It is undoubtedly a matter far from easy for any people to create from materials such as existed in India a true drama, and it was a perfectly legitimate suggestion of Weber’s77 that the necessary impetus to creation may have been given by the contact of Greece with India, through the representation of Greek plays at the courts of the kings in Baktria, the Punjab, and Gujarāt, who brought with them Greek culture as well as Greek forces. This view suffered modification in view of further consideration of the evidence of an Indian drama in the Mahābhāṣya, and the final opinion of Weber was content with the view that a certain influence might have been exerted by the Greek on the Sanskrit drama. The vehement repudiation of this opinion by Pischel78 was followed by the elaborate effort of Windisch79 to trace the extent of the influence which he believed he could establish. Windisch’s attitude is of special importance because he recognizes fully the elements which made for the development of an independent Indian drama, the epic recitations and the mimetic art of the Naṭa, whose name indicated, as a Prākritism of the root nṛt, dance, that he was at first a dancer, in the Indian sense of the term, that is one who represents by [58]his postures and gestures emotions of varied kinds, or, in the terminology of the Greek and Roman stage, a pantomime. But he insists on the distinction between the dramatization of the epic material suggested by the Mahābhāṣya, and the features of the classical form of the drama. The subject-matter differs, heroic and mythic figures are presented in the relations of everyday life, the chief theme is a comedy of love, the plot is artistically developed and the action divided into scenes, character types are developed, the epic element recedes before the development of dialogue, verse is mingled with prose, Sanskrit with Prākrit. The change is remarkable; was it aided by the influence of the Greek drama? Admittedly on any theory we must allow for powerful causes to produce so splendid a development, and it would be idle to ignore the possibility of such influence.

Since Windisch wrote, the extent of Greek influence on India before and after the Christian era has been the subject of much investigation, which has yielded its richest fruits in the sphere of art. That India borrowed the incitement to the art of Gandhāra from Greece as its ultimate source is undeniable, and it is equally clear that the Buddhist adoption of the practice of depicting the human form of the Buddha, in lieu of merely indicating his presence by some symbol such as his seat, was due to Greek artistic influences. The extent to which the rise of the Mahāyāna school of Buddhism was furthered by the influx of religious and philosophical ideas from the west is still uncertain; but it is noteworthy that Professor Lévi,80 who most strongly opposed the theory of Windisch, has himself attributed to western influences the development of the new spirit in Buddhism which he traces in Açvaghoṣa, whom he places in the entourage of Kaniṣka, dating the former in the first century B.C. If this were the case, there would be decided difficulties in maintaining any chronological objections such as Professor Lévi81 originally urged to the theory of Windisch; when he attacked that theory he could place the earliest Sanskrit dramas preserved, those of Kālidāsa in his view, five or six centuries A.D. But now we have dramas of about A.D. 100 which are certainly not the earliest of their [59]type, and it is impossible to deny that the Sanskrit drama came into being during the period when Greek influence was present in India. The highest point of that influence politically was doubtless attained under Menander; in the middle of the first century B.C., roughly a century after Menander’s conquests, the Greek princes were on the verge of being absorbed by new influences culminating in the establishment of the Kuṣana82 domination, but there is nothing chronologically difficult in assuming the influence of Greek drama on the drama in India.

The question, however, arises how far there was actual presentation at the courts of Greek princes in India of dramatic entertainments. On this topic the evidence is no doubt scanty.83 We know indeed that Alexander was fond of theatrical spectacles with which he amused himself in the intervals allowed by his victories, and we hear that at Ekbatana there were no fewer than three thousand Greek artists who had come from Greece. We are told also that the children of the Persians, the Gedrosians and the people of Susa, sang the dramas of Euripides and Sophokles; if we are to believe Philostratos’s Life of Apollonios of Tyana,84 a Brahmin boasted that he had read the Herakleidai of Euripides, and Plutarch has described in inimitable fashion the strange scene at the court of Orodes of Parthia when the messenger arrived, bearing the head of Crassus, and the actor Iason substituted the ghastly relic for the head of Pentheus in the Bakchai, which he was then performing. We need not doubt from these and other passages the existence of performances of Greek dramas throughout the provinces which formed the Empire of Alexander; the scepticism of Professor Lévi85 in this regard is clearly inadmissible. It is perfectly true that of dramatic performances in India we have no express mention, but in view of the miserably scanty information we possess regarding these principalities of the Greeks in India there is nothing surprising in the fact. Nor is it likely that princes who could employ artists of sufficient ability to produce [60]beautiful coins would be indifferent to what is after all the greatest literary creation of Greece.

Nor can we lay much stress on the difficulty of India borrowing anything from the Greek drama, owing to the great difference between the two civilizations, Indian exclusiveness, Indian ignorance of foreign languages, or similar general considerations, because we have really no evidence of value of the feelings and actions of the Indians during the period when the Greek invasion was only the forerunner of invasions by Parthians, Çakas, and Kuṣanas, followed by other less famous but not unimportant immigrants, whose advent vitally affected the population and civilization of the north-west of India. It is plain that in the Gupta dynasty of the fourth century A.D. we find a great Hindu revival, but a revival which evidently drew strength primarily from the east, and we do not know anything definite to enable us to reason a priori on what was, or was not, possible as regards assimilation of the drama. The only decisive evidence possible is that of the actual plays, and unfortunately the results to be attained by examination of them are not at all satisfactory.

It is held by Windisch that the New Attic Comedy, which flourished from 340–260 B.C., must be deemed the source of influence on Indian drama; the fact that no mention of this comedy is specifically made in the few notices we have of drama in the east is doubtless not of importance. On the other hand, we know that Alexandria under the Lagidai became a great centre of Greek learning, and that between Alexandria and Ujjayinī through the port of Barygaza86 there was a brisk exchange of trade which may have aided in intellectual contact,87 perhaps especially in the period when Menander’s conquests gave Greek products of every sort a special vogue. The new comedy by its making its subject of the everyday life of man was far more suited than any other form of drama to attract imitation.

The actual points of contact between the New Comedy and the Sanskrit drama are, however, scanty. The division of both the Roman drama88 and the Sanskrit into acts, distinguished by [61]the departure of all the actors from the stage and the number of five as normal, though often exceeded in India, are facts which need not be more than casual coincidences: the divisions in the Sanskrit drama rest on an analysis of the action which is not recorded in Greece or Rome. There is similarity in the scenic conventions, in the asides, in the entry and exit of characters, more notably in the practice that the advent of a new character is usually expressly notified to the audience by a remark from one of the actors already on the stage. But these are all matters which must almost inevitably coincide in theatrical performances produced under approximately similar conditions. Even in the modern theatre with its programmes the necessity of indicating at once the identity of the new comers to the stage is keenly felt.

More value attaches to the argument from the use of Yavanikā,89 or its Prākrit form Javanikā, for the name of the curtain which covered the tiring room and formed the background of the stage. The word primarily is an adjective meaning Ionian, the Greeks with whom India first came into contact. But it was not confined to what was Greek in the strict sense of the word; it applies to anything connected with the Hellenized Persian Empire, Egypt, Syria, Bactria, and it therefore cannot be rigidly limited to what is Greek. As applied to the curtain it is an adjective, and describes doubtless the material of the curtain (paṭī, apaṭī) as foreign, possibly as Lévi suggests, Persian tapestry brought to India by Greek ships and merchants. The word Yavanikā has no special application to the curtain of the theatre, as would be the case, if it were borrowed as a detail of stage arrangement from Greece. Nor in fact was there any curtain in the case of Greek drama, so far as is known, from which it could be borrowed; Windisch’s contention merely was that the curtain was called Greek because it took the place of the painted scenery at the back of the Greek stage.

As little can any conclusion of Greek borrowing be drawn from the Yavanīs, Greek maidens, who are represented as among the body-guard of the king;90 for this the Greek drama offers no [62]parallel; it represents the fondness of the princes of India91 for the fascinating hetaerae of Greece, and the readiness of Greek traders to make the high profits to be derived from shipping these youthful cargoes.

The points of resemblance in regard to the plot are of interest. There is some similarity between the stock theme of the Nāṭikā, the love of a king for a maiden, hindered by various obstacles, and finally successful through events which reveal her as a princess, destined for him in marriage but concealed in this aspect by some accident, and the New Comedy picture of the youth whose affection for a fair lady, apparently of status which forbids marriage by Attic law, but in reality of equal birth, is finally rewarded by the discovery of the mark which leads to her identification. The use of a mark of recognition is undoubtedly common in both dramas. We have in the Çakuntalā the ring92 which gives part of the title of the play Abhijñāna-Çakuntalā, and in the Vikramorvaçī the stone of reunion (saṁgamamaṇi) which enables Purūravas to recognise his beloved despite her change into a creeper. In the Ratnāvalī we have the necklace which permits the identification of the heroine; in the Nāgānanda, the jewel which, falling from the sky, denotes the fate of the prince; in the Mālatīmādhava the garland plucked by Mādhava, worn by Mālatī, which Saudāminī produces at the dénouement as a sign of recognition; and in the Mṛcchakaṭikā the clay cart in which are placed the jewels used as evidence against the hero. In the same general category fall the ring of the queen in the Mālavikāgnimitra, which the Vidūṣaka obtains from her in order to cure a snake-bite, and employs to bring about the release of Mālavikā; the arrow of Āyus, in the Vikramorvaçī, which reveals to Purūravas his son; and the seal of Rākṣasa in the Mudrārākṣasa of which Cāṇakya makes use to confound his schemes. In [63]some cases the similarity of use of these emblems is close; Mālavikā, taken away by brigands, and Ratnāvalī, rescued from the sea, are real parallels to the heroine of the Rudens, stolen from her father by a brigand, sold to a leno and wrecked on the Sicilian coast, whose recognition is brought about by the discovery of her childish ornaments.

These are striking facts, and the only way to meet them is to show that the motifs in Sanskrit drama have an earlier history in the literature, and can, therefore, be regarded as natural developments. The difficulty presented here is that the literature available consists either of tales, which in any form available to us are later than the period of the supposed Greek influence, or the epic which is of uncertain date, so that no strict proof is available that any of its minor issues antedates the Christian era. But we do find in the epic indications that it was not necessary for Greece to give to India the ideas presented in the drama. The story of the love of Kīcaka for Draupadī, when disguised as handmaiden she served Sudeṣṇā, wife of the king Virāṭa, has a tragic outcome, for his love is repulsed, but it has undoubted affinities with the plot of the Nāṭikā. In the case of the old tale of Nala and Damayantī, the heroine is more happy, for, when separated from her husband who has abandoned her in the distraction of losing his kingdom at dice, she lives in peace, guarded securely from interference; at last she is recognized by a birthmark. In the Rāmāyaṇa the use of signs of this sort is extended to artificial modes: Sītā, stolen away from Rāma, drops her jewels to the ground; the monkeys bear them to their king, who hands them to Rāma, and the hero thus knows beyond a peradventure the identity of the ravisher. To console her in her detention pending his efforts at rescue he sends Hanumant to her, bearing his messages, and gives him his ring to serve to identify him; Sītā sees it and takes heart. We may admit that such incidents are almost inevitable in a primitive society, in which the means of identification were necessarily material, or personal. Nor in the Sanskrit drama is there any preponderant use of this factor; the letter and the portrait93 are other means, the use of which is recognized in the theory.

The evidence of borrowing based on the Mṛcchakaṭikā by [64]Windisch requires reconsideration in the light of the facts now known regarding the authority of that drama for the early Sanskrit drama. To Windisch it seemed to present every appearance of an early age, and to show close relations to a Greek model. The title he compared with the Cistellaria, ‘little chest’, or the Aulularia, ‘little pot’; the mixture of a political intrigue and a love drama with the mention—only incidental however—of political events contemporaneous with the action in Plautus’s Epidicus and Captivi; the court scene he held to be of Greek inspiration; the meeting of Cārudatta and Vasantasenā he compared with that of the hero and heroine of the Cistellaria; the theft of Çarvilaka, in order to buy the freedom of the slave girl he loves, to the dishonest means adopted by the hero in the new comedy to procure means to purchase his inamorata; the setting free of the slave by Vasantasenā with the attaining of the position of a freedwoman in the Greek drama; finally the elevation of Vasantasenā to the rank of a woman of good character to permit of her legal marriage to Cārudatta is compared with the discovery in the Greek drama of the existence of a free status as the birthright of the maiden whom the hero loves. The Mṛcchakaṭikā, however, is not an early representative of the Indian drama in the sense held by Windisch; it is based on the Cārudatta of Bhāsa, in which there is no mingling of the political and love intrigue, at any rate as we have that play; the title Mṛcchakaṭikā, which departs from the usual model, was probably deliberately chosen to distinguish the new drama from the old. The plays cited have no real combination of political and love intrigues, and the other parallels are far too vague to be taken seriously. The raising of Vasantasenā to a new status is an extraordinary event, which is dependent on an action of the new king Āryaka, who, as an overthrower of the former monarch, exercises the supreme right of sovereignty in favour of the lady, in defiance of the rules of caste. The political intrigue thus becomes a vital element in the play.

Nor can any special value be ascribed to the rule, which is laid down in the theory, and observed in practice, and which confines the events in an act to the limits of a single day, as compared with the rule of Aristotle94 that the events of a drama should not [65]exceed, or only by a little, the duration of a day. If the rule was borrowed, it was greatly changed in sense by permitting long periods, up to a year, to elapse between the acts in the Sanskrit drama, and the mere moral needs of the approximation to reality requisite for illusion would produce the state of the Sanskrit drama without external influence.

The characters of the drama present problems which are not solved by the theory of borrowing. The figure of the queen, loving her husband, noble and dignified, is compared by Windisch with that of the matrona of the Roman comedy, while her attempts to prevent the union of her husband and the new love are compared to the efforts of the senex to dissuade his son from a rash marriage or intrigue. But it is clear that the comparisons are idle; the rivalry of the old love and the new is an incident of the life of the harem inevitable in polygamy, while it affords an admirable opportunity for the poet to depict the contrast of types and the different aspects of love, his chief theme. Windisch, however, lays most stress on his comparison of the three figures of the Viṭa, Vidūṣaka, and Çakāra, with the parasite, the servus currens, and the miles gloriosus of the Greek drama, and his arguments have a certain weight. It is true that these three, with the Sūtradhāra and his assistant, are given by the Nāṭyaçāstra in a list of actors, and that the five correspond fairly closely with the male personnel of a Greek drama; it is also true that, while Kālidāsa and the Mṛcchakaṭikā with the Cārudatta know the Çakāra, he vanishes from the later drama, and the Viṭa shows comparatively little life, suggesting that the Greek borrowings were gradually felt unsuited to India and died a natural death. But the argument is inadequate to prove borrowing. The Viṭa is, indeed, more closely akin to the parasite than to any other character of the Greek or Roman comedy, but the parasite is lacking in the refinement and culture of his Indian counterpart, who is clearly drawn from life, the witty and accomplished companion who is paid to amuse his patron, but whose dependence does not make him the object of insolence and bad jokes. The Vidūṣaka has, in all likelihood, as has been seen, his origin in the religious drama; his Brahmin caste, and his use of Prākrit can best thus be explained. The alternative views all present far more difficulties; the transformance of the slave into a Brahmin [66]is far too violent a change to be credible, while Lévi’s95 view which makes him a borrowing from the Prākrit drama, which depicted with truth the type of Brahmin who serves as go-between in love affairs, masking his degraded trade under the cloak of religion, renders it unintelligible why the Brahmins should have consented to maintain him in the Sanskrit drama. Equally unconvincing is Professor Konow’s96 effort to explain him as a figure of the popular drama, which loved to make fun of the higher classes, especially the Brahmins. There was no conceivable reason why the Brahmins should have kept such a figure in a drama which never appealed to the lower classes, and it is significant that there is no trace of a comic figure of the Kṣatriya class, although the populace doubtless was as willing to make fun of the rulers as of the priests. The similarity between the Çakāra and the miles gloriosus is by no means small, but the argument from borrowing is refuted by the reflexion that such a figure can be explained perfectly easily from the actual life of India in the period of Bhāsa and the Mṛcchakaṭikā, when mercenary soldiers must have been painfully familiar to Indians.

The number of actors is certainly not in accord with the Greek practice; not only has Bhāsa large numbers, but the Çakuntalā has thirty, the Mṛcchakaṭikā twenty-nine, the Vikramorvaçī eighteen, the Mudrārākṣasa twenty-four, and it is only in the later and less inventive Bhavabhūti that we find but thirteen in the Mālatīmādhava and eleven in the Uttararāmacarita.

The prologue in both dramas serves the purpose of announcing the author’s name, the title of the play, and the desire of the dramatist for a sympathetic reception, but the Indian prologue is closely attached to the preliminaries, and has a definite and independent character of its own in the conversation between the Sūtradhāra and his wife, the chief actress, so that borrowing is out of the question. Nor does any importance attach to the fact that Çiva, who is in a special sense the patron of drama, is the nearest Indian representative of Dionysos, or that the time of the festival at which plays were often shown was spring, as in the case of the Great Dionysia at Athens when new plays were usually presented. There is similarity between the Protagonist and the Sūtradhāra, for both undertake the leading parts in the drama, [67]but this and other minor points such as can be adduced are of no value as proofs of historical connexion.

Windisch admitted that in regard to the theatrical buildings there was no possibility of comparison, as the Indian theatre was not permanent, but Bloch97 has endeavoured to show that the Sītābengā cave theatre has marked affinities to the Greek. The attempt, however, is clearly a failure; the construction of the whole is merely that of a small amphitheatre cut out in the rock for a small audience without any special similarity to the Greek theatre of any period.

More recently the tendency of those who seek to find Greek influence in the making of the Sanskrit drama has turned to the mime as the form of art which exercised influence on India, and the older arguments of Windisch have been given a new shape and in part strengthened in this regard.98 The mime was performed without masks and buskins, as was the Indian drama. Moreover the mime, at any rate in Roman hands, had a curtain (siparium), which may be compared with the curtain of India. There was also no scene painting in the mime; different dialects were used, and the number of actors was considerable. Further, some of the standing types of the mime may be paralleled in the Indian drama; the zēlotypos has some similarity to the Çakāra, the mōkos to the Vidūṣaka.

Some of the arguments adduced against this theory of Reich’s are admittedly untenable. It is impossible to argue as does Professor Konow that the use of the Mṛcchakaṭikā as a work of early date is a mistake, since the oldest dramas preserved are of quite another type and have no similarity with Greek works. True, the Mṛcchakaṭikā is not as old as it was thought, but the Cārudatta can be substituted in lieu, and there are no dramas older than it, save those of the same author and some fragments of Buddhist drama. Nor have we any very satisfactory evidence of a mime in India at an early date, for a mime means a great deal more than the mere work of a Naṭa. But there are adequate grounds for disregarding the theory. The similarity of types is not at all convincing; the borrowing of the idea of using [68]different dialects from the mime is really absurd, and the large number of actors is equally natural in either case. The argument from the curtain is wholly without probative power; as we have seen, the term Yavanikā refers to material only; it would be very remarkable that the term Greek should be confined to the curtain alone, if the stage were really a Greek borrowing, and, last not least, we have no proof that the Greek mime had the curtain. The new form of the theory must, therefore, claim no more credence than the old. We cannot assuredly deny99 the possibility of Greek influence, in the sense that Weber admitted the probability; the drama, or the mime, may, as played at Greek courts, have aided in the development of a true drama, but the evidence leaves only a negative answer to the search for positive signs of influence.

There are, undoubtedly, certain considerations which a priori tell against borrowing; to judge from the Roman borrowings from Greece and those of France from the classics, the trace of imitation if it were real would be clear and emphatic. But we can hardly place very great faith in arguments from analogy; India has a strange genius for converting what it borrows and assimilating it, as it did in the case of the image of the Buddha which it fabricated from Greek models. More important is the possibility of tracing the sources of the dramas in the epic and the tales, though here the difficulty of dates prevents the demonstration being complete. The epic and undramatic character of the Sanskrit drama is true enough, but not universally applicable, and the argument is liable to be turned by adopting the view that only Greek influence is contended for, not the exclusion of Indian native influences. The typical nature of the characters, adduced by Professor Konow as a point of difference, seems to indicate a forgetfulness that the Greek drama, and especially the New Comedy, is rich in types, and that the mime depicts types. Nor in that comedy do we find any particularly effective heightening of interest or development of the situation from the characters of the persons, or solutions produced without recourse to cutting the knot by artificial means. In all these matters indeed the Indian drama rather is akin to the Greek than otherwise. [69]