Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c13.44

c13.44

But here, as in the case of Greek and Indian philosophy, the resemblances are not so close as they appear to be at first sight. On the whole, the Indian drama, with its neglect of the unities, its mixture of prose and verse, comedy and tragedy, resembles the severe Greek tragedy as little as a florid Indian temple resembles the Parthenon. The “Greek curtain” is certainly not borrowed from the Greek stage, for there the curtain was not used³. The presence of Greek girls as royal attendants shews they were commonly found in Rājās’ harems⁴, but this has no bearing upon the question of Hellenic influence on the drama. The supposed resemblances are really confined to a single play, the *Toy Cart*; they are not discernible in the other dramas of Kālidāsa and Bhavabhūti. This seems to shew that the supposed Greek influence in the Indian drama, if it exists at all, is due to the Hellenic element in North-Western and Western India in the first two centuries after Christ, rather than to the later contact with Alexandria. This appears to be the most plausible theory, if we suppose the *Toy Cart* to be an early play. But was Greek ever talked sufficiently in the Panjāb to make a Greek drama intelligible to an Indian, or semi-Indian audience? The point seems very doubtful. The Greek on the coins,—except in the case of the Baktrian kings,—is so corrupt that we are almost forced to conclude that if spoken at all, it was a barbarous jargon, bearing only the remotest resemblance to classical Greek. It may, indeed, have been a dead language, only surviving on the coins along with other traces of imitation from foreign models¹. Menander and his courtiers may have enjoyed a Greek comedy at Sāgala. It is highly improbable that Kanishka ever did. Chrysostom certainly asserts that this was the case. His accounts of India in other Orations are, however, mere poetical fables. He knew little about India. Is his story about the knowledge of Homer in India merely the result of some vague account, communicated to him by an Indian in Alexandria, of the Rāmāyaṇa or Mahābhārata¹, some episodes of which resemble the Iliad to a certain degree? The assertion that an author as late as Kālidāsa had read not only Menander but Plautus seems to be absolutely unwarranted². If the Indian drama was actually affected by Hellenistic influences in the Baktrian or Kushān period, we may trace to the same time the supposed debt of Indian to Greek medicine. Charaka, said to have been the court physician of Kanishka, prescribes rules for the Indian doctor which resemble very minutely the oath which the Greek physician, according to Hippokrates, had to take upon entering on his duties. The Indian theory of the three humours has been also traced to Greek sources³.