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THE
SANSKRIT DRAMA [[3]]

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THE
SANSKRIT DRAMA

in its
Origin, Development
Theory & Practice

BY A. BERRIEDALE KEITH, D.C.L., D.Litt.
Of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law, and of the Scottish Bar
Regius Professor of Sanskrit & Comparative Philology at the University of Edinburgh
Author of ‘Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon’, &c.

GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C. 4

GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI CAPE TOWN IBADAN

Geoffrey Cumberlege, Publisher to the University

FIRST PUBLISHED 1924
REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY 1954

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN [[5]]

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PREFACE

Thirty-two years have elapsed since the appearance of Professor Sylvain Lévi’s admirable treatise, Le théâtre indien, the first adequate sketch of the origin and development of the Indian drama and of Indian dramatic theory. Since then the discovery of important fragments of the dramas of the great Buddhist poet Açvaghoṣa, and of the plays of the famous Bhāsa, has thrown unexpected light on the early history of the drama in India; the question of the origin of the drama has been the subject of elaborate investigation by Professors von Schroeder, Pischel, Hertel, Sir W. Ridgeway, Lüders, Konow, and myself; and the real significance and value of the Indian theory of the dramatic art have been brought out by the labours of Professor Jacobi. The time is therefore ripe for a fresh investigation of the origin and development of the drama in the light of the new materials available.

To bring the subject matter within moderate compass, I have confined it to the drama in Sanskrit or Prākrit, omitting any reference to vernacular dramas. I have also omitted from the account of the theory of drama all minor detail which appeared to have no more than the interest of ingenuity in subdivision and classification; I have had the less hesitation in doing so, because I have no doubt that the value and depth of the Indian theory of poetics have failed to receive recognition, simply because in the original sources what is important and what is valueless are presented in almost inextricable confusion. In tracing the development of the drama, I have laid stress only on the great writers and on dramatists who wrote before the end of the first millennium; of later works I have selected a few typical specimens for description; it seemed needless to dwell on plays which in the main show an excessive dependence [[6]]on older models and on the text-books of dramatic theory, and whose chief merit, when they have any, lies in skill and taste in versification. Valuable bibliographies of the dramas are contained in Mr. Montgomery Schuyler’s Bibliography of the Sanskrit Drama (1906), and in Professor Konow’s treatise, and it has seemed needless to do more than refer to the most important and accessible editions of the plays mentioned and to treatises which have appeared since the publication of these works.

Though the limits of space available have precluded any full investigation of the style of the dramatists, I have not followed Professor Lévi in leaving this aspect out of consideration. The translations given of the passages cited are intended merely to convey the main sense; I have therefore left without discussion difficulties of interpretation and allusion, and have resorted to prose. Verse translations from Sanskrit sometimes attain very real merit, but normally only in a way which has little affinity with Sanskrit poetry. H. H. Wilson’s versions of Sanskrit dramas in his Theatre of the Hindus for this reason, and also because the prose of the dramas is turned into verse, thus fail, despite their many intrinsic merits, to convey any precise idea of the effect of a Sanskrit drama.

I am indebted to my wife for much assistance and criticism.

A. BERRIEDALE KEITH.

Edinburgh University,
April, 1923. [[7]]

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CONTENTS

PART I. [THE ORIGIN OF THE SANSKRIT DRAMA]

PAGE

PART II. [THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SANSKRIT DRAMA]

PART III. [DRAMATIC THEORY]

PART IV. [DRAMATIC PRACTICE]

[English Index] 373

[Sanskrit Index] 394 [[10]]

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ABBREVIATIONS

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PART I

THE ORIGIN OF THE SANSKRIT DRAMA

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I

DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN VEDIC LITERATURE

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1. The Indian Tradition of the Origin of the Drama

Indian tradition, preserved in the Nāṭyaçāstra,[1] the oldest of the texts of the theory of the drama, claims for the drama divine origin, and a close connexion with the sacred Vedas themselves. The golden age had no need for such amusements: ignorant of all pain, the sorrow, which is as essential to the art as joy itself, was inconceivable. The creation of the new form of literature was reserved to the silver age, when the gods approached the all-father and bade him produce something to give pleasure to the ears and eyes alike, a fifth Veda which, unlike the other four, would not be the jealous preserve of the three twice-born castes, but might be shared by the Çūdras also. Brahmā gave ear to the pleading, and designed to fashion a Veda in which tradition (itihāsa) should be combined with instruction in all the ends of men. To accomplish his task he took from the Ṛgveda the element of recitation, from the Sāmaveda song, from the Yajurveda the mimetic art, and from the Atharvaveda sentiment. Then he bade Viçvakarman, the divine architect, build a playhouse in which the sage Bharata was instructed to carry into practice the art thus created. The gods accepted with joy the new creation; Çiva contributed to it the Tāṇḍava dance, expressing violent emotion, Pārvatī, his spouse, the tender and voluptuous Lāsya, while Viṣṇu was responsible for the invention of the four dramatic styles, essential to the effect of any play. To Bharata fell the duty of transferring to earth this celestial Veda in the inferior and truncated form of the Nāṭyaçāstra.

The legend is interesting for its determination to secure the [[13]]participation of every member of the Hindu Trinity in the creation of the new art, and for its effort to claim that the fifth Veda of tradition was the Veda of the dramatic art. The older tradition, recorded and exploited by the epic,[2] recognizes as the fifth Veda the mass of traditions, and the Nāṭyaçāstra tacitly concedes this by representing the Nāṭyaveda as including these traditions. The legend, therefore, is not of great antiquity, nor need we place it long before the compilation of the Nāṭyaçāstra itself. The date of that text is uncertain, but we cannot with any assurance place it before the third century A.D. With the Indian tendency to find divine origins, it may well be that the tradition existed much earlier, but in the absence of any corroboration that must remain a mere hypothesis, for which no conclusive ground can be adduced. What is important is that none of the theorists on the drama appeal to any Vedic texts as representing dramas, whence it is natural to draw the conclusion that there was no Indian tradition extant in their time which pointed to the preservation among the sacred texts of dramas. Indeed, if it were worth while, the conclusion might legitimately be drawn that the absence of any drama in the Vedic literature was recognized, since it was necessary for the gods to ask Brahmā to create a completely new type of literature, suitable for an age posterior to that in which the Vedas already existed.

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2. The Dialogues of the Veda

The silence of Indian tradition is all the more remarkable because there do exist in the Ṛgveda itself a number of hymns which are obviously dialogues, and which are expressly recognized as such by early Indian tradition.[3] The number of such hymns is uncertain, for it is possible to add to those which clearly bear that character others whose interpretation might be improved by assuming a division of persons. There are, however, at least fifteen whose character as dialogues is quite undeniable, and most of these hymns are of marked interest. Thus in x. 10 Yama and Yamī, the primeval twins, whence in the legend are derived the races of men, engage in debate; [[14]]the poet, with a more refined sentiment than the legend, is uneasy regarding this primitive incest, and represents Yamī as intent on an effort, fruitless so far as the hymn goes, to induce Yama to accept and make fruitful her proffered love. A tantalizing, but certainly interesting, hymn in the same book (x. 95) gives a dialogue between Purūravas, and the nymph Urvaçī; he rebukes her inconstancy, but does not succeed in making her refrain from withdrawing from his gaze. In viii. 100 Nema Bhārgava utters an appeal to Indra, to which the god is pleased to give a reply. Sometimes there are three interlocutors; thus Agastya, the sage, has a conversation (i. 179) of an enigmatic type with his wife, Lopāmudrā, and their son; not less obscure is the dialogue between Indra and Vasukra, in which the wife of the latter plays a small part, in x. 28; and in iv. 18 we have a most confused dialogue between Indra, Aditi, and Vāmadeva. Even less intelligible is the famous debate between Indra, his wife, Indrāṇī, and Vṛṣākapi (x. 86), each interpreter of which is able to show the absurdity of the versions of his predecessors but seems incapable of recognizing the defects of his own. Or one of the interlocutors may be a troop, not an individual. Thus Saramā, the messenger of Indra, seeking the kine which have been taken away, goes to the demons, the Paṇis, and holds with them lively debate (x. 108). The gods also have a hard business (x. 51–3) to persuade Agni, the living fire, to persevere in the tedious occupation of bearing to them the oblations of mortals, and the dialogue in which they engage is vivid in the extreme, extending even to the breaking of a stanza into portions for two interlocutors. Two dialogues are of interest for their historical allusions, the converse of Viçvāmitra and the rivers (iii. 33) which he seeks to cross, and that of Vasiṣṭha with his sons (vii. 33), if indeed that is the correct interpretation of the speakers of the hymn. Indra again disputes with the Maruts (i. 165 and 170), who had disgraced themselves in his eyes by deserting him in the thick of his contest with the demon Vṛtra, but who succeed at last in placating his anger; in the former hymn Agastya seems also to intervene, by summing up the result at the close, and invoking the favour of the gods for himself. Similarly the account of Viçvāmitra’s dialogue ends with the assertion that [[15]]the Bharatas successfully crossed the rivers in search of booty, having won a passage by the intercession of their priest. The interesting, but obscure, hymn (iv. 42), in which Indra and Varuṇa seem to engage in a dispute as to their relative pre-eminence, is clearly commented on by the poet himself, and his intervention may be suspected even where it is not essential.

Now it is clear that the tradition of the ritual literature did not know what to make of the dialogues of the Ṛgveda. The genre of composition was one which died out in the later Vedic age; it is significant that the Atharvaveda knows but one hymn of that type (v. 11) in which the priest, Atharvan, begs the god for the payment due, a cow; the god is little inclined to accord his prayer, but finally is induced to relent and to add to the guerdon due the promise of eternal friendship. It is not in the least surprising, therefore, if we find that Yāska and Çaunaka in the fifth century B.C. were at variance as to whether the hymn x. 95 was a dialogue, as the former held, or a mere legend, as the latter believed.[4] In the commentary of Sāyaṇa we find that the tradition was unable to ascribe any ritual use for nearly all the hymns; the case of x. 86 is an exception, but it is significant that that hymn has little of a true dialogue, the three speakers rather uttering enigmas than conversing, and it was therefore easier to fit it into the inconspicuous part it occupies in the later ritual. We must, therefore, admit that we have in these dialogues the remnant of a style of poetry which died out in the later Vedic period.

Its original purpose is obscure, but a very interesting suggestion was made in 1869 by Max Müller in connexion with his version of Ṛgveda i. 165.[5] He conjectured that the ‘dialogue was repeated at sacrifices in honour of the Maruts or that possibly it was acted by two parties, one representing Indra, the other the Maruts and their followers’. In 1890 the suggestion was repeated with approval by Professor Lévi,[6] who added to it the argument that the Sāmaveda shows that the art of music had been fully developed by the Vedic age. Moreover the Ṛgveda[7] already knows maidens who, decked in splendid raiment, dance and attract lovers, and the Atharvaveda[8] tells [[16]]how men dance and sing to music. There is, therefore, a priori no fatal objection to assuming that the period of the Ṛgveda knew dramatic spectacles, religious in character, in which the priests assumed the rôles of gods and sages in order to imitate on earth the events of the heavens.

The logical consequence of this doctrine is seen in Professor von Schroeder’s elaborate theory[9] that the dialogue hymns, and also certain monologues, for instance x. 119, in which Indra appears as glorifying himself in the intoxication of his favourite Soma drink, are relics of Vedic mysteries, an inheritance in germ from Indo-European times. Ethnology shows us the close relation of music, dance, and drama among many peoples, and the curious phenomenon that Vedic religion knows of gods as dancers cannot be explained satisfactorily save on the assumption that the priests were used to see performed ritual dances, in themselves imitations of the cosmic dance in which the world was, on one view, created. Such dances partake of the nature of sympathetic magic, and they have an obvious parallel in the great sacrificial rites, which in the Brāhmaṇa period are undertaken in order to represent on earth the cosmic creation. It is true that we do not find in the Ṛgveda the phallic dances which in Greece and Mexico alike are held to be closely connected with the origin of drama, but that was because the priests of the Ṛgveda were in many respects austere, and disapproved of phallic deities of any kind. The dramas of the ritual, therefore, are in a sense somewhat out of the main line of the development of the drama; the popular side has survived through the ages in a rough way in the Yātrās well known in the literature of Bengal, while the refined and sacerdotalized Vedic drama passed away without a direct descendant.

Independent support for the view of the dialogues as mystery plays in nuce is given by Dr. Hertel,[10] whose argument is largely based on the doctrine that the Vedic hymns were always sung, and that in singing it would have been impossible for a single singer to make the necessary distinction between the different speakers, which would have been possible if the hymns had not [[17]]been sung. The hymns, therefore, represent the beginnings of a dramatic art, which may be compared with the form of the Gītagovinda.[11] But, what is more important, he seeks to find an actual drama on an extended scale in the Suparṇādhyāya,[12] a curious and comparatively late Vedic text. In his view, accordingly, the Vedic drama does not stand isolated; it is seen in the Ṛgveda only in its beginnings; the Suparṇādhyāya displays it en route to further development, and in the Yātrās we can see a continuation of the old type, which aids us in following the growth from the Vedic drama of the classical drama of India. In this regard there is a distinct divergence of view between the two supporters of the dramatic theory, for Professor von Schroeder regards the Yātrās as genuinely connected with the later drama, being developed in close connexion with the cult of Viṣṇu-Kṛṣṇa and Rudra-Çiva, but as representing a different development from the same root as the Vedic dialogues. Of this other side of the drama he finds hints in the traditional connexion of the Gandharvas and Apsarases with the drama, for these in his view are essentially phallic deities.

There is, of course, no doubt of the possibility of the dialogues really representing portions of the old ritual in which the priests assumed the character of gods or demons, for there are abundant parallels for such a supposition. But there is no sufficient ground to compel us to seek for such an explanation of these hymns; that the Ṛgveda contains nothing save what is connected with ritual is a postulate which is not made by the Indians themselves, and has no justification save in the desire for symmetry. On the contrary, it is perfectly legitimate and much more natural to regard the Ṛgveda as a collection of hymns, in the vast majority of cases of ritual origin, but including some more secular poetry, to which genus alone can we reasonably attribute the battle hymns of Viçvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha. The fact that such hymns disappear in the later Vedic literature is then natural, for that literature represents unquestionably hymns collected definitely for ritual uses, and therefore nothing was admitted which could not be employed therein. To assume, therefore, that a ritual explanation must [[18]]be found, and to find it in ritual drama is illegitimate, and the only justification for accepting the view in any case must lie in the fact that it affords a better explanation of the hymn than any which can be given otherwise.

It is impossible to feel any certainty that the necessary proof has been brought in any case. The hymn ix. 112, which describes in four stanzas in a rather humorous style the various ends of men, ending with the refrain in each case, ‘O Soma, flow for Indra’, is transformed into the marching song of a popular festival at which mummers represent vegetation deities and symbols of fertility are carried. The tradition knows nothing of these happenings, and the hymn certainly suggests none to the average intelligence. On the contrary, it seems a very natural piece of witty sarcasm, to which point is lent by the use of the refrain, and to deny the possibility of sarcasm to the thinkers who produce the advanced and sceptical views expressed in the Ṛgveda is certainly unwise.[13] To explain the Vṛṣākapi hymn (x. 86) as a piece of fertility magic in dramatic form is ingenious, but unluckily it in no way contributes towards the explanation of the hymn, and, therefore, is as valueless as the other possible explanations which have been offered. The same condemnation must be passed on the effort to find a mimic race at a festival described in the strange Mudgala hymn (x. 102) which if it is intelligible at all, seems to have a mythological reference, and not to refer either to actual or mimic races.

An ingenious effort is that made to adduce ethnological parallels to prove that the hymn x. 119, which is a straightforward monologue, placed in the mouth of Indra, celebrating the effect of drinking the Soma, must be regarded as part of a ritual in which at the close of the drinking of the Soma in the rite, a priest comes forward, assuming the rôle of Indra, and celebrates in monologue the strength of the juice of the holy plant. Among the Cora Indians, after a wine festival, a god is introduced showing the effects of the drink, while a singer celebrates its potent merits. There is, however, a fatal hiatus in the proof; the poem by itself is perfectly clear, and to seek [[19]]for an explanation so far-fetched is idle expenditure of energy. The same condemnation must be expressed of the effort to find in the frog hymn (vii. 103) a song sung by men masked as frogs, dancing as a spell to secure rain. If we grant that the hymn is really intended as a rain spell, which is moderately probable though not proved, it needs no further explanation whatever, and, if we do not accept this suggestion but adopt the older view that it satyrizes in an amusing way the antics of certain performers of the ritual, the character of the hymn as a fertility spell vanishes at once. The errors of method are seen excellently in the fantastic conclusion that the gambler’s hymn (x. 34), in which a gambler deplores the fatal love for the dice which has led to his reducing even his beloved wife to ruin, is a dramatic monologue in which dancers represent the leaping and falling dice. The dialogue of Yama and Yamī reduces itself to a fertility drama, from which the prudishness of the Vedic age has omitted the vital part of the union of the pair. The curious hymn, iv. 18, which tells of Indra’s unnatural birth becomes a drama by the assumption that of thirteen verses seven are ascribed to the poet himself. We are in fact in every case presented with a bare possibility, which sometimes involves absurdities, and in all cases does nothing whatever to help us in interpreting the hymns. There is nothing, it is true, inconceivable in the view that the hymn of Saramā and the Paṇis was actually recited by two different parties, and thus was a ritual drama in nuce; what is certain is that the later Vedic period knew nothing whatever of such a practice; the only hymn in dialogue form for which it finds a use (x. 86) is assigned an employment in which there is nothing dramatic whatever. The absurdity of the whole process reaches perhaps its fullest exhibition in the dissertation on the hymn regarding Agastya and Lopāmudrā (i. 179), for it becomes a fertility rite performed after the corn has been cut; Lopāmudrā becomes ‘that which has the seal of disappearance upon it’, a feat which is impossible in the Vedic language; the hymn itself suits far better the obvious alternative[14] of ‘one who enjoys love at the cost of breaking her marital vows’. To explain the hymns of Indra and the Maruts (i. 170, 171, and 165) we are to hold that we [[20]]have three scenes of a dramatic performance, which takes place at a Soma sacrifice to celebrate the victory of Indra over the serpent Vṛtra, ending with a dance of the Maruts, represented by youths fully armed. This weapon dance is a relic of old vegetation ritual, the driving out of the old year, winter, or death, which is the foundation of the dances of the Roman Salii, the Greek Kouretes, the Phrygian Korybantes, and the German sword dancers. How can it be justifiable to spin theories thus in order to explain hymns which are taken by themselves without serious difficulty save in detail?

It is equally impossible to find any cogency in Dr. Hertel’s arguments from the necessity of assuming two sets of performers, since the hymns were sung and a single voice in singing could not distinguish the interlocutors. Doubtless, if we accepted this necessity, we would be inclined to admit a priori that the song would tend to be accompanied by action and by the dance, so that drama would be on the way to development. But we do not know that the hymns of the Ṛgveda were always sung; on the contrary we do know with absolute certainty that, while the verses of the Sāmaveda were sung (gai), the verses of the Ṛgveda were recited (çaṅs). True, we do not have precise information of the exact character of the recitation, but there is not the slightest ground to suppose that a reciter could not have conveyed by differences in his mode of recitation the distinction between two different interlocutors, and the fact that this point is ignored in the argument is fatal to it. Moreover, we must admit that we are wholly ignorant as to the degree in which it was desired by the authors or reciters of these hymns to convey these differences of person. We do not know, and the ritual text-books did not know, exactly in what way these hymns were used. We find in the Ṛgveda a number of philosophic hymns; why should we not admit that a philosophic dialogue such as that of Yama and Yamī is possible without demanding that it should be a fragment of ritual? We have historical hymns in Maṇḍala vii; why should we turn the dialogue of Viçvāmitra and the rivers into a drama? Why should we insist that all hymns were composed for ritual use, when we know that ancient tales were among the things used to pass the period immediately following the disposal of the dead, and [[21]]that during the pauses in the great horse sacrifice, performed to assert the wide sovereignty of the king, both Brahmins and warriors sang songs to fill up the time? We may legitimately assume that in the Ṛgveda we have hymns of other than directly ritual or magic purpose; the gambler’s hymn cannot by any reasonable stretch of the imagination be taken as ritual.[15]

It is also impossible to accept the view that the Vedic drama died out under the chilling effect of the disapproval of the priests of fertility ritual. We find, on the contrary, that fertility ritual is fully recognized later in the Mahāvrata ceremonial, and also in the horse sacrifice, which are both known to the other Vedic Saṁhitās, though this feature of the rite is not referred to, directly at least, in the Ṛgveda. Moreover, even if the disapproval of fertility rites had been real, why should it have brought to a close the drama? The dialogues of Agni and the gods, of Saramā and the Paṇis, of Varuṇa and Indra, of Indra and the singer—and perhaps Vāyu also (viii. 100), have no connexion with fertility, and this aspect of drama need not have perished. Dr. Hertel is certainly right in demanding traces of development, not of decadence, but his great effort to find a full drama in the Suparṇādhyāya must definitely be pronounced a failure. It involves an elaborate invention of stage directions, the preparation of a list of dramatis personae largely on the basis of imagination, and a translation of the piece based on this theory, which can be shown in detail to be open to the certainty of error. Add to this the fact that there is no hint in Indian tradition that the Suparṇādhyāya, on the face of it a late imitation of Vedic work proper, had ever any dramatic intention or use.

A very different theory of the purpose of these hymns is that which we owe to Professors Windisch,[16] Oldenberg,[17] and Pischel.[18] They represent an old type, Indo-European in antiquity, of composition of epic character, in which the verses, representing the points of highest emotion, were preserved, and the connecting links were in prose which was not stereotyped, and therefore [[22]]has not come down to us. The theory is capable of combination with the suggestion that these hymns in dialogue were dramatic; thus Prof. Pischel explained the combination of prose and verse in the Sanskrit drama as a relic of this early form of literature, which thus might serve both epic and dramatic ends.[19] Despite the considerable vogue which the theory has at one time or other attained, and the energetic defence of it by Professor Oldenberg, who has based upon it an elaborate theory of the development of Indian prose, it is doubtful whether we can accept the view.[20] It is a very real difficulty here also that the tradition shows no trace of knowledge of this characteristic of the hymns, and we do not find any work actually in this form in the whole of the Vedic literature. The alleged instances of this type, such as those of the tale of Çunaḥçepa in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa, or the working up in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa of the legend of Purūravas and Urvaçī cannot possibly be made to fit the theory. In the latter case we have a tale, which manifestly does not agree with the verses of the Ṛgveda, and which is openly and obviously an attempt to work that hymn into the explanation of the ritual; in the former we have the use of gnomic verses to illustrate a theme, a form of literature which is preserved through the history of Sanskrit prose, and portions of a verse narrative. The true type, verses used at the point of emotion, especially, therefore, to give the vital speeches and replies, is thus not represented by any text of the Vedic literature. Whether it ever existed at all in the sense postulated by the theory, whether there are traces of it in the Pāli Jātakas, or whether its existence even there is a misunderstanding, are questions which are not in vital connexion with the origin of Sanskrit drama, and may, therefore, here be left undiscussed. One consideration, however, is germane; if it were necessary to explain the Vedic dialogues by this theory, it would certainly be possible to do so far more effectively and simply than by the theory of their being the remains of ritual dramas. The most serious objection to both theories is that they are not really necessary. Professor Geldner[21] who formerly patronized [[23]]the theory of Oldenberg has sought to explain the hymns in question as ballads.[22]

Nor of course is it necessary to make any use of this theory in order to explain the mixture of prose and verse in the Sanskrit drama. The use of prose needs no defence or explanation; that of verse is what was essentially to be expected, in view of the importance of song as a form of amusement as well as in worship both in Vedic times and later, and of the fact that our extant dramas draw so largely on epic tradition, preserved in versified texts. Nothing indeed is more noteworthy in Sanskrit literature than the determination to turn everything, law, astronomy, architecture, rhetoric, even philosophy into a metrical form. The theorists on the drama give no suggestion that the prose was regarded as any less fixed in character than the verses, or that it was not the duty of the author of the drama to be as careful in preparing the one as the other, and the manuscript tradition of the drama does not hint at any distinction of the two elements as regards source.

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3. Dramatic Elements in Vedic Ritual

When we leave out of account the enigmatic dialogues of the Ṛgveda we can see that the Vedic ritual contained within itself the germs of drama, as is the case with practically every primitive form of worship. The ritual did not consist merely of the singing of songs or recitations in honour of the gods; it involved a complex round of ceremonies in some of which there was undoubtedly present the element of dramatic representation; that is the performers of the rites assumed for the time being personalities other than their own. There is an interesting instance of this in the ritual of the Soma purchase for the Soma sacrifice. The seller is in some versions at the close of the ceremony deprived of his price, and beaten or pelted with clods. Now there can be no doubt that we have here, not a reflex of a disapproval of trafficking in Soma, but a mimic account of the obtaining of Soma from its guardians the Gandharvas, and there is some truth in the comparison drawn [[24]]between the Çūdra who plays the rôle of the mishandled seller and the much misused Devil of the mediaeval mystery plays.[23] But we must not exaggerate the amount of representation; it falls very far short of an approach to drama, a point which is overlooked by Professor von Schroeder throughout his discussions. A drama proper can only be said to come into being when the actors perform parts deliberately for the sake of the performance, to give pleasure to themselves and others, if not profit also; if a ritual includes elements of representation, the aim is not the representation, but the actors are seeking a direct religious or magic result. It would be absurd, for instance, to treat the identification in the marriage ritual of the husband and wife with the sky and the earth as in any sense dramatic or to see any drama in the performance of the royal consecration, which is based carefully on the divine consecration of Indra, doubtless in the view that thus the king was for the time being identified with the great god, and so acquired some measure of his prowess.

In the Mahāvrata[24] we find elements which are of importance as indicating the materials from which the drama might develop. The Mahāvrata is plainly a rite intended to strengthen at the winter solstice the sun, so that it may resume its vigour and make fruitful the earth. Now an essential part of the rite is a struggle between a Vaiçya, whose colour is to be white, and a Çūdra, black in colour, over a round white skin, which ultimately falls to the victorious Vaiçya. It is impossible, without ignoring the obvious nature of this rite, not to see in it a mimic contest to gain the sun, the power of light, the Aryan, striving against that of darkness, the Çūdra. In the face of the ethnological parallels it is impossible also to sever this episode from the numerous forms of the contest of summer and winter, the first represented by the white Aryan, the second by the dark Çūdra. We have in fact a primitive dramatic ritual, and one which it may be added was popular throughout the Vedic age. The same ceremony is also marked by a curious episode; a Brahmin student and a hetaera are introduced as engaged in coarse abuse of each other, and in the older form of the ritual [[25]]we actually find that sexual union as a fertility rite is permitted, though later taste dismissed the practice as undesirable. The ritual purpose of this abuse is undeniable; it is aimed at producing fertility, and has a precise parallel in the untranslatable language employed in the horse sacrifice during the period when the unlucky chief queen is compelled to lie beside the slaughtered horse, in order to secure, we may assume, the certainty of obtaining a son for the monarch whose conquests are thus celebrated.[25]

There are, however, nothing but elements here, and we have reasonable certainty that no drama was known. In the Yajurveda we have long lists of persons of every kind covering every possible sort of occupation, and the term Naṭa, which is normally the designation of the actor in the later literature is unknown. We find but one term[26] which later ever has that sense, Çailūṣa, and there is nothing whatever to show that an actor here is meant; a musician or a dancer may be denoted, for both dancing and singing are mentioned in close proximity.

Professor Hillebrandt,[27] on the other hand, is satisfied that we have actual ritual drama before us, and Professor Konow[28] insists that these are indeed ritual dramas, but that they are borrowed by the ritual from the popular mime of the time, which accordingly must have known dialogue, abusive conversation and blows, but of which the chief parts were dance, song, and music which are reckoned in the Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇa[29] as the arts, but of which the Pāraskara Gṛhya Sūtra[30] disapproves for the use of men of the three higher castes. The evidence for this assumption is entirely lacking, and it is extremely significant that the Vedic texts ignore the Naṭa,[31] whose activity belongs according to all the evidence to a later period. It is, of course, always possible to deprecate any argument from silence, though the value of this contention is diminished by the very remarkable enumerations of the different forms of occupation given in the Puruṣamedha sections of the [[26]]Yajurveda, where in the imaginary sacrifice of men the imagination of the Brahmins appears to have laboured to enumerate every form of human activity. But in the absence of any proof that secular pantomime is older than religious throughout the world, and in the absence of anything to indicate that it was so in the case of India, it seems quite impossible to accept Professor Konow’s suggested origin of drama.

Of other elements which enter into drama we find the songs of the Sāmaveda, and the use of ceremonial dances. Thus at the Mahāvrata maidens dance round the fire as a spell to bring down rain for the crops, and to secure the prosperity of the herds. Before the marriage ceremony is completed[32] there is a dance of matrons whose husbands are still alive, obviously to secure that the marriage shall endure and be fruitful. When a death takes place, and the ashes of the deceased are collected, to be laid away, the mourners move round the vase which contains the last relics of the dead, and dancers are present who dance to the sound of the lute and the flute; dance, music, and song fill the whole day of mourning.[33] Dancing is closely associated throughout the history of the Indian theatre with the drama, and in the ritual of Çiva and Viṣṇu-Kṛṣṇa it has an important part. Hence the doctrine which has the approval of Professor Oldenberg[34] and which finds the origin of drama in the sacred dance, a dance, of course, accompanied by gesture of pantomimic character; combined with song, and later enriched by dialogue, this would give rise to the drama. If we further accept the view that the dialogue in prose was added from the ritual element seen in the abuse at the horse sacrifice and the Mahāvrata, then within the Vedic ritual we may discern all the elements for the growth of drama present.

In this sense we may speak of the drama as having its origin in the Vedic period, but it may be doubted whether anything is gained by such a proposition. Unless the hymns of the Ṛgveda present us with real drama, which is most implausible, we have not the slightest evidence that the essential synthesis of elements and development of plot, which constitute a true [[27]]drama, were made in the Vedic age. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that it was through the use of epic recitations that the latent possibilities of drama were evoked, and the literary form created. One very important point in this regard has certainly often been neglected. The Sanskrit drama does not consist, as the theory suggests, of song and prose as its vital elements; the vast majority of the stanzas, which are one of its chief features, were recited, not sung, and it was doubtless from the epic that the practice of recitation was in the main derived. Professor Oldenberg[35] admits in fact the great importance of the epic on the development of drama, but it may be more accurate to say that without epic recitation there would and could have been no drama at all. Assuredly we have no clear proof of such a thing as drama existing until later than we have assurance of the recitation of epic passages by Granthikas, as will be seen below. [[28]]

[1] i. 2 ff. [↑]

[2] Hopkins, Great Epic of India, pp. 7, 10, 53. [↑]

[3] Keith, JRAS. 1911, pp. 981 ff. [↑]

[4] Sieg, Die Sagenstoffe des Ṛgveda, p. 27. [↑]

[5] SBE. xxxii. 182 f. [↑]

[6] TI. i. 307 f. [↑]

[7] i. 92. 4. [↑]

[8] xii. 1. 41. [↑]

[9] Mysterium und Mimus im Rigveda (1908); VOJ. xxii. 223 ff.; xxiii. 1 ff., 270 f. [↑]

[10] VOJ. xviii. 59 ff., 137 ff.; xxiii. 273 ff.; xxiv. 117 ff. Cf. Charpentier, VOJ. xxiii. 33 ff.; Die Suparṇasage (1922) is somewhat confused and uncritical. [↑]

[11] See ch. xi., § 9; Winternitz, GIL. iii. 130 f. [↑]

[12] See also Jarl Charpentier, Die Suparṇasage (Uppsala, 1922). [↑]

[13] This is quite consistent with the ritual use in a Soma ‘wish’ offering suggested by Oldenberg, GGA. 1909, pp. 79 ff. Cf. his remarks on vii. 103 in Ṛgveda-Noten, ii. 67. [↑]

[14] Oldenberg, GGA. 1909, p. 77, n. 4. [↑]

[15] Keith, JRAS. 1911, p. 1006. [↑]

[16] Cf. Sansk. Phil. pp. 404 ff. [↑]

[17] ZDMG. xxxvii. 54 ff.; xxxix. 52 ff.; GGA. 1909, pp. 66 ff.; GN. 1911, pp. 441 ff.; Zur Geschichte der altindischen Prosa (1917), pp. 53 ff.; Das Mahabharata, pp. 21 ff. [↑]

[18] VS. ii. 42 ff. GGA. 1891, pp. 351 ff. [↑]

[19] Compare Oldenberg, Die Literatur des alten Indien, p. 241. [↑]

[20] See Keith, JRAS. 1911, pp. 981 ff.; 1912, pp. 429 ff.; Rigveda Brāhmaṇas, pp. 68 ff. [↑]

[21] Die indische Balladendichtung (1913). Cf. G. M. Miller, The Popular Ballad (1905). [↑]

[22] The existence of this type in the Epic is certainly most improbable, and in the Jātakas it is not frequent; cf. Charpentier, Die Suparṇasage, and Winternitz’s admissions, GIL. ii. 368 with Oldenberg, GN. 1918, pp. 429 ff.; 1919, pp. 61 ff. [↑]

[23] Hillebrandt, Ved. Myth., i. 69 ff. [↑]

[24] Keith, Śāṅkhāyana Āraṇyaka, pp. 72 ff. [↑]

[25] Keith, HOS. XVIII. cxxxv. [↑]

[26] VS. xxx. 4; TB. iii. 4. 2. [↑]

[27] AID. pp. 22 f. [↑]

[28] ID. pp. 42 ff. [↑]

[29] xxix. 5. [↑]

[30] ii. 7. 3. [↑]

[31] The Prākritic form of the term as opposed to Vedic nṛtu and nṛtta is legitimate evidence for the development of pantomimic dancing in circles more popular than priestly. But it does nothing to show that such dancing was originally secular, or that it rather than religious dancing gave a factor to drama. [↑]

[32] Çān̄khāyana Gṛhya Sūtra, i. 11. 5. [↑]

[33] Caland, Die altindischen Todten- und Bestattungsgebräuche, pp. 138 ff. [↑]

[34] Die Literatur des alten Indien, p. 237; Macdonell, Sanskrit Literature, p. 347. [↑]

[35] Die Literatur des alten Indien, p. 241. In Mexico we have the material of a ritual drama (K. Th. Preuss, Archiv für Anthropologie, 1904, pp. 158 ff.), but not the epic element. [↑]

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II

POST-VEDIC LITERATURE AND THE ORIGIN OF THE DRAMA

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1. The Epics

The great epic of India, the Mahābhārata, in the whole extent of its older portions, does not recognize in any explicit manner the existence of the drama.[1] The term Naṭa indeed occurs, and, if it meant actor, the existence of the drama would be proved, but it may equally well merely denote pantomimist. This conclusion, moreover, is strongly supported by the strange fact that, if the epic knew the drama, it should never mention any of its characteristics or such a standing character as the Vidūṣaka. There is, what is still more significant, even in the later parts of the epic, such as the Çānti and Anuçāsana Parvans, no clear allusion to the art, for the passage in the Çānti[2] in which Professor Hillebrandt has found an allusion to dramatic artists can perfectly well apply to pantomimes, and in the latter text[3] the passage in which the commentator Nīlakaṇṭha finds comedians and dancers (naṭa-nartakāḥ) yields perfectly good senses as pantomimists and dancers, both occupations there repudiated by Brahmins. To find the drama we are compelled to have recourse to the Harivaṅça,[4] which is a deliberate continuation of the Mahābhārata, and there we have explicit evidence, for we learn of players who made a drama out of the Rāmāyaṇa legend. But this is of no importance for the purpose of determining the date of the drama; the Harivaṅça is of uncertain date, but in all probability, as we have it, it cannot be placed earlier than the second or third century A.D., long after the [[29]]time when there is no doubt of the existence of a Sanskrit drama.

The Rāmāyaṇa lends no aid to the attempt to establish an early existence of drama; we hear of festivals and concourses (samāja) where Naṭas and Nartakas delight themselves,[5] and even of the speaking of Nāṭakas;[6] in another passage the term Vyāmiçraka[7] denotes, if we believe the commentator, plays in mingled languages. But, accepting all these references as genuine, which we are not obliged to do, the passages have manifestly no claim to early date, for other reasons than the allusions, and leave us again without any early evidence.

But, while the epics cannot be said to know the drama, there is abundant evidence of the strong influence on the development of the drama exercised by the recitation of the epics. The long continued popularity of these recitations is attested throughout the literature; at the beginning of the seventh century A.D.[8] a Brahmin, Somaçarman, akin to the royal house of Cambodia, presented to a temple in that far-off outpost of Indian civilization a complete copy of the Bhārata, in order that regular recitations might take place, and almost contemporaneously Bāṇa in the Kādambarī depicts the queen as hastening to the temple of Çiva to hear the recitation of the epic. Four centuries later Kṣemendra reproaches his contemporaries with their equal eagerness to hear such recitations, and their reluctance to carry out in practice the excellent advice contained in them. We have vivid accounts from recent time of such recitations not only in temples but in villages, when the generosity of some rich man has secured the presence, if need be, for three months or longer of the reciters, Kathakas, to go over the huge poem, which claims to be an encyclopaedia of all useful knowledge as well as the best of poems. The reciters divide themselves into two classes, the Pāṭhakas, who repeat the poem, and the Dhārakas, who expound it in the vernacular for the edification of the people, whose deep interest in the recitations is attested; if the Rāmāyaṇa is the epic chosen for recitation, the departure [[30]]of the hero into exile excites their tears and sobs, even to the interruption of the recital; when he returns and ascends the throne the village is illuminated and garlanded.[9] Fortunately we have in a bas-relief[10] from Sānchi, which may safely be placed before the Christian era, a representation of a group of these Kathakas. We see in it that they accompanied with music in some degree their recitations, danced, and indicated by gestures the sentiments of the characters they presented. We have thus something which in its nature is far from undramatic; given the use of dialogue, the drama would be present in embryo. This step is foreshadowed but not actually taken in the account given in the later additions to the Rāmāyaṇa[11] of the first recitation of that poem. Vālmīki, the author of the narrative of Rāma’s deeds, teaches the poem to Kuça and Lava, the children whom Sītā in exile bears to Rāma; they enter Ayodhyā at the moment when the king performs the horse sacrifice, and excite the curiosity of the king himself, who hears the recitation of his own deeds by the two rhapsodes, and recognizes them for his own sons.

The term Bhārata,[12] which is an appellation of the comedian in the later texts, attests doubtless the connexion of the rhapsodes with the growth of the drama. It has survived in the modern form of Bhāṭ denoting a class of reciters, who are the inheritors of a tradition of recitation of the epics, and who are expert in genealogy, enjoy general consideration, and by their mere presence with a caravan assure its passage in safety. The Bhāratas must be the rhapsodes of the Bhārata tribe,[13] whose fame is great in the early history of India, whose special fire is known to the Ṛgveda, and who have a special offering (hotrā) of their own. The Mahābhārata is the great epic of the family, preserved by their care. With the passage of time the rhapsodes doubtless took upon them the newer art of drama. Bhavabhūti in the Uttararāmacarita shows himself conscious of the debts owed by the drama to the epic, and the clearest proof is now available in the dramas of Bhāsa, with their wide indebtedness to the great epic itself. [[31]]

The term Kuçīlava, which occasionally denotes actor, is apparently derived from the Kuça and Lava of the Rāmāyaṇa; the mode of formation of the compound is indeed strange, for it is not obvious why it should have been formed on the mode of compounds in which the first member represents a woman’s name, but it is equally, if not more difficult, to imagine how it could be derived from the prefix ku and çīla manners, denoting ‘of bad morals’. Weber’s attempt to compare this name with Çailūṣa of the Vedic texts and Çilālin, who is connected with a Sūtra for Naṭas, is obviously impossible, and it may be that the name, derived originally from Kuça and Lava, was later by a witticism altered to Kuçīlava as a hit against the morals of the actors, which were recognized on every hand to be bad.[14]

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2. The Grammarians

In Pāṇini[15] we find mention of Naṭasūtras, text-books for Naṭas, ascribed to Çilālin and Kṛçāçva; the fact is recorded because of the formation of the names assumed by their followers, Çailālins and Kṛçāçvins. The names are curious; it has been suggested by Professor Lévi to see in them ironical appellations; the Kṛçāçvins are those whose horses are meagre, with an ironic reference to the great Indo-Iranian hero Kṛçāçva, while the Çailālins have nothing but stones for their beds in pitiful contrast with the fame of the Vedic school of that name, whose Çailāli Brāhmaṇa is known to us. But we unfortunately are here as ever in no position to establish the meaning of Naṭa, which may mean no more than a pantomime. The conclusion is important, for Pāṇini’s date is most probably the fourth century B.C., and the fact that he has no term certainly denoting drama is of significance.

In Patañjali,[16] the author of the Mahābhāṣya, whose date is certainly to be placed with reasonable assurance about 140 B.C., we find much more effective evidence bearing on the existence of drama. We learn from his criticism on a rule laid down by his predecessor Kātyāyana, as to the use of the imperfect tense of things which a person has himself seen, that it was normal [[32]]to use in his time phrases describing a past event as if it had occurred before the eyes of the speaker; we can understand this only of a character in a dramatic performance of some kind, and it is significant that the phrase cited in illustration of the usage is ‘Vāsudeva has slain Kaṅsa’. The reference is to the famous legend of Kṛṣṇa, son of Vasudeva, and his wicked uncle Kaṅsa, who first sought to destroy him in his childhood, and afterward paid the penalty of his evil deeds by death at the hands of Kṛṣṇa. This notice receives further elucidation by a famous passage, first adduced by Weber, in which Patañjali explains the justification of the use of phrases such as ‘He causes the death of Kaṅsa’, and ‘He causes the binding of Bali’.[17] Both these deeds, the actual killing, the actual binding, are deeds of the remote past; how then can the present be in place? The answer, we learn, is that the events are described in the present because the sense is, not that they are being actually done, but that they are being described. Of the modes of description no less than three are then set out. In the first place we have the case of the Çaubhikas or Çobhanikas, who before the eyes of the spectators actually carry out—naturally in appearance only in the first case—the killing of Kaṅsa and the binding of Bali; they represent in fact by action, without words, so far as this passage formally tells us, the slaying of the wicked Kaṅsa, the binding of the evil Bali. Secondly, we have the painters; they describe by their paintings, for on the canvases themselves we see the blows rained on Kaṅsa and the dragging of him about; a painter, that is to say, kills Kaṅsa and has Bali bound by painting a scene describing these incidents. Thirdly, we have those who use words, and not action of the Çaubhika type, the Granthikas; they also, while relating the fortunes of their subjects from their birth to their death, make them real to the minds of their audience, for they divide [[33]]themselves into two parties, one set adhering to Kṛṣṇa, and one to Kaṅsa, and they adopt different colours, the adherents of Kaṅsa black, and those of Kṛṣṇa red, though, by what is probably an erroneous correction, the colours are ascribed in the inverse order by many of the manuscripts.

This is clear and intelligible, and it is unfortunate that it has recently been misunderstood by Professor Lüders,[18] with disastrous results for the comprehension of the notice. The Çaubhikas are made to be persons who explain to the audience shadow pictures, a view which has not even the merit of Indian tradition, and, as will be seen below, contradicts entirely the facts known as to the shadow play in India, where it is recorded only in late mediaeval times. The traditional rendering in India of the statement is recorded by Kaiyaṭa, more than a thousand years later; it is frankly obscure; Professor Lévi[19] renders it as meaning that the Çaubhikas are those who teach actors, representing Kaṅsa, and so on, the mode of recitation, a version which is doubtless very difficult. The sense accorded to it by Professor Lüders is that the Çaubhikas explain to the audience dumb actors, a form of drama which is recorded as performed by the Jhāṁkīs of Bombay and Mathurā in modern India, but of which in ancient times we have no certainty, since this is the only passage which even remotely can be supposed to allude to it. The obvious view, that of Weber,[20] that we have a reference to a pantomimic killing and binding, seems irresistible; the use of the causative is explained by this fact; if Bali and Kaṅsa were persons of to-day the simple verb would express their binding and slaying; because it is mere actors, the causative is used, and its use denotes that the act is not now real but an exposition of a past act. ‘He causes the binding of Bali’ [[34]]means ‘he describes the binding of Bali’. The only legitimate doubt on the passage is that regarding the exact mode of performance of the Çaubhikas; the word pratyakṣam in the text insists that it is done before the eyes of the audience, and we may justly assume that the Çaubhikas performed manual acts. Did they also use dialogue? There is nothing in the passage either to show that they did or that they did not; the contrast which follows later with Granthikas, whose medium was words, is sufficiently pointed if they used action as well as words. The most that can be said is that Çaubhika or Çobhanika does not obtain currency later as denoting an actor, which may tell against the view that Patañjali is here actually alluding to drama proper. Further we cannot go; to argue that, if he had known drama proper, he must have clearly mentioned it, is to ignore entirely the manner of Patañjali, whose silence as to what he must have known is as common as his incidental mention of current topics.

The error of Professor Lüders in insisting on a literal interpretation of the passage as referring to different sorts of narrators by words comes out with special clearness as regards the second class of persons alluded to by Patañjali. That they are painters whose canvases are living speeches was clearly recognized by the commentators in India. Haradatta tells us in the simplest and plainest language that when men look at a picture on which is shown the death of Kaṅsa at the hands of Vāsudeva they interpret the picture as the slaying of the wicked Kaṅsa by the blessed Vāsudeva, and thus by the pictured Vāsudeva cause to be slain the pictured Kaṅsa, for this is the conception which they form as they gaze, and he adds, very naturally, that this explains the practice of saying of artists that they cause the slaying of Kaṅsa, the binding of Bali.[21] It would be difficult to see how the idea could have been more forcibly expressed, but Professor Lüders interprets it in the sense that artists occasionally explain their own pictures to others, an idea which is not merely wholly impossible, but renders Haradatta’s [[35]]language nonsense. On this basis he finds that the Çaubhikas added to their business of explaining shadow pictures that of showing and explaining other pictures, in this respect again without any support from tradition.

Finally Professor Lüders denies any division of parties among the Granthikas, whose name he derives, like the scholiasts, from the use of manuscript books in recitation, rejecting the idea of cyclic rhapsodes suggested by Dr. Dahlmann.[22] The derivation is too speculative in sense to be relied upon, but there is no doubt that the Granthikas were reciters. Their exact means of expressing the sense is not quite clear owing to the unlucky divergence of reading in the text, and the fact that the precise meaning of the second word in the most probable reading (çabda-gaḍu-mātram)[23] is wholly unknown. It is, accordingly, wholly illegitimate to assert that they used words alone, and on the score of that to deny that they could be said to divide themselves into two parties, one of followers of Kaṅsa, one of adherents of Kṛṣṇa, bearing appropriate colours. This view reduces us to the impossible theory that the division of parties refers to the audience. Apart from all questions of regard for the Sanskrit language, which Patañjali should be assumed capable of writing, the ludicrous result is achieved that among a pious audience of Kṛṣṇa adorers we are to suppose that there were many who favoured Kaṅsa, the cruel uncle whose vices are redeemed by not a single virtue, and for whose fate Sanskrit literature, pious and devout, shows not a sign of regret. The change of colour, which is asserted to be the only possible sense of the term varṇānyatvam, wholly without ground, is referred to the spectators, who turn red with anger if supporters of Kaṅsa, black with fear if they support Vāsudeva. Professor Hillebrandt, who has unfortunately accepted the new theory to the extent that he believes that there were persons who carried round pictures and explained them for a living, justly declines to believe in the possibility of a Hindu audience containing persons who wished the success of Kaṅsa, and he accepts the plain fact that the Granthikas took parts. The colours he [[36]]explains, however, as indicating the sentiments which the two parties feel, a view for which there is the authority of the Nāṭyaçāstra which ascribes to each sentiment an appropriate colour, and, accepting the reading of Kielhorn, he is compelled to assume that the supporters of Kaṅsa on the stage showed as the dominant sentiment fury, while those of Kṛṣṇa are reduced to manifest fear as the sentiment of their side. But it is frankly incredible that the followers of Kṛṣṇa, the invincible, who calmly and coolly proceeds from victory to victory culminating in the overthrow of his wicked uncle, accomplished with ease and celerity, should show fear as the dominant sentiment, and it is clear that on this view we should accept the reading which inverts the descriptions,[24] thus allotting to the supporters of Kaṅsa the fear, to those of Kṛṣṇa the fury of slaughter and revenge. But in this trait it is more probable, as will be seen below, that we have a trace of the religious origin of the drama.[25]

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3. Religion and the Drama

We seem in fact to have in the Mahābhāṣya evidence of a stage in which all the elements of drama were present; we have acting in dumb show, if not with words also; we have recitations divided between two parties. Moreover, we hear of Naṭas who not only recite but also sing; we find that in the days of the Mahābhāṣya the Naṭa’s hunger is as proverbial as the dancing of the peacock, that it was no rare thing for him to receive blows, and that a special term, Bhrūkuṅsa, existed to name him who played women’s parts, appropriately made up.[26] The Mahābhāṣya does not seem to recognize women as other than dancers or singers,[27] so that it may well be that in the infancy of the [[37]]dramatic art the rôles of women were reserved for men, though in the classical drama this was by no means necessarily the case. We cannot absolutely prove that in Patañjali’s time the drama in its full form of action allied to speech was present, but we know that all its elements existed, and we may legitimately and properly accept its existence in a primitive form.

That form, from the express mention of the subjects of the dramatic exhibitions, we may deduce to have been of the nature of a religious drama. It is difficult not to see in the Kaṅsavadha, the death of Kaṅsa at the hands of Kṛṣṇa, the refined version of an older vegetation ritual in which the representative of the outworn spirit of vegetation is destroyed. Colour is given to this theory by the remarkable fact that in one reading the partisans of the young Kṛṣṇa are red in hue, those of Kaṅsa are black. Now as Kṛṣṇa’s name indicates black, it would be almost inevitable that the original attribution of red to his followers should be corrected by well-meaning scribes to black, and this explains effectively the transposition found in the bulk of the manuscripts. In the red hue of Kṛṣṇa’s supporters as against the black of those of Kaṅsa we probably have a distinct reminiscence of another side of the slaying of the vegetation spirit.[28] The contest is often presented as one between summer and winter, and we have seen in the Mahāvrata what is probably a primitive form of this contest; the white Vaiçya fights with the black Çūdra for the sun, and attains possession of its symbolical form. The red of Kṛṣṇa’s following then proclaims him as the genius of summer who overcomes the darkness of the winter.

With this view accords most interestingly the theory of the origin of the Greek drama from a mimic conflict of summer and winter, as developed by Dr. Farnell.[29] In the legend of the conflict between the Boiotian Xanthos and the Neleid Melanthos we hear that at the moment of conflict Melanthos descried a form beside his foe, whom he taunted with bringing a friend to aid him. Xanthos turned round, and Melanthos slew him. [[38]]The form was that of Dionysos Melanaigis, and for his intervention the Athenians rewarded him by admission to the Apatouria, the festival of deceit. Thus the black Melanthos with the aid of Dionysos of the black goatskin slays the fair; the dark winter destroys the light of summer. Even in modern times in Northern Thrace[30] is celebrated a popular festival in which a man clad in a goatskin is hailed as king, scatters seed over the crowd—obviously to secure fertility—and ultimately is cast into the river, the usual fate for the outworn spirit of vegetation. In a similar mummery performed near the ancient Thracian capital there is a band of mummers, clad in goatskins, of whom one is killed and lamented by his wife. It is natural to deduce hence that tragedy had its origin in a primitive passion-play performed by men in goatskins, in which an incarnation of a divine spirit was slain and lamented, whence the dirge-like nature of the Greek drama.

The primitive Indian play differs in one essential from this suggested origin of tragedy; the victory lies, as we have seen, with Kṛṣṇa, with the Vaiçya, not with the dark Kaṅsa, the black Çūdra. We have, therefore, not sorrow, though there is death, and the fact that the Sanskrit drama insists on a happy ending is unquestionably most effectively explained if it be brought into connexion with the fact of the origin of the drama in a passion play whose end was happiness through death, not grief. This view has received a remarkable measure of confirmation from the discovery of the plays of Bhāsa; that dramatist does not conform to the rule of the later theory that there must be no slaying on the stage, but he most assuredly conforms to the principle of the Kaṅsavadha that the slaying is to be of an enemy of the god; the Ūrubhan̄ga, which has erroneously[31] been treated as a tragedy is, on the contrary, the depicting of the deplorable fate of an enemy of Kṛṣṇa, and we have from Bhāsa himself the Bālacarita which describes the death of several monsters at Kṛṣṇa’s hands, and finally of Kaṅsa himself.

In the recitation of the Granthikas divided into two parties [[39]]we have an interesting parallel to the place played according to Aristotle[32] by the dithyramb in the development of the Greek drama. Action was required neither of the singers of the dithyramb nor of the Granthikas, but it was only necessary in one case and the other to introduce action, and the form of the drama would be complete.

Both in the Greek and the Sanskrit drama the essential fact in the contest, from which their origin may thus be traced, is the existence of a conflict. In the Greek drama in its development this conflict came to dominate the play, and in the Indian drama this characteristic is far less prominent. But it is distinctly present in all the higher forms of the art, and we can hardly doubt that it was from this conflict that these higher forms were evolved from the simplicity of the early material out of which the drama rose.

For the religious origin of drama a further fact can be adduced, the character of the Vidūṣaka, the constant and trusted companion of the king, who is the normal hero of an Indian play. The name denotes him as given to abuse,[33] and not rarely in the dramas he and one of the attendants on the queen engage in contests of acrid repartee, in which he certainly does not fare the better. It would be absurd to ignore in this regard the dialogue between the Brahmin and the hetaera in the Mahāvrata, where the exchange of coarse abuse is intended as a fertility charm.

Another religious element may, it has been suggested, be conjectured as present in the Vidūṣaka, the reminiscence of the figure of the Çūdra who is beaten in the ceremony of the purchase of the Soma; possibly it is to this that the hideous appearance attributed to the Vidūṣaka is due. Professor Hillebrandt[34] compares the history of the Harlequin who was originally a representative of the Devil and not a figure of mirth. It may be that these factors concurred in shaping the character of the Vidūṣaka, but the fact that he is treated as a Brahmin is conclusive that the abusive side of his character is the more [[40]]important. It is to this doubtless that his use of Prākrit is due; it cannot be conceived that a dialogue of abuse was carried on by the Brahmin in the sacred language, which the hetaera of the primitive social conditions of the Mahāvrata could not possibly be expected to appreciate. Professor Hillebrandt suggests indeed that there is change in the character of the Vidūṣaka in the literature as compared with the account given in the Nāṭyaçāstra, but there is clearly no adequate ground for this view.

There is further abundant evidence of the close connexion of the drama with religion; it is attested in the legend of Kṛṣṇa whose feat of slaying Kaṅsa is carried out in the amphitheatre in the presence of the public, where he defeats the wrestlers of his uncle’s court, and finally slays the tyrant. The festival of his nativity is essentially a popular spectacle; as developed later, in detail which has often evoked comparison with the Nativity,[35] the young mother, Devakī, is shown on a couch in a stable, with her infant clinging to her; Yaçodā is also there with the little girl, who in the legend meets the fate intended for Kṛṣṇa by Kaṅsa; gods and spirits surround them; Vasudeva stands sword in hand to guard them; the Apsarases sing, the Gandharvas dance, the shepherdesses celebrate the birth, and all night is spent by the audience in gazing at the gay scene. Kṛṣṇa, again, is the lover of the shepherdesses and the inventor of the ardent dance of love, the Rāsamaṇḍala. Of great importance in this regard is the persistence in popularity of the Yātrās, which have survived the decadence of the regular Sanskrit drama. They tell of the loves of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā, his favourite among the Gopīs, for cowherdesses replace in the pastoral the shepherdesses of European idyllic poetry. Kṛṣṇa is by no means a faithful lover, but the end is always the fruition of Rādhā’s love for him. And in Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda we have in literary form[36] the expression of the substance of the Yātrā, lyric songs, to which must be added the charms of music and the dance. A further consideration of the highest importance attests the influence of the Kṛṣṇa cult: the normal [[41]]prose language of the drama is Çaurasenī Prākrit, and we can only suppose that it is so because it was the ordinary speech of the people among whom the drama first developed into definite shape. Once this was established, we may feel assured, the usage would be continued wherever the drama spread; we have modern evidence of the persistence of the Brajbhāshā, the language of the revival of the Kṛṣṇa cult after the Mahomedan invasions in the ancient home of Çaurasenī, as the language of Kṛṣṇa devotion beyond the limits of its natural home.[37] Mathurā, the great centre of Kṛṣṇa worship, still celebrates the Holi festival with rites which resemble the May-day merriment of older England, and still more the phallic orgies of pagan Rome as described by Juvenal. It is an interesting coincidence with the comparison made by Growse[38] of the Holi and the May-day rites that Haraprasād Śāstrin should have found an explanation of the origin of the Indian drama in the fact that at the preliminaries of the play there is special attention devoted to the salutation of Indra’s banner, which is a flagstaff decorated with colours and bunting.[39] The Indian legend of the origin of drama tells that, when Bharata was bidden teach on earth the divine art invented by Brahmā, the occasion decided upon was the banner festival (dhvajamaha) of Indra. The Asuras rose in wrath, but Indra seized the staff of his banner and beat them off, whence the staff of the banner (jarjara) is used as a protection at the beginning of the drama. The drama was, therefore, once connected with the ceremonies of bringing in the Maypole from the woods at the close of the winter, but in India this rite fell at the close of the rainy season, and the ceremony was converted into a festival of thanksgiving for Indra’s victory over the clouds, the Asuras. The theory in itself is inadequate, but the preliminaries of the drama are sufficient to show the extraordinary importance attached to propitiation of the gods, a relic of the old religious service, which would be quite out of place if the origin of the drama had been secular.

The importance of Kṛṣṇa must not cause us to ignore the prominent place occupied by Çiva in the history of the drama. [[42]]To him and his spouse are ascribed the invention of the Tāṇḍava[40] and the Lāsya, the violent and the tender and seductive dances, which are so important an element in the representation of a play. Nor is it surprising that a god who in the Vedic period itself is hailed as the patron of men of every profession and occupation should be regarded as the special patron of the artists. But it is probable that this importance in the drama is later than that of Kṛṣṇa, and it is not without significance that Bhāsa, who is older than any of the other classical dramatists, unlike them, celebrates in full Kṛṣṇa, and is a Vaiṣṇava, while Çūdraka, Kālidāsa, Harṣa, and Bhavabhūti alike are adorers of Çiva in their prefaces. The Mālavikāgnimitra of Kālidāsa introduces a dancing-master who speaks of the creation of the dance by the god and its close connexion with the drama. The sect of the Pāçupatas, adorers of Çiva as lord of creatures, include in their ritual the song and the dance, the latter consisting in expressing the sentiments of the devotees by means of corporeal movement in accord with the rules of the Nāṭyaçāstra. In the decadent ceremonial of the Tantras the ritual includes the representation of Çiva by men, and of his spouse as Çakti, female energy, by women.

The part of Rāma in the growth of drama was certainly not less important than that of Kṛṣṇa himself, for the recitation of the Rāmāyaṇa was popular throughout the country, and has persisted in vogue. The popularity of the story is proved to the full by the effect of the Rām-Līlā or Daçārha festival, at which the story is presented in dumb show, children taking the places of Rāma, Sītā, and Lakṣmaṇa before a vast concourse of pilgrims and others. No effort is made to speak the parts, but a series of tableaux recalls to the minds of the devotees, to whom the whole tale is familiar, the course of the history of the hero, his banishment, his search for Sītā, and his final triumph. In Rāma’s case the influence of the epic on the drama appears in its full development.[41]

The religious importance of the drama is seen distinctly in [[43]]the attitude of the Buddhists towards it.[42] The extreme dubiety of the date of the Buddhist Suttas renders it impossible to come to any satisfactory decision regarding the existence of drama at any early date, while the terms employed, such as Visūkadassana, Nacca, and Pekkhā, and the reference to Samajjas leave us wholly without any ground for belief in an actual drama. We see, however, that the objection of the sacred Canon to monks engaging in the amusement of watching these shows, whatever their nature, was gradually overcome, and it is an important fact that the earliest dramas known to us by fragments are the Buddhist dramas of Açvaghoṣa. With the acceptance of the drama, the Lalitavistara[43] does not hesitate to speak of the Buddha as including knowledge of the drama as among his accomplishments; the Buddha is even called one who has entered to gaze on the drama of the Great Law. The legend is willing to admit that even in Buddha’s time there were dramas, for Bimbisāra had one performed in honour of a pair of Nāga kings,[44] and the Avadānaçataka,[45] a collection of pious tales, places the drama in remote antiquity. It was performed by the bidding of Krakucchanda, a far distant Buddha in the city Çobhāvatī by a troupe of actors; the director undertook the rôle of the Buddha himself, while the other members of the troupe took the rôle of monks; the same troupe in a later age, under Gautama the Buddha himself, performed at Rājagṛha, the actress Kuvalayā gaining enormous fame, and seducing the monks, until the Buddha terminated her career by turning her into a hideous old woman. She then repented and attained the rank of a saint. The same idea of a play bearing on the life of the Buddha himself is preserved in another tale in Tibet where an actor from the south sets up in rivalry with the monks in giving representations of the life of the Buddha. These Buddhist dramas have left their imprint on the form of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, the Lotus of the Good Law, itself, which has none of the epic character of the Lalitavistara, but is presented [[44]]as a series of dialogues in which the Buddha himself, now supernatural, is the chief, but not the only interlocutor. The same love of the Buddhists for artistic effects is seen in the use of music, song, dance, and some scenic effects in the ceremonial attaching to the foundation of Thūpas in Ceylon by a prince of the royal house; the Mahāvaṅsa assumes that dramas were displayed on such occasions, though this may be an anachronism. The frescoes of Ajantā show the keen appreciation felt for music, song, and the dance, though they date from a time when there is certain evidence of the full existence of the drama. We find also in Tibet[46] the relics of ancient popular religious plays in the contests between the spirits of good and those of evil for mankind, which are part of the spring and autumn festivals. The actors wear strange garments and masks; monks represent the good spirits, laymen the evil spirits of men. The whole company first sings prayers and benedictions; then an evil spirit seeks to seduce into evil a man; he would yield but for the intervention of his friends; the evil spirits then arrive in force, a struggle ensues, in which the men would be defeated but for the intervention of the good spirits, and the whole ends with the chasing away with blows of the representatives of the spirits of evil.

With Jainism it is as with Buddhism; we find censure of such ideal enjoyments as the arts akin to the drama, but also recognition of song, music, dance, and scenic presentations in the Canon.[47] But it is hopeless, in view of the utter uncertainty of the date of that collection, to draw any conclusion from it as to the age of the drama. As in the case of Buddhism, Jainism in its development was glad to have recourse to the drama as a means of propagating its beliefs.[48]

The evidence is conclusive on the close connexion of religion and the drama, and it strongly suggests that it was from religion [[45]]that the decisive impulse to dramatic creation was given. The importance of the epic is doubtless enormous, but the mere recitation of the epics, however closely it might approach to the drama, does not overstep the bounds. The element which fails to be added is that of the dramatic contest, the Agon of the Greek drama. That this was supplied by the development of such primitive vegetation rituals as that of the Mahāvrata, until they assumed the concrete and human form of the Kṛṣṇa and Kaṅsa legend would be a conjecture worth consideration, but without possibility of proof if we had not the notice of the Mahābhāṣya which expressly shows that the story of Kṛṣṇa and Kaṅsa could both be represented by Granthikas, who coloured their faces and expressed vividly the emotions of those whom they represented, but also, in dumb show seemingly, by Çaubhikas. If there did not exist an Indian drama proper, in which these sides were combined when Patañjali wrote, it is fair to say that it would be surprising if it did not develop shortly afterwards, and we have perfectly certain proof that the Naṭas of Patañjali were much more than dancers or acrobats; they sang and recited. The balance of probability, therefore, is that the Sanskrit drama came into being shortly after, if not before, the middle of the second century B.C., and that it was evoked by the combination of epic recitations with the dramatic moment of the Kṛṣṇa legend, in which a young god strives against and overcomes enemies.

The drama which was nascent in Patañjali’s time must be taken to have been, like the classical drama, one in which Sanskrit was mingled with Prākrit in the speeches of the characters. The epic recitations of the slaying of Kaṅsa which he records must have been in Sanskrit, but, if the drama was to be popular—and the Nāṭyaçāstra in its tale of the origin of the art recognizes both its epic and popular characteristics, the humble people who figured in it must have been allowed to speak in their own vernacular; this accords brilliantly with the presence of Çaurasenī as the normal prose of the drama of the classical stage. A different view is taken by Professor Lévi,[49] [[46]]who conceives that the drama sprang first into being in Prākrit, while Sanskrit was only later applied at the time when Sanskrit, long reserved as a sacred language, re-entered into use as the language of literature; India, he contends, was never anxious for contact with reality, and it is absurd to suppose that the mixture of languages was adopted as a representation of the actual speech-usage of the time and circles in which drama came into being. This contention is supported by the observation that a number of the technical terms of the Nāṭyaçāstra are of strange appearance, and the frequency of cerebral letters in them suggests Prākrit origin. The contention can hardly be treated as satisfactory, nor is it clear how it can possibly be reconciled with the evidence of Patañjali. The early drama, it seems clear, was not secular in origin, and Professor Lévi emphasizes its dependence on the cult of Kṛṣṇa; to refuse to use Sanskrit in it, therefore, would be extremely strange, unless we are to assume that the existence of true drama goes back to a period considerably earlier than Patañjali, and that it came into being among a milieu which was not Brahminical. There are very serious difficulties in such a theory; we may legitimately hold that such a literary form as the true drama was not created until the Brahmin genius fused the ethic and religious agonistic motives into a new creation of the highest importance for the literary history of India. The presence of a number of Prākrit terms in the Nāṭyaçāstra is probable, but it does not mean that a theory of drama was first excogitated in Prākrit; the main theory in all its essentials is expressed in Sanskrit, and all that is borrowed from Prākrit is some technical terms of subsidiary importance, borrowed, doubtless, from the minor arts, which go to aid but do not constitute the drama, song, music, dancing, and the mimetic art.

The religious origin of the Sanskrit drama in Kṛṣṇa worship is also admitted as part, however, of a wider thesis by Dr. Ridgeway,[50] who contends that Greek drama, and drama all over the world, are the outcome of the reverence paid to the spirits [[47]]of the dead, which again is the source of all religion, a revival in fact of the doctrine of animism in one of its connotations. The contention as applied to the Indian drama involves the view that the actors in the primitive drama were representatives of the spirits of the dead, and that the performance was meant to gratify the dead. It is supported by the doctrine that not only Rāma and Kṛṣṇa were believed once to be men, but that Çiva himself had this origin;[51] all gods indeed are derived from the memory of noble men. The evidence adduced for this thesis is simply non-existent. A valuable collection of material due to Sir J. H. Marshall proves the prevalence throughout India of popular dramatic performances celebrating the deeds of Rāma and Kṛṣṇa, and the modern Indian drama deals also with the lives of distinguished historical characters such as Açoka or Candragupta. But there is nothing to show that the idea of gratifying the dead by the performances of dramatic scenes based on their history was ever present to any mind in India, either early or late. Rāma and Kṛṣṇa to their worshippers were long before the rise of so late an art as drama, just like Çiva, great gods, of whom it would be absurd to think as dead men requiring funeral rites to give them pleasure. Nor is it necessary further to criticize his reconstruction of Vedic religion on the basis of his animistic theory, for these issues of origins have no possible relevance to the specific question of the origin of the Indian drama. Whether elsewhere the worship of the dead resulted in drama is a matter open to grave doubt; certainly in the case of the Greek drama, which offers the most interesting parallel to that of India, the evidence of derivation from funeral games is wholly defective.

Definite support for this view of the origin of drama may be found in the accounts of dramatic performances which are given in the Harivaṅça, the supplement of the Mahābhārata. That work cannot, as has been mentioned, be dated with any certainty or probability earlier than the dramas of Açvaghoṣa, and, therefore, it cannot be appealed to as the earliest mention now extant of the dramatic art. But it is of value as showing how closely [[48]]connected the drama was in early times with the Kṛṣṇa cult, thus supplementing the conclusions to be derived from the Mahābhāṣya, and falling into line with the evidence of Bhāsa.

At the festival performed by the Yādavas after the death of Andhaka, we find that the women of the place danced and sang to music, while Kṛṣṇa induced celestial nymphs to aid the merriment by similar exhibitions, including a representation by the Apsarases, apparently by dancing, of the death of Kaṅsa and Pralamba, the fall of Cāṇūra in the amphitheatre, and various other exploits of Kṛṣṇa. After they had performed, the sage Nārada amused the audience by a series of what may fairly be called comic turns; he imitated the gestures, the movements, and even the laughter of such distinguished personages as Satyabhāmā, Keçava, Arjuna, Baladeva, and the young princess, the daughter of Revata, causing infinite amusement to the audience, and reminding us of the part played by the Vidūṣaka in the drama. The Yādavas then supped, and this enjoyment was followed by further songs and dances by the Apsarases, whose performance thus resembled a modern ballet with songs interspersed.[52]

In a later passage[53] in connexion with the story of the demon Vajranābha, whom Indra asked Kṛṣṇa to dispose of, we learn of an actor Bhadra who delighted all by his excellent power of representation; Vajranābha is induced to demand his presence in his abode, and Kṛṣṇa’s son Pradyumna and his friends disguise themselves to penetrate there; Pradyumna is to be the hero, Sāmba the Vidūṣaka, and Gada the assistant of the stage director, while maidens, skilled in song, dance, and music, are the actresses; they delight the demons by presenting the story of Viṣṇu’s descent on earth to slay the chief of the Rākṣasas, a dramatised version of the Rāmāyaṇa, presenting the figures of Rāma, his brother, and in special the episode of Ṛṣyaçṛn̄ga and Çāntā, that curious old legend based on a fertility- and rain-ritual.[54] After the play the actors showed their skill in depicting [[49]]situations suggested by their hosts, and Vajranābha himself induces them to perform an episode from the legend of Kubera, the rendezvous of Rambhā; after music from the orchestra the actresses sing, Pradyumna enters and recites the benediction, and then a verse on the descent of the Ganges, which is connected with the subject-matter of the piece; he then assumes the rôle of Nalakūbara, Sāmba is his Vidūṣaka, Çūra plays Rāvaṇa, Manovatī Rambhā. Nalakūbara curses Rāvaṇa, and consoles Rambhā, and the audience was delighted by the skilled acting of the Yādavas, who by a magic illusion had presented mount Kailāsa on the stage.

[[Contents]]

4. Theories of the Secular Origin of the Drama

Professors Hillebrandt[55] and Konow[56] agree in the main in maintaining the view that it is an error to look to religious ceremonies as explaining the origin of the drama. True, these ceremonies have a share in the development of the drama, but they themselves are merely the introduction into the ritual of elements which have a popular origin. We are to believe that a popular mime existed, which, with the epic, lies at the bottom of the Sanskrit drama.

It must be admitted at once that we have extremely little authentic information regarding the performers of these mimes, believed to have existed before the origin of drama. The statements made by Professor Konow, who finds in them experts in song, dance, music, but also in matters such as jugglery, pantomime, and the allied arts, all rest on evidence which is either contemporary with the Mahābhāṣya or later than it; the fact that Naṭas sang is recorded for us in the Mahābhāṣya, which of course may refer to genuine actors, and not to professors of the mime, and their connexion with sweet words is attested in the Jātaka prose only, which dates several centuries after the existence of the true drama. We need not, of course, doubt that music, song, and dance, popular in the Vedic age, preserved that character throughout the later period, and we have evidence from Açoka’s time onwards of the existence of Samājas which he condemned, doubtless because of the fights of animals which took [[50]]place at them.[57] That Naṭas and Nartakas were present at such festivals we learn from the Rāmāyaṇa; but we cannot say whether pantomimes and dancers or actors and dancers are referred to. Our knowledge, in fact, of the primitive mime is hypothetical, and it rests in effect on certain considerations which Professor Hillebrandt adduces to show a popular as opposed to a religious origin for drama. His view is supported by the general argument that the drama as comedy is a natural expression of man’s primitive life of pleasure and appreciation of humour and wit. It is, however, unnecessary to enter into any examination of this general principle, which he defends against the theory accepted by Dr. Gray that it is highly problematical whether any view of pleasure to the actors or audience is associated with primitive drama.[58] These ultimate origins are a matter of indifference to the concrete question of the origin of so late a production as the classical drama of India. That the mimetic character is natural to man may be granted; the essential point in question is whether the Sanskrit drama in its characteristics shows signs of religious or secular origin.

Of the points adduced by Professor Hillebrandt most have clearly no relevance in the argument. The use of Sanskrit and dialects in the classical drama is claimed as a proof of popular origin; as has been explained above, the Prākrit element is due to the fact that the drama contains an essential popular, but also religious, element, the Kṛṣṇa worship. The mixture of prose and song, and the union of both with music and the dance, are as natural on the theory of religious origin as on that of secular derivation. The simplicity of the Indian stage, which knows no arrangements for providing changes of scenery, is certainly no proof of secular origin; the Vedic religion is singularly sparing in any external apparatus, and there is the strongest similarity between its practice to mark out altars for its great sacrifices at pleasure, and to have no regular sacrificial buildings, and the tradition throughout the Sanskrit dramas which neither requires nor needs fixed theatres.

The popular origin of the Vidūṣaka is obvious, but the point is whether this origin is religious or secular, and we have seen [[51]]that the Vedic literature offers us in the Brahmin of the Mahāvrata the prototype, possibly with reminiscences of the Çūdra in the Soma sale, of this figure, a fact admitted by the supporters of the theory of secular origin. It is manifestly unnecessary and illegitimate, when the descent of this figure from the Vedic literature is clear, to insist that it was borrowed directly from popular usage, for which there is no proof, but only conjecture.

There remains the argument derived from the fact that the classical drama usually begins with a dialogue between the Sūtradhāra and the Naṭī, who is usually represented as his wife; in this we have, it is said, a reflex of the old popular mime. But an examination of the practice and theory, as found in Bhāsa and the Nāṭyaçāstra, shows that we have no simple or naïve arrangement, but a very elaborate literary device by which the actors bridge over the transition from the preliminaries of the drama to the drama itself. The preliminaries are essentially popular religion, and the detail was left largely in the hands of the Sūtradhāra and his assistants, aided by a chorus of dancers and by musicians; they are doubtless older than the drama, and it was an ingenious and happy device which was invented to carry on the preliminaries, so that the transition to the drama was effective and satisfactory. It is, however, a perversion of all probability to find in this item the trace of a primitive popular secular performance.

The evidence, therefore, for a secular origin disappears; it is curious, indeed, that Professor Hillebrandt[59] himself adduces proof that the western parallel of the Vidūṣaka is connected with religious ceremonies rather than a secular creation. But what is most remarkable of all is that Professor Konow adduces as evidence of the secular origin of the drama the Yātrās, which are essentially bound up with the religion of Kṛṣṇa, and the rough dramatic sketches performed at Almora at the Holi festival, also [[52]]essentially religious.[60] It is indeed to ignore how essentially religion enters into the life of the Hindu to imagine that it is possible to trace the beginnings of drama to a detached love of amusement. It is apparently difficult for the modern mind to appreciate that religion may cover matters which to us appear scarcely connected with it or even repugnant; but this is a delusion largely due to the narrower and more exalted conception of religion of the northern and western lands of Europe.

Less plausible still is the attempt of Pischel[61] to find evidence that the puppet-play is the source of the Sanskrit drama, and that moreover it has its home in India, whence it has spread over the world. The curious and odd art may indeed have an Indian origin, but it would be wholly unwise to suppose that the drama is due to it, nor is the theory apparently accepted on any side at the present time. The existence of such a play is attested by the Mahābhārata,[62] though the antiquity of the device is not thus made clear; in the Kathāsaritsāgara, following perhaps the Bṛhatkathā of Guṇāḍhya, possibly of the third century A.D., we hear of a damsel, daughter of the wonderful craftsman Asura Maya, who amused her companion with puppets which could speak, dance, fly, fetch water, or pluck and bring a garland. In the Bālarāmāyaṇa of Rājaçekhara Rāvaṇa is represented as deceived by a puppet made to resemble Sītā, in whose mouth a parrot was placed to give his entreaties suitable replies. Shaṅkar Pāṇḍuraṅg Paṇḍit[63] records of his time that in the Marāṭha and Kanarese country there are travelling marionette theatres, the only form of drama known in the villages; the puppets made of wood or paper are managed by the director, whose style is Sūtradhāra; they can stand or lie, dance or fight. From this puppet-play, it was suggested, the names of the Sūtradhāra, as the puller of the strings, and of the Sthāpaka, arranger, his assistant, passed over to the legitimate drama. The Vidūṣaka, in Pischel’s view, owed also his origin to the puppet-play.

Professor Hillebrandt[64] has argued against this theory on the ground that the puppet-play assumes the pre-existence of the [[53]]drama, on which it must essentially be based, and he then uses the early date of the puppet-play as a proof of the still earlier existence of the drama. The latter argument, however, is unsatisfactory on various grounds. Apart from the fact that we cannot date the epic references or prove them earlier than the Mahābhāṣya, we have the doubt whether such a contention can possibly be justified. The use of puppets is primarily, of course, derived from the make-belief of children in playing with dolls; the terms for puppets which denote ‘little daughter’ (putrikā, puttalī, puttalikā, duhitṛkā), show this clearly enough, and the popularity of puppets is indicated by the erotic game known as the imitation of puppets, where the word for puppet (pāñcālī) suggests that the home of the puppet-play in India was the Pañcāla country. The growth of the drama doubtless brought with it the use of puppets to imitate it in brief, and from the drama came the Vidūṣaka, and not vice versa.

Though Pischel’s theory[65] of the puppet-play as the origin of drama has failed to find supporters, the shadow play, on whose importance in India he was the first to lay stress, has emerged in lieu in the hands of Professor Lüders[66] as an essential element in the development of the Sanskrit drama, a position accepted by Professor Konow. The place found for the drama is in connexion with the displays of the Çaubhikas of the Mahābhāṣya. Owing to the misinterpretation of that passage it is held that the Çaubhikas were persons who explained matters to the audience to supplement either dumb actors[67] or shadow figures. It is admitted by Professor Lüders that there is no proof which of these two eventualities is correct, but he endeavours both to prove the existence of the shadow-play in early India and to show that the Çaubhikas had the function of showing them. Based on this misinterpretation of the Mahābhāṣya and on the hypotheses—wholly in the air—which it necessitates, is his view that the influence of the epic on the drama was conveyed through [[54]]the use of shadow-figures to illustrate the epic recitation; this, united with the art of the old Naṭas, gave birth to drama, though he is not certain whether such a real drama existed or not at the time of Patañjali, and Konow sets its appearance much later.

The early evidence adduced for the existence of the shadow-drama is wholly unreliable. Professor Konow suggests that the term Rūpa used in the fourth Rock Edict of Açoka, where he speaks of exhibiting spectacles of the dwellings of the gods, of elephants and bonfires, refers to a shadow device, in apparent ignorance of the true sense abundantly illustrated by the attested facts as to the mode of such representations in Buddhist literature;[68] he accepts the wholly absurd view that Rūpaka as a name of the drama is derived from such shadow projections, while in fact it obviously denotes the visible presentation, the normal and early sense of Rūpa. Equally unfortunate is the effort to discover that the Sītābengā cave[69] shows signs of grooves in front, which might have served in connexion with the curtain necessary for a shadow play, and much more so is the effort to explain Nepathya, the name of the tiring-room behind the curtain in the Sanskrit drama, from a misunderstood Prākrit nevaccha, which in its turn might represent a Sanskrit naipāṭhya—never found—denoting the place for the reader; apparently the shadows are in this view explained by some person behind the curtain. The philological combination is quite impossible.

Pischel’s evidence for the early existence of the shadow-drama is all of it without value. The term rupparūpakam occurs in v. 394 of the comparatively old Therīgāthā of the Buddhist Canon, but it may indicate a puppet-play, and this is rendered very probable by the mention of a puppet only just before in the text; if not, it doubtless means, as taken by the commentator, a piece of jugglery, an art always loved in India; unfortunately the age of the text is uncertain, so that even for the puppet-play it gives no precise date. It is certain that rūpadakkha, a term used in the Milindapañha[70]—a work of dubious date—has no such reference, nor lūpadakha in a cave at Jogīmārā. To find rūpopajīvana in the Mahābhārata used in the sense of shadow-play [[55]]is impossible; the explanation is given by Nīlakaṇṭha,[71] and proves the existence in his time, the seventeenth century A.D., of the custom, but the term is used in close proximity with appearing on the stage (ran̄gāvataraṇa), and there is conclusive evidence that the word refers to the deplorable immorality of the players, who actually have as a synonym in the lexicons the style of ‘living by (the dishonour of) their wives (jāyājīva)’. The same fact explains the term rūpopajīvin used by Varāhamihira in the sixth century A.D. in proximity to painters, writers, and singers: the actor is essentially mercenary.[72] It is impossible to accept the suggestion that the Aindrajālikas, who appear working magic results in the Ratnāvalī, the Prabodhacandrodaya, and the Pūrvapīṭhikā of the Daçakumāracarita, were really shadow-dramatists; Indian magicians are well known even at present, and the illusions which to some extent they produce have nothing whatever to do with shadow-plays. The scenes which the magician describes to the king in the Ratnāvalī were doubtless left to the imagination of the audience, just as was the apparent fire which burned the inner apartments and enveloped the princess. To believe in realism in these cases runs contrary to the stage directions of the play itself. From the name Çaubhika, with its Prākrit equivalent Sobhiya, nothing whatever can be made out; the word has no relation to shadows and is never explained by any authority in that sense.

We are left, therefore, with the evidence to be derived from the term Chāyānāṭaka, which is interpreted by Pischel as a ‘shadow-drama’, and is applied to several dramas, among which the oldest which can be dated with sufficient certainty is the Dūtān̄gada of Subhaṭa in the thirteenth century A.D. The exact meaning of the term is uncertain, as it might denote a ‘drama in the state of a shadow’, and this would accord perfectly with the Dūtān̄gada itself. That such a drama was a shadow-drama is best supported by the Dharmābhyudaya of Meghaprabhācārya,[73] which is styled a Chāyānāṭyaprabandha, and in which a definite stage direction is found directing that, when the king expresses his intention to become an ascetic, a puppet is to be placed inside the curtain in the attire of an ascetic. But the [[56]]date of this play is uncertain, and it is extremely difficult to argue with any certainty from it to the Dūtān̄gada; why, it is inevitable to ask, should the latter play contain no stage direction of this kind? We know that the shadow-drama arose in some part of India, for Nīlakaṇṭha recognizes it, but we have no evidence that it existed at the time of the Dūtān̄gada.

Whatever judgement be passed on this view,[74] and the matter must be left undecided in the absence of any effective evidence, it is wholly impossible to accept the argument of Professor Lüders which would take the Dūtān̄gada as the type of Chāyānāṭaka, and thence deduce that the Mahānāṭaka and the Haridūta are shadow-dramas. The one Chāyānāṭya which we know to have been a shadow-drama in fact is an ordinary play without kinship to the Dūtān̄gada, and the same remark applies to the other dramas known to us which are styled Chāyānāṭakas. There are, however, points of similarity between the Dūtān̄gada and the Mahānāṭaka; the prevalence of verse, often epic in character, over prose, the absence of Prākrit, the large number of characters, and the omission of the Vidūṣaka, which explain themselves easily in the latter case by the assumption that we have literary drama before us, a play never intended to be acted. The conviction is strengthened by the shameless plagiarisms of the plays from earlier Rāma dramas. In any case, however, we are dealing with the late developments of the Sanskrit drama, and it is clear that nothing can be gained from any assumption of a part played by the shadow-play in the evolution of the Sanskrit drama. Even on Professor Lüders’s own interpretation of the Mahābhāṣya, all that is requisite is dumb players, and this form of drama is attested for India in modern times.

That the Sūtradhāra and Sthāpaka derive their names from manipulating the puppets for either the puppet- or the shadow-drama is a suggestion which, though recently repeated by Dr. Hultzsch, cannot be regarded as plausible.[75] The term Sthāpaka is colourless, and may merely denote ‘performer’; if it comes from the puppet-play, it is difficult to see why such a person was needed beside the Sūtradhāra, who moved the strings. Moreover, the theory recognizes the Sūtradhāra clearly [[57]]as the man who lays out the temporary playhouse needed for the exhibition, and this sense passes easily over into that of director; this derivation is preferable on the whole to the other, accepted by Professor Hillebrandt,[76] which would make him the man who knows the rules of his art.

The shadow-play, we have seen, cannot have influenced the progress of the early drama, and we may, therefore, leave aside the question whether it does not essentially presuppose the drama, as Professor Hillebrandt contends; the parallel from Java adduced to refute this opinion is clearly wholly inadequate, unless and until it can be proved that the shadow play sprang up in Java without any previous knowledge of real drama.

[[Contents]]

5. Greek Influence on the Sanskrit Drama

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’s[77] 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 Pischel[78] was followed by the elaborate effort of Windisch[79] 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 Lévi[81] 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 Kuṣana[82] 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 Lévi[85] 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 Barygaza[86] 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 drama[88] 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 India[91] 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 ring[92] 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 portrait[93] 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 Aristotle[94] 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’s[95] 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’s[96] 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 Bloch[97] 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 deny[99] 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]]

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6. The Çakas and the Sanskrit Drama

Professor Lévi,[100] whose opposition to Windisch regarding the possibility of Greek influence on the Indian drama has been noted, is himself responsible for the suggestion that the rise of the Sanskrit drama, as opposed to the more popular religious drama in Prākrit, is to be attributed to the Çakas, whose advent to India was one of the causes of the rapid decadence of the Greek principalities in the north-west. The theory is based on a general view of the elevation of Sanskrit to the rank of the language of literature, as opposed to its restriction to use as the learned and sacred language of the Brahmins. The inscriptions, on the whole, show that Sanskrit as an epigraphic language was introduced by Rudradāman whose Girnār inscription of A.D. 150 is wholly in Sanskrit, though Sanskrit appears in part in Uṣavadāta’s inscription of A.D. 124. The Western Kṣatrapas, of Çaka origin, were, he holds, the first to bring Sanskrit down to earth, while not vulgarizing it, as contrasted with the Hindu and orthodox Çātakarṇis of the Deccan who retained Prākrit in their inscriptions down to the third century A.D. The character of the Çakāra may be regarded in this light; in its hostility to the Çakas it reveals a period when either a prince was opposed to the Çaka rule, or the Çaka dominion had just fallen and was fresh in the minds of the people. The Mṛcchakaṭikā may retain a confused version of the events of the second century A.D. A specific connexion between the Çakas and the creation of drama may be seen in the terminology of the Nāṭyaçāstra, and that of their inscriptions. Rudradāman refers to his grandfather Caṣṭana as Svāmin and Sugṛhītanāman, and Svāmin is freely used in the epigraphic records of the kings of the line from Nahapāna (A.D. 78) onwards. Further Rudrasena in A.D. 205, in referring to his royal ancestors, Caṣṭana, Jayadāman, Rudradāman, and Rudrasena, gives them the epithet of Bhadramukha, ‘of gracious countenance’. These terms, Lévi argues, correspond with the use laid down in the Nāṭyaçāstra, which must have borrowed from contemporary official usage. Further, Rudradāman uses the term Rāṣṭriya as applying to Puṣyagupta, who under [[70]]Candragupta, the Maurya, some four and a half centuries earlier established the reservoir which he had repaired, and this term occurs in the Çakuntalā and the Mṛcchakaṭikā in the sense of brother-in-law of the king, the sense given to it in the Amarakoça, the earliest Sanskrit lexicon of established authority. To these considerations may be added that Ujjayinī, the capital of the Western Kṣatrapas of Mālava, is a centre, round which as a fan radiate the three great literary Prākrits of the drama, Çaurasenī, Māgadhī, and Māhārāṣṭrī, thus accounting for their use, which else would be difficult to explain.

Lévi’s suggestion, which was accompanied by an admission that the Mṛcchakaṭikā or its source was older than he had formerly argued, and that the possibility of Greek influence was thus increased, has been accepted by Professor Konow[101] with the important modification that in face of the fact that the oldest dramas known to us, the fragments of Açvaghoṣa and those of Bhāsa, ignore Māhārāṣṭrī and that Çaurasenī is the normal prose tongue, he accepts Mathurā as the home of the drama, and ascribes it to about the middle of the first century A.D. This view he supports by the fact that the rulers of Mathurā were also Çaka Kṣatrapas, or Satraps, whose control extends back at least to the beginning of the first century A.D.

It may be feared that neither theory will stand critical investigation, however tempting it may be to obtain an exact date for the Sanskrit drama. The discovery of Açvaghoṣa’s fragments shows that the drama has already attained a very definite and complete form, and we really cannot with any probability assume that the creation of drama preceded this by no more than a century. Even a century, however, brings us further back than the middle of the first century A.D., for Konow’s date of Kaniṣka, about A.D. 150,[102] is probably considerably too late, and should be placed fifty years earlier at least. We are thus separated from Rudradāman by a period of 150 years, probably more, and the theory that the Western Kṣatrapas introduced Sanskrit into the drama falls hopelessly to the ground on chronological considerations alone.

The argument from the use of technical terms is clearly untenable. That Rāṣṭriya in Rudradāman’s inscription has the sense [[71]]of ‘brother-in-law’ is not supported by the slightest evidence, and is most improbable; the term doubtless denotes governor, and the restricted use is a later development. The use of Svāmin as the mode of addressing the king is not recorded in the Nāṭyaçāstra, and to argue that it, being given in the Daçarūpa and the Sāhityadarpaṇa, must be borrowed from Bharata, as Konow does, is quite impossible. On the contrary, Bharata[103] gives the style to the Yuvarāja, or Crown Prince, presumably as distinct from the king. In the extant dramas after Bhāsa it is not used of the king or Crown Prince. Sugṛhītanāman, denoting perhaps ‘whose name is uttered with respect’, has no parallel in Bharata; only in the later theory do we find Sugṛhītābhidha, which, however, is prescribed merely for the address of a pupil, child, or younger brother to a teacher, father, or elder brother, and therefore stands in no conceivable relation to the term used by Rudradāman. Bhadramukha is the address to a royal prince in Bharata; it is used of kings by Rudrasena, and the literature ignores the specific or royal use. The lack of accord is complete and convincing; if the drama had originated under the Western Kṣatrapas of Ujjayinī, it would not have been so flagrantly out of harmony with the official language.

The whole error of these arguments rests in the belief that the drama developed as a Prākrit drama before it was turned into Sanskrit. The same theory has been applied to every department of secular Sanskrit literature without either plausibility or success; the Mahābhāṣya knows Sanskrit Kāvya before any Prākrit Kāvya is recorded.[104] But, apart from this, it is essential to remember that the drama was religious in origin and essentially connected with epic recitations, and that for both reasons Sanskrit claimed in it a rightful place from the inception. It is certain that the recitations known by Patañjali were in Sanskrit, and it is difficult in the extreme to understand how in the view of Lévi and Konow a Prākrit drama proper ever came into being. Before the coalescence of the epic recitation and the primitive mime believed in by Konow, there cannot have been any drama on his own theory; when they coalesced, Sanskrit must have from the first been present. [[72]]

The discovery of Açvaghoṣa’s fragments undoubtedly helps greatly to bring the creation of the drama very close up to the time of Patañjali, if not to that date. The first century B.C. can with fair certainty be assumed to be the very latest period at which the appearance of a genuine Sanskrit drama can be placed. If indeed Professor Lüders’s former date for Kaniṣka were correct and he were the founder of the Vikrama era of 57 B.C.,[105] then the Sanskrit drama must be dated a century at least earlier, and we would have the paradoxical position that on Professor Lüders’s date of Açvaghoṣa he must place the drama at not later than Patañjali, while when dealing with the Mahābhāṣya evidence he doubts the existence of the drama. Professor Lüders has overlooked this dilemma, which, however, we may evade on his behalf by recognising that he erred in assigning to Kaniṣka a date which the evidence available in 1911 already showed to be quite untenable.

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7. The Evidence of the Prākrits

The discovery of Açvaghoṣa’s fragments not only disposes effectively of Professor Lévi’s dating of the rise of Sanskrit drama, since he probably preceded Rudradāman by at least half a century, but it casts a vivid light on the question of the Prākrits and Sanskrit. It must be remembered that Açvaghoṣa was the exponent of a faith which had originally insisted on the use of the vernacular as opposed to Sanskrit, and that it is absurd to imagine that it would have occurred to him to use Sanskrit in dramas of Buddhist inspiration and aim, had not the use of that language been established in the drama of the day. This leads us back once more to the conclusion that the drama from the outset was written in part at least in Sanskrit, and that, therefore, it stands in genetic relation with the dramatic recitations described by Patañjali which were in Sanskrit.

That the drama was also in part in Prākrit from the outset seems extremely probable. The mere recitation of the epic [[73]]indeed did not demand any intervention of Prākrit, but that such recitations by themselves would produce a true drama is most improbable, and we may legitimately hold that it was only the union of these recitations with action from the religious contest that produced the drama. In that contest we may assume that the lower classes were represented and spoke their own language; in the Vedic Mahāvrata we cannot suppose that the Çūdra who contested the right of the Vaiçya to the symbol of the sun spoke in Sanskrit, nor that the Brahmin and the hetaera exchanged their ritual abuse in the classical tongue, or its Vedic antecedent. The religious festival in which Kṛṣṇa appeared as slaying Kaṅsa must similarly have demanded the use of the vernacular by the humbler members of those who took part in it. The fact that Prākrit appears mainly in the dialogue, Sanskrit pre-eminently in verses, strengthens the view that the new drama derived its verse in the main from the epic recitation, its prose dialogue from the religious contest. The two elements never entirely merged; the Vidūṣaka who comes from one side of the religious ceremonial, that which in Greece lies at the basis of comedy as opposed to tragedy, is not a figure normal in the dramas of mainly epic inspiration; but this is not enough to prove that the drama ever in its early days was merely in Sanskrit. It may indeed have been the case; Bhāsa’s Dūtavākya has no Prākrit, and so far the probability is rather for than against it, as an alternative form.

The question how many Prākrits were used in the primitive Sanskrit drama presents difficulties. The obvious conclusion is that the vernacular employed would be that of the region where the drama came into being, and that this was the Çūrasena country is not to be denied. Çaurasenī in fact appears throughout as the normal prose of the drama; it is the language of the Vidūṣaka and the hetaera and normally of all the characters of a play who are born in Āryāvarta, and no other dialect even in theory vies with it in importance. The theory and the practice after Bhāsa ascribe to Māhārāṣṭrī the honour of the language of verses sung by maidens who would in prose speak Çaurasenī. There can be no doubt that this is not primitive, but is a reflex of the growth and development of the fame of the artificial lyric poetry of which we have an anthology under the [[74]]name of Hāla, perhaps to be ascribed to the third or fifth century A.D.[106]

To what extent any other Prākrit was used in the earliest drama we cannot effectively determine. Bhāsa has only, besides Çaurasenī, Māgadhī of two kinds, and a few hints of what may be styled Ardha-Māgadhī, while Açvaghoṣa has three dialects which suggest much older forms of Çaurasenī, Māgadhī, and Ardha-Māgadhī. The use of these dialects for characters by Açvaghoṣa explains itself naturally from his familiarity with the Buddhist scriptures whose original was very probably in something approximating to the Ardha-Māgadhī[107] he knew, and the fact that the speaker of Old Māgadhī is the Duṣṭa, or bad man, reminds us of the bad character enjoyed[108] by the Magadha. Lévi’s[109] suggestion that the Māgadhī of the drama comes from its epic element, and that the Māgadhas were the reciters of Prākrit epic compositions, is clearly untenable, and indeed seems to have been later abandoned by its author in favour of the suggestion that the Prākrits of the drama were evolved, because the drama was produced at Ujjayinī, which was a meeting place of different dialectical forms. This theory might be revised to adapt it to making Mathurā the headquarters of the drama and Māgadhī and Ardha-Māgadhī the other dialects, but the restricted use of anything but Çaurasenī by Bhāsa suggests that the introduction of other Prākrits was a gradual process. In point of fact it never attained great vitality, and in the developed drama Çaurasenī and Māhārāṣṭrī alone play any real part. The ground for the more extended use of dialects when found may be attributed to literary purposes rather than to any attempt to imitate the speech of the day, as Sir George Grierson[110] has suggested. The ground for this conclusion, apart from the improbability of so great an effort at realism, is that the dialects used for instance even in the Mṛcchakaṭikā are clearly literary and not attempts to reproduce true vernaculars. [[75]]

The stage reached by the Prākrits of Açvaghoṣa shows clearly how late are the Prākrits of the orthodox classical drama,[111] and reminds us how much more closely akin to Sanskrit must have been the Prākrit of the drama of the time of, or shortly after, Patañjali. The classical drama with its broken-down forms of Prākrit gives a false impression of the original dramatic form in which either perhaps Sanskrit alone, if the matter were epic, or both Sanskrit and a closely akin Çaurasenī appeared.

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8. The Literary Antecedents of the Drama

The drama owes in part its origin to the epics of India; from them throughout its history it derives largely its inspiration, far more truly so indeed than Greek tragedy as compared with the Greek epic.[112] From the epics also developed the Kāvya, the refined and polished epic, which appears at its best in the Kumārasambhava and Raghuvaṅça of Kālidāsa. The parallelism between the developed form of both is close and striking. The Sāhityadarpaṇa[113] lays down that it is a composition in several cantos, the hero a god or Kṣatriya of high race, of the type noble and superior; if there are several heroes, they are persons of royal rank of one family. The sentiment which predominates is the erotic, the heroic, or occasionally that of calm; the others serve in a subsidiary rôle. The subject-matter is either taken from tradition or not, but the heroes must be virtuous. The work begins with a prayer, a benediction, or an indication of the subject-matter. The development of the story employs the same five junctures as the theory prescribes for the drama. One or other of the four aims of man, wealth, love, performance of duty, or release, is to be attained by the action. The number of cantos is not to be less than eight; each should end in a different metre, and should announce the subject of the following act. Descriptions of every kind are essential; objects of these are the different times of day, the sun, the moon, night, the [[76]]dawn, twilight, darkness, morning, midday, the hunt, mountains, the seasons, forests, the ocean, the sky, a town, the pleasures of love, the misery of separation from one’s beloved, a sacrifice, a battle, the march of an army, a marriage, the birth of a son, all of which should be developed in appropriate detail.

The essential feature of these little epics is the enormous development of the art of description, and the feature occurs in the other forms of narrative literature, the Kathā, tale, and the Ākhyāyikā, romance, types which blend with each other. Whether the subject be an imaginary theme, as is the Vāsavadattā of Subandhu, or a historical one, as in the Harṣacarita of Bāṇa, we find nothing treated as really important save the descriptions as contrasted with the narrative. The Sanskrit lyric also, in Kālidāsa’s masterpiece, the Meghadūta, is essentially descriptive, as is the Prākrit lyric preserved in the collection of Hāla, which is based on the model of an older lyric in Sanskrit, whose existence is revealed to us by the Mahābhāṣya.

The love of description, however, is not new; it is a characteristic of the epic itself, and the Rāmāyaṇa in special shows us how the way for the court poetry was being prepared.[114] Hence the fact that the verses of the drama are overwhelmingly descriptive, when not gnomic in character, is no matter for surprise. The peculiarity is a direct inheritance from the epic.

This fact has one important bearing on the history of the drama. The suggestion of Pischel[115] that the verses alone were once preserved, and the prose left to be improvised would have been plausible only if the verses had been essentially the important elements in the dialogue, as in the supposed Vedic Ākhyāna hymns. But this is assuredly not the case; the verses do little to help on the action; as in the epic, they express descriptions of situations and emotions; when movement of the play is requisite recourse is had to prose. Or the verses serve to set out maxims, as is natural in view of the great fondness of India for gnomic poetry, seen already in the verses introduced [[77]]into the legend of Çunaḥçepa in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa. In this again there is a close parallel with the epic, nor is it surprising that the epic poet, like Açvaghoṣa and Kālidāsa, was often devoted to the drama.

A further source of literary inspiration must undoubtedly be seen in the work of the lyric poets, of whose work clear evidence, as well as some scattered fragments, is preserved to us in the Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali.[116] Moreover, to these lyric writers it is probable that the drama owed some of its metrical variety; in the development of the metres with a fixed number of syllables, each of determined length, from the older and freer Vedic and epic forms, it may be taken as certain that the erotic poets, who had a narrow theme to handle, and had every motive to aim at variety of form and effect, must have contributed largely, a conclusion which is also strongly suggested, if not proved, by the very names of the metres with their erotic suggestion.[117] [[79]]

[1] Hopkins, The Great Epic of India, pp. 55 ff. Nāṭaka in ii. 11. 36 is very late; JRAS. 1903, pp. 571 f. [↑]

[2] xii. 140. 21. [↑]

[3] xiii. 33. 12. [↑]

[4] ii. 88 ff. See § 3 below. [↑]

[5] ii. 67. 15. [↑]

[6] ii. 69. 3. [↑]

[7] ii. 1. 27; Hillebrandt, ZDMG. lxxii. 229, n. 1; contra, SBAW. 1916, p. 730. [↑]

[8] Barth, Inscr. Sansc. du Cambodge, p. 30. At the close of the Mahābhārata the existence of such recitations is clearly recognized; Oldenberg, Das Mahabharata, p. 20. [↑]

[9] Max Müller, India, p. 81. Cf. Winternitz, GIL. iii. 162, n. 1. [↑]

[10] E. Schlagintweit, India in Wort und Bild, i. 176. [↑]

[11] vii. 93. [↑]

[12] Lévi, TI. i. 311 f. [↑]

[13] Macdonell and Keith, Vedic Index, ii. 94 ff. [↑]

[14] Konow, ID. p. 9; Lévi, TI. ii. 51. On these rhapsodes, cf. Jacobi, Das Rāmāyaṇa, pp. 62 ff.; GGA. 1899, pp. 877 f.; Hopkins, The Great Epic of India, pp. 364 ff. [↑]

[15] iv. 3. 110 f. [↑]

[16] iii. 2. 111. [↑]

[17] ye tāvad ete çobhanikā nāmaite pratyakṣaṁ Kaṅsaṁ ghātayanti pratyakṣam Balim bandhayantīti. citreṣu katham? citreṣv apy udgūrṇā nipātitāç ca prahārā dṛçyante Kaṅsakarṣaṇyaç ca. granthikeṣu kathaṁ yatra çabdagaḍumātraṁ lakṣyate te ’pi hi teṣām utpattiprabhṛty ā vināçād ṛddhīr vyācakṣāṇāḥ sato buddhiviṣayān prakāçayanti. ātaç ca sato vyāmiçrā hi dṛçyante: kecit Kaṅsabhaktā bhavanti, kecid Vāsudevabhaktāḥ. varṇānyatvaṁ khalv api puṣyanti: kecit kālamukhā bhavanti, kecid raktamukhāḥ. See iii. I. 26. The text, uncertain in detail, must be corrected by replacing buddhīr for the absurd ṛddhīr of some manuscripts only, defended by Lüders. See Weber, IS. xiii. 487 ff. Çaubhika is a variant. [↑]

[18] SBAW. 1916, pp. 698 ff. Cf. Hillebrandt, ZDMG. lxxii. 227 f.; Keith, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, I. iv. 27 ff. Winternitz (ZDMG. lxxiv. 118 ff.) ineffectively supports Lüders, though he recognizes the extraordinary difficulties of this view. The error is due to the idea that one can only describe (ācaṣṭe) in words, ignoring art and action. [↑]

[19] TI. i. 315. The words are: Kaṅsādyanukāriṇāṁ naṭanāṁ vyākhyānopādhyāyāḥ. [↑]

[20] Weber might be interpreted as believing in an actual killing, but, if so, he was clearly in error, and in point of fact he merely gives this as possible (IS. xiii. 490). That Çaubhikas did manual acts and were not talkers primarily, if at all, is suggested by the use elsewhere of the term; thus in the Kāvyamīmāṅsā, p. 55, they are classed with rope-dancers and wrestlers. [↑]

[21] ye ’pi citraṁ vyācakṣate ’yam Mathurāprāsādo ’yaṁ Kaṅso ’yam bhagavān Vāsudevaḥ praviṣṭa etāḥ Kaṅsakarṣiṇyo rajjava etā udgūrṇā nipātitāç ca prahārā ayaṁ hataḥ Kaṅso ’yam ākṛṣṭa iti te ’pi citragataṁ Kaṅsaṁ tādṛçenaiva Vāsudevena ghātayanti. citre ’pi hi tadbuddhir eva paçyatām. etena citralekhakā vyākhyātāḥ. On Lüders’ view the second sentence is useless. [↑]

[22] Genesis des Mahābhārata, pp. 163 ff. Granthika occurs in MBh. xiv. 70. 7; cf. granthin, Manu, xii. 103. [↑]

[23] SBAW. 1916, p. 736. Hillebrandt (ZDMG. lxxii. 228) criticises effectively Lüders’s interpretation. Cf. granthagaḍutva in R. i. 243. [↑]

[24] It is a confirmation of the incorrectness of Lüders’s view that he is driven to render vṛddhīr, which he reads for buddhīr, as ‘Schicksale’. Now vṛddhi cannot possibly be used in this sense; it means ‘prosperity’, and, applied to Kaṅsa or Bali, it is ludicrous. What is meant is that, by forming parties, the Granthikas make real to the audience the feelings of the characters, a doctrine entirely in keeping with the duty of an actor according to N. Hillebrandt’s view of the Çaubhikas as explaining the subject of the play to the audience, like the Sthāpaka later (N. v. 154 ff.; DR. iii. 3; SD. 283), contradicts the word pratyakṣam. [↑]

[25] Winternitz (ZDMG. lxxiv. 122) desires inversion, even on Lüders’s theory, although Lüders attaches importance to the text. [↑]

[26] i. 4. 29 (naṭasya çṛṇoti, granthikasya çṛṇoti); ii. 4. 77 (agāsīn naṭaḥ); ii. 3. 67 (naṭasya bhuktam); iii. 2. 127 (naṭam āghnānāḥ); iv. 1. 3. [↑]

[27] vi. 3. 43. [↑]

[28] Keith, ZDMG. lxiv. 534 f.; JRAS. 1911, pp. 979 ff.; 1912, pp. 411 ff. [↑]

[29] The Cults of the Greek States, v. 233 ff. The variant theory of Miss Harrison, Prof. Gilbert Murray, and Dr. Cornford in Themis, and of Dieterich, Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, xi. 163 ff., is much less plausible. [↑]

[30] Dawkins, Journ. Hell. Stud., 1906, pp. 191 ff. [↑]

[31] Lüders (SBAW. 1916, p. 718, n. 3) is responsible for the view that Duryodhana is the hero. Lindenau (BS. p. 30) accepts this, but gives the true facts (pp. 32, 33), without apparently realizing that the views are contradictory. The Ūrubhan̄ga’s conclusion is happy, not tragic, for the worshipper of Kṛṣṇa. [↑]

[32] Poetics, 1449 a 10 ff. [↑]

[33] Cf. the connexion of Greek Comedy with ritual cathartic cursing; Keith, JRAS. 1912, p. 425, n. For less plausible theories see F. M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914); Ridgeway, Dramas and Dramatic Dances, pp. 401 ff. [↑]

[34] AID. p. 27. Cf. below, p. 51, n. 1. [↑]

[35] Weber, Ueber die Kṛṣṇajanmāṣṭamī (1868). [↑]

[36] The influence of the Kṛṣṇa legend is suggested on the Vikramorvaçī; Gawroński, Les sources de quelques drames indiens, pp. 33 ff. Cf. below, p. 130. [↑]

[37] Lévi, TI. i. 331 f. Cf. Bloch, Langue Marathe, pp. ix. 12 f. [↑]

[38] Mathurā, pp. 91 f., 101 f. [↑]

[39] JPASB. v. 351 ff. [↑]

[40] Megasthenes ascribed the Kordax to the Indian Dionysos (Çiva); Arrian, Ind. 7. Bloch (ZDMG. lxii. 655) exaggerates his importance. [↑]

[41] Cf. Ridgeway, Dramas and Dramatic Dances, p. 190, and pp. 192 ff. on modern Indian drama in general. [↑]

[42] Lévi, TI. i. 319 ff. That any of the early Buddhist texts (e.g. Padhānasutta, Pabbajjāsutta; Mārasaṁyutta, Bhikkhunīsaṁyutta; Chaddanta-, Ummadantī-, Mahājanaka-, or Candakinnara-jātaka; Theragāthā, 866 ff.; Therīgāthā, 912 ff.) is really dramatic is out of the question; cf. Winternitz, VOJ. xxvii. 38 f. [↑]

[43] xii. p. 178. Drama is alluded to in Divyāvadāna, pp. 357, 360, 361. [↑]

[44] Schiefner, IS. iii. 483, Indian Tales, pp. 236 ff. [↑]

[45] ii. 24 (75). [↑]

[46] E. Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet, p. 233; JASB. 1865, p. 71. Ridgeway’s Dramas, &c., ignores Tibet. For similar Chinese performances, see Annales Guimet, xii. 416 f. [↑]

[47] Āyāraṁga Sutta, ii. 11. 14; Rājapraçnīya, IS. xvi. 385. The love of the Indians for song and dance is recorded by Greek tradition; Arrian, Anabasis, vi. 2. [↑]

[48] Unfortunately the date of this change of view is uncertain. No early Jain drama is certainly recorded. A number of mediaeval works have recently been printed; see E. Hultzsch, ZDMG. lxxv. 59 ff. [↑]

[49] JA. sér. 9, xix. 95 ff. If this had been the case, one would have found references freely to the literature in Hāla, where only v. 344 alludes to the Pūrvaran̄ga of the Nāṭaka (raiṇāḍaapuvvaraṁgassa). [↑]

[50] The Origin of Tragedy (1910); Dramas and Dramatic Dances of non-European Races (1915); JRAS. 1916, pp. 821 ff.; Keith, JRAS. 1916, pp. 335 ff.; 1917, pp. 140 ff. G. Norwood (Greek Tragedy, pp. 2 f.) rejects Ridgeway’s view for Greece, and see Keith, JRAS. 1912, pp. 411 ff. [↑]

[51] Drama, &c., p. 129 asserts this as the view of ‘the best authorities’; very wisely he does not refer to these amazing authorities. Cf. E. Arbman, Rudra (Uppsala, 1922); Keith, Indian Mythology, pp. 81 ff. [↑]

[52] ii. 88. [↑]

[53] ii. 91. 26 ff.; 93. 1 ff. Cf. Hertel, VOJ. xxiv. 117 ff.; Ravivarman, Pradyumnābhyudaya, Act III, p. 23. [↑]

[54] Cf. von Schroeder, Mysterium und Mimus, pp. 292 ff. That this was originally a ritual drama is most improbable. [↑]

[55] AID. pp. 22 ff. [↑]

[56] ID. pp. 42 ff. [↑]

[57] Hardy, Album Kern, pp. 61 f.; Thomas, JRAS. 1914, pp. 392 f. [↑]

[58] ERE. iv. 868. [↑]

[59] AID. p. 25. Lindenau (BS. p. 45) sees in Vṛṣākapi of Ṛgveda, x. 86, the prototype of the Vidūṣaka, as a maker of mischief and as the god’s companion, but this is far-fetched. Hertel (Literarisches Zentralbl. 1917, pp. 1198 ff.) lays stress on the fact that at the royal courts the king had normally a jester to amuse him. This may easily have served to affect the figure of this character, if of religious origin. For older views, cf. J. Huizinga, De Vidûṣaka en het indisch tooneel (Groningen, 1897); F. Cimmino, Atti della reale Accademia di Archeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti (Naples, 1893), xv. 97 ff.; M. Schuyler, JAOS. xx. 338 ff.; P. E. Pavolini, Studi italiani di filologia indo-iranica, ii. 88 f. [↑]

[60] TD. pp. 43 f. Cf. Niṣikânta Chattopâdhyâya, The Yâtrâs (1882). [↑]

[61] Die Heimat des Puppenspiels (1902). Obvious objections are given by Ridgeway, Dramas, &c., pp. 164 ff. [↑]

[62] iii. 30. 23; v. 39. 1. [↑]

[63] Vikramorvaçīya, pp. 4 f. [↑]

[64] AID. p. 8; ZDMG. lxxii. 231. [↑]

[65] SBAW. 1906, pp. 481 ff. [↑]

[66] SBAW. 1916, pp. 698 ff. Contra, Hillebrandt, ZDMG. lxxii. 230 f. Winternitz (ZDMG. lxxiv. 120) reduces the Çaubhikas to people who tell tales of what is depicted on pictures, a clearly impossible version, but valid against Lüders. [↑]

[67] Based on Kaiyaṭa’s version of Çaubhika: Kaṁsādyanukāriṇāṁ naṭānāṁ vyākhyānopādhyāyāḥ. This is clearly incompatible with Lüders’s view, as he admits (pp. 720 f.). Kaiyaṭa is far too late for useful evidence. [↑]

[68] See Vincent Smith, Asoka, (ed. 3), pp. 166 f. [↑]

[69] Bloch, Arch. Survey of India Report, 1903–4, pp. 123 ff. [↑]

[70] p. 344. [↑]

[71] xii. 295. 5. [↑]

[72] Bṛhatsaṁhitā, v. 74; see Hillebrandt, ZDMG. lxxii. 227. [↑]

[73] ZDMG. lxxv. 69 f. [↑]

[74] See ch. xi, § 8 below. [↑]

[75] See ch. xiv, § 2 below. [↑]

[76] AID. p. 8, n. 2. On Javan drama, cf. Ridgeway, Dramas, &c., pp. 216 ff. [↑]

[77] IS. ii. 148; Ind. Lit.² n. 210; SBAW. 1890, p. 920; cf. IS. xiii. 492. [↑]

[78] Die Recensionen der Çakuntalā (1875), p. 19; SBAW. 1906, p. 502. [↑]

[79] Der griechische Einfluss im indischen Drama (1882); Sansk. Phil. pp. 398 ff. Cf. E. Brandes, Lervognen (1870), pp. iii ff.; Vincent Smith, JASB. lviii. 1. 184 ff. [↑]

[80] Mahāyānasūtrālaṁkāra, ii. 16 f. Cf. Keith, Buddhist Philosophy, p. 217. [↑]

[81] TI. i. 345. [↑]

[82] Or Kuṣāṇa; CHI. i. 580 ff. [↑]

[83] Plutarch, Alex. 72; Fort. Alex. 128 D; Crassus, 33. Marshall (JRAS. 1909, pp. 1060 f.) suggests a reproduction of a motif of the Antigone in a vase at Peshawar, but dubiously. [↑]

[84] ii. 32. [↑]

[85] TI. ii. 60. [↑]

[86] Periplus, 48. [↑]

[87] Cf. Hultzsch, JRAS. 1904, pp. 399 ff. on the Kanarese words found in a fragment of a Greek comedy preserved in a papyrus of the second century A.D. [↑]

[88] This does not appear in the dramas of Menander so far as recovered, and is of uncertain date. Cf. Donatus on Terence, Andria, Prol. [↑]

[89] Konow, ID. p. 5, n. 5; Lévi, TI. i. 348; for the generic sense, cf. Amara, ii. 6. 3. 22; Halāyudha, ii. 154. [↑]

[90] Already in Bhāsa: cf. Lindenau, BS. p. 41, n. 2; Lévi, Quid de Graecis, &c. [[62]](1890), pp. 41 f.; on Greek influence, cf. Kennedy, JRAS. 1912, pp. 993 ff., 1012 ff.; 1913, pp. 121 ff.; W. E. Clark, Classical Philology, xiv. 311 ff.; xv. 10 f., 18 f.; Weber, SBAW. 1890, pp. 900 ff. [↑]

[91] Kauṭilīya Arthaçāstra, i. 21; Megasthenes, frag. 26; Strabo, xv. 1. 55. [↑]

[92] For this motif cf. Gawroński, Les Sources de quelques drames indiens, pp. 39 ff. On recognition in the Greek tragic drama see Aristotle, Poetics, 1452 a 29 ff.; Verrall, Choephorae, pp. xxxiii–lxx. Its alleged essential character as an element of primitive tragedy, the recognition of the god, is disposed of by Ridgeway, Dramas, &c., pp. 40 f. [↑]