairs are there of like character in the world (suṣṭhu tarkitam alpaṁ tulyaçīlāni dvandvāni sṛjyante)’.40 Quite distinctly amusing is the scene at the close of the Avimāraka,41 where the facts of the relationships are being disclosed to the king Kuntibhoja. That sovereign may be justly excused his difficulty in apprehending the situation; he is reduced to such confusion that he is dubious about his own capital Vairantya, but finally, when assured that the hero is the son-in-law of Kuntibhoja, asks who that worthy may be, to be reminded politely that he himself is Kuntibhoja, father of Kuran̄gī, son of Duryodhana, and lord of Vairantya. This power explains the description of Bhāsa as the laughter (hāsa) of poetry given to him by Jayadeva in the Prasannarāghava, a title which is also merited by such verses as one cited in the anthologies,42 though not found in the extant dramas:

‘When its rays fall on its cheeks the cat licks them, thinking them milk; when they are caught in the cleft of a tree the elephant deems them a lotus; when they rest on the couch of lovers the maiden seizes them, saying, “’Tis my robe”; the moon in truth, proud of its brilliance, doth lead astray all this world.’

Of deeper sentiments we need expect nothing from Bhāsa; [110]in this respect he sets the model for his successors. From Kālidāsa he differs in being a devotee of Viṣṇu rather than Çiva, but he is equally an admirer of the established Brahminical order. In the Pañcarātra,43 the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa,44 and in the character of Nārada in the Avimāraka,45 we find clearly expressed his appreciation of the high rank of the Brahmin, and the obligations due to him from kings and other classes.

Care in the delineation of even minor characters is normally displayed; the number of these is considerable; sixteen each in the Svapnavāsavadattā and the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa, about twenty in the Avimāraka, Abhiṣekanāṭaka, and Pañcarātra, twelve in the Cārudatta, and about thirty in the Bālacarita. But there are traces of the anxiety of Bhāsa to avoid adding needlessly to the number of those appearing; in the Avimāraka neither the king of Kāçi nor Sucetanā appears on the scene despite their part in the play. The silence of Sītā, though at the close of the Abhiṣekanāṭaka she appears on the stage, is doubtless explicable by the same dramatic touch which makes Euripides refuse to assign any words to Alkestis on her return from the dead.

In technique Bhāsa does not accord entirely with the later rules of the theorists. The Nāṭyaçāstra, it is true, when it forbids the exhibition of battle scenes contradicts itself, and Bhāsa freely permits them, as must have been the case in the primitive drama in which Kṛṣṇa slew Kaṅsa. The maidens, however, he bids watch the mortal combat of Ariṣṭa and Kṛṣṇa from afar. Daçaratha’s death he admits; the bodies of Cāṇūra, Muṣṭika, and Kaṅsa lie on the stage, and Vālin perishes there as well as Duryodhana, but all these are evildoers, and their death evokes no sorrow. The same simplicity doubtless accounts for the introduction of the mythological figures of the Bālacarita, whom we need not imagine to have been elaborately costumed; they announce their nature or are described,46 and the spectator supplies the imagination requisite to comprehend them.

We find already in Bhāsa the formal distinction of introductory scenes into Viṣkambhakas of two kinds, according as Sanskrit alone or Sanskrit and Prākrit are used and Praveçakas; [111]in the former the number of interlocutors is three in two47 cases against one or two as usual later; there are other signs of his fondness for triads.48 The introduction normally is styled Sthāpanā,49 not as later Prastāvanā, and it is extremely simple; after a Nāndī, not preserved, has been pronounced—perhaps behind the scene—the director enters, utters a benediction, and is about to make an announcement when a sound is heard which leads up to the actual drama. No mention of the poet’s name or the work is found, but these we may suggest were left to the preliminaries which even in the Nāṭyaçāstra were elaborate, and which doubtless were performed before Bhāsa’s plays, as they were essentially religious rites in honour of the gods. On the other hand, the close, the Bharatavākya, of the later theory is varied in Bhāsa. The conventions as to the use of speech, aloud, aside to another, or to the audience alone are well known, and effective use is made of the voice from the air or behind the scene, as in the Abhiṣekanāṭaka, when Rāvaṇa taunts his prisoner and asks, who can set her free when her rescuers are dead; the voice replies, ‘Rāma, Rāma’.50

There are unquestionably primitive traits in Bhāsa’s art; he uses with dangerous freedom the device by which some one departs and returns straightway, to narrate what must have taken long to happen; thus in the Abhiṣekanāṭaka, Çan̄kukarṇa is bidden send a thousand men against Hanumant; he departs at once, to return and tell that they have fallen. Free use is made also, as in the epic, of magic weapons in the conflict, as in the battle of Duryodhana and Kṛṣṇa in the Dūtavākya. So also in the Madhyamavyāyoga we find Ghaṭotkaca employing his magic power to produce water from a rock; then he binds Bhīma in a magic noose, from which he is delivered by a magic formula. In the Dūtavākya the discus of Kṛṣṇa [112]secures water from the heavenly Ganges by magic means; it has the power to move the mountains of the gods, to set the ocean in motion, and to bring down the stars to earth, ideas which are less unintelligible when we remember the wide-spread Indian beliefs in the powers of magicians, which we find later in Harṣa’s Ratnāvalī, and which are earlier recorded of those who have attained high degrees of intuition in both the Upaniṣads and Buddhism. In the Avimāraka we have the magic ring of the Vidyādhara playing a decisive part in the action, since by its use the hero can enter unseen the harem and visit his wife Kuran̄gī in secret. It is clear that both in the epic and in the popular tale Bhāsa found adequate precedent for the stress laid on these means of evoking in his audience the sentiment of wonder.

The use of the dance as an ornament to the drama which is seen in Kālidāsa is frequently resorted to in Bhāsa. In Act III of the Bālacarita there is a performance of the Hallīçaka dance, in which both the herdsmen and the cowherdesses take full part; the dance is accompanied by music and song, and the maidens are gaily attired. A similar dance is mentioned in Act II of the Pañcarātra,51 a reflex no doubt of the ritual dance of the winter solstice in the Mahāvrata rite. It is conceivable also that the conception in the Bālacarita of the appearance of Viṣṇu’s weapons as figures on the stage in the dress of herdsmen is a reminiscence of a cult dance in honour of Viṣṇu, but this idea must not be pressed unduly, for the poet there invents also the figures of the Curse and the King’s Fortune as personae dramatis. There is, it is clear, a certain similarity between the personification of these abstractions and the allegorical figures of the Buddhist drama, which come again into being in the Prabodhacandrodaya of Kṛṣṇamiçra. Song as an important element in the drama again appears in the Abhiṣekanāṭaka, where the Gandharvas and Apsarases sing the praises of Viṣṇu.52

There are clear traces in the dramas of the overwhelming influence of epic tradition and of epic recitation in the tendency [113]to introduce the description of battle scenes at great length in lieu of dramatic action, while a certain lack of skill is apparent in the attempt to transform the tale into a drama. Thus in the Avimāraka the facts essential for a full understanding of the story come out only in the last Act, and the adventures of the hero are there recounted with distinct lack of propriety, as they have formed the subject of the earlier acts of the drama. Neither the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa nor the Svapnavāsavadattā is constructed in so clumsy a manner, but in both cases the working out of the plot is certainly open to criticism. Thus even in the last Act of the latter drama, which in many respects is effective, the stage directions assume that the queen appears on the stage with Vāsavadattā as her attendant, but that the king either does not see, or does not recognize the latter, both obviously very improbable suppositions; possibly it is assumed that the presence of Vāsavadattā, though obvious to the audience, is concealed from the king in some manner by the use of the curtain, but this is left to be imagined,53 and it would have been much simpler to invent some ground for securing the entry of Vāsavadattā by herself later on. On the other hand, in Act I of the play, the facts regarding the supposed death of Vāsavadattā and the minister in a fire are effectively brought out by the device of using a Brahmacārin, who arrives at the hermitage at the same time as Yaugandharāyaṇa and Vāsavadattā in their disguise, and tells the tale of the disaster as explaining why he has left that place in sorrow at the event, dilating at the same time on the effect of the news on the unhappy king. The mode in which Vāsavadattā in Act V mistakes the king for Padmāvatī is quite naturally evolved, for the place where he is resting is poorly illuminated and she was naturally unwilling to arouse her mistress from the slumber into which she hoped she had fallen. In Act II of the Abhiṣekanāṭaka the conversation of Hanumant with Sītā is made possible only by the somewhat implausible device of assuming that the Rākṣasīs who guard her fall asleep at their post.

A rather marked fondness is shown by Bhāsa for the repetition of the same incident. Thus in the Avimāraka we have the [114]twice repeated attempt of the hero at suicide followed by the attempt of the heroine in the same sense, from which he saves her. At the close of the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa we have again the idea of the attempted suicide of the heroine’s mother, which is obviated by the king’s good sense in showing her that the marriage of the runaway pair was quite proper in their rank and in arranging for marrying them in a painting. The dying Vālin in the Abhiṣekanāṭaka has a vision of the Ganges and the other great rivers. Urvaçī and the Apsarases, and the chariot drawn by a thousand swans, which bears away the dead, coming for his spirit; Duryodhana in the Ūrubhan̄ga has a similar vision, and Avimāraka, when on the point of committing suicide he sees the Vidyādhara beside him, imagines that this is a vision such as comes often to dying men. Again in the prologues there is almost a monotonous adoption of the device by which the director is interrupted in making a proposed announcement by a voice from behind the scene, which enables him by a clever transition to lead the audience into the dramatic action proper.