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A History of Sanskrit Literature: Classical Period, Vol. I c9: Chapter VII. 1. General Characteristics

A History of Sanskrit Literature: Classical Period, Vol. I c9

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English

Contents

Chapter VII. 1. General Characteristics

c9.1

With Bhavabhūti practically ends the great epoch of Sanskrit dramatic literature and begins the age of lesser achievement. There is profusion of talent and effort, but there is no drama of real dramatic quality. All kinds of so-called plays continued to be produced in amazing abundance for several centuries, and the number of works available today in print or in manuscript exceeds six hundred, but they are inferior and imitative productions, which seek to follow dramaturgic rules slavishly, but which reveal little sense of what a drama really is. They are rather narratives, cast in a loose dramatic form, or expanded with a series of lyric and descriptive stanzas loosely strung together. Of the large bulk of these, so little of any kind is retained by the general memory that, considering their poor quality, we can hardly say that they are consigned to any exceptional oblivion. Here and there individual manner and method are perceptible, and a few names are still cherished ; but the seeds of decadence, which we already find in Bhaṭṭa Nārāyaṇa and Bhavabhūti, come into full and luxuriant bloom. The drama now shows no uneasiness in abjectly surrendering itself to the poetical Kāvya ; and, in course of time, it becomes a curious hybrid between a play and a poem.

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On that side of the drama which is not literature but stage-craft, the Sanskrit dramatists, as a rule, never made a strong appeal. But if earlier dramatists did not reach the highest level as constructors of plot, inventors of incident, or creators of dramatic effect, their successors never attained, nor did they care to attain, any level at all. The disproportion between the acting and the literary value of a drama increases, until the literary motive overshadows everything. It is true that there never existed in Sanskrit any real distinction between the literary drama, which may be acted but not with real acting success, and the acting drama, which abandons all pretension to literature and succeeds only on the stage; it is also true that the necessity never ceased of appealing to the highly cultivated audience of the royal court and polished society, and there existed the wide-spread influence and continual temptation of narrative and lyric matter, detrimental to action and characterisation; but the inherent dramatic sense of earlier writers was never entirely eclipsed by the general demand for purely literary effect.

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The root of the trouble lay in the fact that there was always a distinct cleavage between drama and life, and the gulf widened as dramatic enthusiasm subsided. Had the theatre been more popular, the tendency to reject reality and simplicity and to strain for artificial and recondite result would have been counteracted. But from the beginning the authors, as a rule, were dramatists of exclusive society, dealing preferably with kings and courts, *ego et rex meus*; and it is very seldom that they came down from their pedestal. The common antithesis of facile criticism made between a poet of the people and one of the court is idle in this case, for the simple reason that there was hardly any real poet of the people. We can seldom take away from the dramatist the courtly atmosphere and the sham heroes and heroines with their conventional twaddle. But the earlier masters, in spite of this limitation, could still produce real dramatic interest; they were not entirely indifferent to the realities of life or drama. If they were inclined to the poetic, they could invest their plays with a higher poetic naturalness; and in this sense, there was no lack of vigour and variety, no complete divorce between the poetical drama and real life. Their successors continued to work with the same traditional material. There was as yet no strict limitation of form, and the immense fund of legends, as well as the unlimited diversity of life, was open to them; but out of respect for texts and traditions, or out of contempt for the real life surrounding them, they preferred to draw upon the same epic and legendary cycles or fictitious amourettes of court-life, with a more conscious inclination towards poetic extravagance and greater lack of dramatic power and originality. The taste for elegancies in language and sentiment are indeed not absent in the earlier masterpieces. It appears to have spread down and diffused itself among the common people, and there is no hint that the demand for exuberant graces and refinements of poetry in dramatic composition was not almost universal. Even middle-class life is presented by Bhavabhūti in an apparently excessive poetic atmosphere; and the fact that in later times, the *Ratnāvalī* and the *Veṇīsaṃhāra* were preferred to the *Mṛcchakaṭika* and the *Mudrārākṣasa*, is typical of this traditional attitude. The heroic and erotic drama alone survived, with the thinnest surplus of plays of other kinds. Common life was left to inferior talents, and their productions were allowed to pass, in course of time, to neglect and oblivion.

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The scanty remains of the earlier drama do not justify any sweeping conclusion, but it seems that there was, as we have already pointed out, hardly any living tradition for all the eighteen forms of the drama recognised in dramaturgic treatises. If some writers of later times, like Vatsarāja, attempted rarer types of plays, they were not following what was widely in vogue, but displaying, more or less, pedantry and book-learning, which prompted them to produce lifeless plays in accordance with fixed formulas. As such, they are literary curiosities, but useless as historical specimens. This slavish adherence to dramaturgic prescriptions, which gradually becomes a general feature of the decadent drama, is also found in the normally accepted heroic and erotic plays, as well as in these laboriously constructed specimens, and illustrates the more pronounced influence of theory on practice. Although based upon empirical analysis, the theory tended to enforce fixed rules and methods, and never proved advantageous to a free development of practice. In a period of decadence, in which inspiration was replaced by erudition, it naturally came to have a greater hold and authority, and the plays became too deliberately bound to precedent to be original to any extent. If some irregular types, like the *Mahānāṭaka* and *Gopāla-keli-candrikā*, were evolved, they came into existence through other causes; not in accordance with the theory but in spite of it. The general result was that the drama receded entirely from real life, and became nothing more than a rigid, but insipid, exercise in literary skill and ingenuity.

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One of the disastrous results of this isolation of drama from life is seen in the wide separation of its language from the language of life. Since drama is not life, the language of drama, like that of poetry, has doubtless its own ways of expression, and neither Kalidasa nor Shakespeare ever wrote in the common language of his time; but, however refined and elevated it may be, neither the drama nor its language can afford to lose its semblance of colour and vividness to those of life or its language. The stilted and laboured diction of the later Sanskrit drama, losing all touch with life, becomes wholly unconvincing. The distinction of class implied in the distinction of Prakrit dialects¹ becomes now a meaningless convention, and may be neglected, especially in view of the fact that its use (in spite of Rājaśekhara's *tour de force*) becomes more artificial and sparing than what we find, for instance, in Bhavabhūti, who never employs Prakrit in verse, and in Bhaṭṭa Nārāyaṇa, who never uses more forms of Prakrits than he can help. The fact is, however, significant that in this decadent drama Prakrit is merely suffered to exist or relegated to an inferior position, and Sanskrit, with its learned possibilities, becomes the normal, but not natural, medium. In some works, like the *Mahānāṭaka*, Prakrit is entirely absent. If Sanskrit was more difficult, it was richer and more accommodating to stylistic extravagances; if it was learned, it suited the learned atmosphere; it also served the purpose of composing those lyric, narrative and reflective stanzas which came to predominate and oust the prose, in a greater degree, from its legitimate place, or to make it, with its sonorous length and excess of heavy compounds, approximate to the established method of verse.

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¹ On dramatic Prakrits in general, see Pischel, *Grammatik der Prakrit-sprachen*, Strassburg 1900, sections 5f, 22-26, 28-30; Sten Konow in *JRAS*, 1901, p. 329 f, 1922, p. 434 f. and introd. to his ed. of *Karpūramañjarī*; Hultzsch in *ZDMG*, LXVI, 1912, p. 709 f; Hillebrandt in *Gottingische gelehrte Anzeigen*, 1908, p. 99 f; Manmohon Ghosh, introd. to his ed. of *Karpūramañjarī*.

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It is clear that the whole cast of thought and style, the atmosphere, the stereotyped conventions and limited themes, and the highly poetical and affected diction become unfavourable, and almost fatal, to the writing of such plays as would be at once poetical and practical. The dramatists themeselves do not seem quite to know whether they are composing a play or a poem; nor are they producing the right kind of either. For the prevailing heroic and erotic drama, poetry is, to some extent, necessary, but the poetry here is of the artificial kind; the heroic degenerates into the pseudo-heroic and the erotic into the namby-pamby. The poetic frenzy, which describes the eyes of maidens as compendious oceans, or arms of men as capable of uprooting the Himalayas, is delightfully hyperbolic, but leaves us cold. The dramatist has verses enough for anything; the verses have often the fascination of sonorous sound and sentimental sense, but their profusion and extravagance become undramatic and tiresome; sometimes they have resonance, but no melody; and being mechanically multiplied with set phrases and conceits, they have little originality in idea and expression. The prose and the dialogue are thereby reduced to a minimum; and the little that remains of them loses all dramatic quality, for the simple reason that everything of importance is expressed in verse. In the leisurely progress of the exuberant stanzas, the action is left to take care of itself; dramatic propriety, unity, or motive is of little concern; a panorama of pictures or a loosely connected series of incidents is enough. The plot is even of less concern; it is unredeemed by variety of presentation, and offers, in play after play, the same set of incidents and situations ; it is never hurried, nor does the dramatist expect us to follow it with breathless interest. All this inevitably affects characterisation and delineation of sentiment. The conventionally fixed types of character become only dim figures shadowed through a vague mist of luxuriant poetry. There are beautiful ladies, but their tender and fragile portraits combine in the memory into one delicate type which stands practically for all ; they are discriminated by names, but not by character. Virtues are idealised with an absurd neglect of proportion ; but the vicious persons are only harmless devils whose passion can run as high as the stiff manner of tirades alows. There is a vast amount of distress in what are meant to be pathetic scenes, but we read them comfortably without tears or undue emotion, unless the sham-tragic lingo becomes too much for our patience. The extreme rarity and, when they occur, the utter worthlessness of comic or pseudo-comic parts of the decadent drama are on a par with this diffused and rhetorical pathos, as well as with the huffiness and extravagant passion of its impossible stage-heroes.

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The lack of humour explains and is explained by the lack of pathos, and both spring from a lack of grasp on the essentials of human nature. These sentimentally idealised writings hardly show any sense of the stress and contradiction from which both tragedy and comedy arise. The attitude is ethically clear and regular ; there is no situation of moral complexity, as well as no appreciation of the inherent inconsistencies of human character ; no shadow of tragic error qualifies heroic grandeur, as no shade of good is allowed to redeem foulness. We have consequently neither really tragic heroes, nor really lively rogues. As humour degenerates into coarse and boisterous laughter, by tragedy is understood, characteristically enough, a mere misfortune, a simple decline from good to evil hap, the nodus of which can be dissolved in sentiment or cut away by the force of merciful circumstances. Even when the hero undergoes real and grievous affliction, all obstacles and perils give away before him, and the poignancy of the tragedy is warded off. The calamity never rightly comes home, but becomes the means of sentimental effusion; and the hero is never brought to the point at which he utters the agonised cry of Oedipus or Lear in their last straits. The foreshadowing of all this we have seen in Bhavabhūti, but it becomes a definite posture with the decadent playwrights who succeed him; and they betray an equally unhumorous and inelastic disposition. The comedy is confined chiefly to insignificant characters and to equally insignificant farcical sketches. There is no breath of sympathy for the follies and oddities of life, no amused allowance for its ugliness and rascality, no inclination to look at life more widely and wisely, and no sense of tear in laughter, which consequently descends to puerile and tastless vulgarity.

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If drama is the transference of human action on the stage, these works are not dramas, and very few of them are acceptable as stage-plays. Even considered as poems, their real value is obscured by convention and pedantry. It has been suggested that the natural progress of the dramatic art was obstructed and disordered, from this period onwards, by the depressing effect of Muhmmadan invasion and by the turmoil and uncertainty consequent upon it. As in poetry, so in drama, this is only partially true. The dislocation of social and political order undoubtedly reacted on literature, especially on the drama, which is necessarily meant to be closer to actual life; but this cannot be the entire explanation. The decadence, in the case of the drama, is neither an isolated phenomenon, nor is it brought about directly and immediately by the foreign invasion. The process was wide-spread; it is seen in poetry, as well as in the various arts and sciences, which produce nothing striking after the 9th or the 10th century, but concern themselves with the barren refinements of scholasticism. The decline had already commenced widely even before the foreign occupation became an actual fact. The drama lost all contact with real life and became an abstract thing of fancy, not as a consequence of external disturbances, but because the really creative period of Sanskrit literature in almost all its aspects closed with the 10th century. The period ended with the standardisation of the forms and methods of the dramatic, as well as the poetic, art; and though much was produced thereafter, there was nothing of real merit. The standard patterns were already there, and with a fund of ready-made words and ideas, it was not difficult for the proverbial prolixity of bad writers to turn out poems and dramas in vast number. But the vein of originality had exhausted itself, and the foeign incursion never brought in its train any vigorous dramatic literature which might have furnished the much needed impetus towards a revival. The foreign occupation, therefore, which was necessarily a slow and diffused process, could not save it from stagnation, and perhaps hastened the decline, but it was never responsible for a state of things which had commenced, independently and much beforehand, from causes inherent in the literature itself.

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The history of the Sanskrit drama, therefore, does not close with the 10th century, but it loses genuine interest thereafter. There is no breach of community, and the general scheme of the various kinds of plays is so stereotyped that monotony inevitably results from the unvaried sameness, not only of form, manner and method, but also of incident, sentiment and characterisation. The drama becomes an uninspired and uninspiring record, which seldom rises above the dead leavel of convention and uniformity of characteristics. The literature which calls itself drama is neither good drama nor good poetry. Nothing will be gained, therefore, by pursuing its unprofitable history in detail, or by a bare recital of names, which might have an antiquarian but no literary importance. We have to reckon, in such cases, brilliant flashes, but even these become rare. Some of the writers, like Murāri, Rājaśekhara, Kṣemīśvara and Kṛṣṇa-miśra have enjoyed traditional reputation, but the validity of the praises showered upon them is not justified by actual reading, They are poets who try the stage, but they are never to the manner born, nor is their gift of poetry high and arresting. Notwithstanding worthy and strenuous effort, they are not only chronologically behind (which was in itself a misfortune rather than a blessing), but recede as much from the first row of the dramatists as they fall back in point of time. These four writers, however, so completely represent the drama in its decline and fix the general characteristics so rigidly that, after considering their works, it would be hardly necessary to take up in detail those of their countless successors, who have little ability to swerve from the beaten track and produce anything of which Sanskrit drama or poetry may be legitimately proud.

2. Murāri and Rājaśekhara

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The Prologue to Murāri's solitary play, named *Anargha-rāghava*,¹ tells us that he was son of Vardhamāṅka of Maudgalya Gotra and Tantumati. Beyond this we know nothing of him, and his date is conjectural. Most probably he knew Bhavabhūti's *Mahāvīra-carita*,² from which he appears to have borrowed, but loosely utilised, the motif of Mālyavat's conspiracy. The earliest citation from the *Anargha-rāghava*, without the name of the author, occurs in the *Daśa-rūpaka*.³ It would not be unjustifiable, therefore, to place Murāri at the end of the 9th or the beginning of the 10th century. This date accords well with a passage of the *Śrīkaṇṭha-carita* (xxv. 74), in which Maṅkhaka mentions and apparently makes him a predecessor of Rājaśekhara.¹ The seventh act of Murāri's drama gives a rapid description of various well-known places, like Ujjayinī, Varaṇasī, Kailāsa, Prayāga, Tāmraparṇī on the sea, Campā in Gauḍa, Pañcavaṭī, Kuṇḍina in Mahārāṣṭra, and Kāñcī in the Drāviḍa country; but the singular mention of Māhiṣmatī as the seat of the Kalcuris in the Cedi-maṇḍala is curious, and perhaps suggests that the poet lived under the patronage of some king of that dynasty.²

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¹ Ed. Premchandra Tarkavagis, Calcutta 1860; ed. Durgaprasad and K. P. Parab, with the commentary of Rucipati, NSP, Bombay 1894.

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² The alleged citation of the prose passage of *Uttara-carita* between vi. 30 and 31 in the prose passage of *Anargha*°, Prologue verses 6 and 7, made out by Sten Konow (p. 83), is illusory, for the verbal resemblance is uncertain.

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³ *Daśa-rūpaka* ad ii. 1 (*rāma rāma*) = *Anargha*° iii, 21. The fact that the verse occurs in the *Mahānāṭaka*, which is notorious for is appropriation of verses from most Rāma-dramas, does not invalidate the position.

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¹ The supposition that Ratnākara refers to Murāri in the middle of the 9th century in a punning passage of his *Hara-vijaya* (xxxviii. 68) cannot be supported, as the reference is not at all clear. See Bhattanatha Svamin in *IA*, XLI, 1912 p. 141 and Sten Konow, *loc. cit.*—Murāri is also mentioned by Rāmacandra, a pupil of Hemacandra (1st half of the 12th century) in his *Nāṭya-darpaṇa* (p. 193) and his *Kaumudī-mitrānanda* (Prologue); but the supposition of Hultzsch (*ZDMG*, LXXVI, 1921, p. 63) that Rāmacandra was Murāri's contemporary is not borne out by the terms of the reference.

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² The Sūtradhāra calls himself Madhyadeśīya. We are told that the work was presented at the procession (Yātrā) of Puruṣottama; this cannot, in the absence of historical knowledge of the time of construction of the Jagannātha temple at Puri, refer to that deity in particular. There is no satisfactory evidence also for the late Bengal tradition which takes Murāri as the progenitor of a class of Bengali Brahmans.

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The *Anargha-rāghava* dramatises the traditional narrative of the *Rāmāyaṇa*, with very slight modification, in seven acts. In a somewhat lengthy Prologue³ the author justifies the choice of a banal theme, and explains how the splendid subject really deserves the epithet Anargha, hia own object being to relieve his audience, who had enough of horror, terror and disgust, with an elevated, heroic and charming composition. The smooth, even an excessively poetical, tenour of his writing perhaps bears out this claim and supports his own arrogation of the style of Bāla-Vālmīki; but neither his choice of topic, which has been already so forcibly presented by Bhavabhūti, nor his undramatic and extravagant treatment, which is tediously prolonged, justifies the poet's confidence and the enthusiastic estimate of his admirers.⁴

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³ The prolixity of some of the chief decadent dramatists is seen in the length of their boastful Prologues, in which they appear to vie with one another. Murāri is moderate in having only 13 stanzas, but Rājaśekhara (in his *Bāla-rāmāyaṇa*) has 20 and Jayadeva 23.

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⁴ The popularity of Murari's play is attested not only by the citation of anthologists but also by the existence of a large number of commentaries on his work.

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After some poetic, but hyperbolic, compliments exchanged between Daśaratha and Viśvāmitra, the first act of the drama ends with the sighs and lamentations of the former at the departure of Rāma to the hermitage of Viśvāmitra. The second long act, containing more than eighty stanzas, opens with the recital of the history of Vālin, Rāvaṇa, Hanūmat and Tāṭakā by means of a lengthy prose conversation, interspersed with verse, between two pupils of Viśvāmitra. This is followed by the appearence of Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa and description by them, in a series of verses, of the hermitage, its occupants and their doings, as well as of the heat of midday, which, with a singular disregard of time, brings us to the evening, to a description of sunset, to the approach of Tāṭakā announced behind the scenes, Rāma's reluctant exit to kill her, a description of the fight by Lakṣmaṇa who stays behind on the stage, and Rāma's return to describe the moonrise in his turn. The end of the glorious day comes with Viśvāmitra's suggestion of a visit to Mithilā, which of course involves a description of the city and its ruler. In the third and fourth acts, the motif of Rāvaṇa's feud and Mālyavat's strategy is feebly borrowed from Bhavabhūti, but not developed as the basis of dramatic action or unity, to the necessity of which Murāri seems to be utterly indifferent. But he scatters liberally more than sixty sonorous stanzas in each of these acts, and spends all his strength on them. The arrival of Rāvaṇa's messenger and his discomfiture at Sītā's Svayaṃvara, and the subsequent device of Śūrpaṇakhās disguise as Mantharā, are elaborated, imitatively but without dramatic skill. Then we have grandiose exchange of defiances (again after Bhavabhūti) between Rāma and Paraśurāma. Though equally boastful and insulting, Paraśurāma, however, is not connected with the plot by Mālyavat's instigation, and Rāma is not as impolite as his friends, who carry on the campaign of vituperation from a safe distance behind the scenes. In the fifth act, most of Rāma's doing in the forest, as well as Sītā's abduction, is reported, till Rāma appears on the stage lamenting. Vālin is made to of Rājaśekhara.¹ The seventh act of Murāri's drama gives a rapid description of various well-known places, like Ujjayinī, Vārāṇasī, Kailāsa, Prayāga, Tāmraparṇī on the sea, Campā in Gauḍa, Pancavaṭī. Kuṇḍina in Mahārāṣṭra, and Kāñcī in the Drāviḍa country; but the singular mention of Māhiṣmatī as the seat of the Kalcuris in the Cedi-maṇḍala is curious, and perhaps suggests that the poet lived under the patronage of some king of that dynasty.²

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¹ The supposition that Ratnākara refers to Murāri in the middle of the 9th century in a punning passage of his *Hara-vijaya* (xxxviii. 68) cannot be supported, as the reference is not at all clear. See Bhattanatha Svamin in *IA*, XLI, 1912 p. 141 and Sten Konow, *loc. cit.*—Murāri is also mentioned by Rāmacandra, a pupil of Hemacandra (1st half of the 12th century) in his *Nāṭya-darpaṇa* (p. 193) and his *Kaumudī-mitrānanda* (Prologue); but the supposition of Hultzsch (*ZDMG*, LXXVI, 1921, p. 63) that Rāmacandra was Murāri's contemporary is not borne out by the terms of the reference,

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² The Sūtradhāra calls himself Madhyadeśīya. We are told that the work was presented at the procession (Yātrā) of Puruṣottama; this cannot, in the absence of historical knowledge of the time of construction of the Jagannātha temple at Puri, refer to that deity in particular. There is no satisfactory evidence also for the late Bengal tradition which takes Murāri as the progenitor of a class of Bengali Brahmans.

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The *Anargha-rāghava* dramatises the traditional narrative of the *Rāmāyaṇa*, with very slight modification, in seven acts. In a somewhat lengthy Prologue³ the author justifies the choice of a banal theme, and explains how the splendid subject really deserves the epithet Anargha, hia own object being to relieve his audience, who had enough of horror, terror and disgust, with an elevated, heroic and charming composition. The smooth, even an excessively poetical, tenour of his writing perhaps bears out this claim and supports his own arrogation of the style of Bāla-Valmīki; but neither his choice of topic, which has been already so forcibly presented by Bhavabhūti, nor his undramatic and extravagant treatment, which is tediously prolonged, justifies the poet's confidence and the enthusiastic estimate of his admirers.⁴

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³ The prolixity of some of the chief decadent dramatists is seen in the length of their boastful Prologues, in which they appear to vie with one another. Murāri is moderate in having only 13 stanzas, but Rājaśekhara (in his *Bāla-rāmāyaṇa*) has 20 and Jayadeva 23.

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⁴ The popularity of Murari's play is attested not only by the citation of anthologists but also by the existence of a large number of commentaries on his work.

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After some poetic, but hyperbolic, compliments exchanged between Daśaratha and Viśvamitra, the first act of the drama ends with the sighs and lamentations of the former at the departure of Rāma to the hermitage of Viśvamitra. The second long act, containing more than eighty stanzas, opens with the recital of the history of Vālin, Rāvaṇa, Hanūmat and Tāṭakā by means of a lengthy prose conversation, interspersed with verse, between two pupils of Viśvāmitra. This is followed by the appearence of Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa and description by them, in a series of verses, of the hermitage, its occupants and their doings, as well as of the heat of midday, which, with a singular disregard of time, brings us to the evening, to a description of sunset, to the approach of Tāṭakā announced behind the scenes, Rāma's reluctant exit to kill her, a description of the fight by Lakṣmaṇa who stays behind on the stage, and Rāma's return to describe the moonrise in his turn. The end of the glorious day comes with Viśvāmitra's suggestion of a visit to Mithilā, which of course involves a description of the city and its ruler. In the third and fourth acts, the motif of Rāvaṇa's feud and Mālyavat's strategy is feebly borrowed from Bhavabhūti, but not developed as the basis of dramatic action or unity, to the necessity of which Murāri seems to be utterly indifferent. But he scatters liberally more than sixty sonorous stanzas in each of these acts, and spends all his strength on them. The arrival of Rāvaṇa's messenger and his discomfiture at Sītā's Svayamvara, and the subsequent device of Śūrpaṇakhās disguise as Mantharā, are elaborated, imitatively but without dramatic skill. Then we have grandiose exchange of defiances (again after Bhavabhūti) between Rāma and Paraśurāma. Though equally boastful and insulting, Paraśurāma, however, is not connected with the plot by Mālyavat's instigation, and Rāma is not as impolite as his friends, who carry on the campaign of vituperation from a safe distance behind the scenes. In the fifth act, most of Rāma's doing in the forest, as well as Sītā's abduction, is reported, till Rāma appears on the stage lamenting. Vālin is made to challenge him to a fight on a somewhat frivolous excuse; and Valin's death and Sugrīva's coronation are again described secondhand. In the next long act, in which the number of stanzas is well over eighty, all the incidents from the building of the bridge over the ocean to the death of Rāvaṇa are similarly described by persons on the stage or by voices from behind the scenes. But the longest and most actionless act is the last, in which the aerial journey of Rāma and his party to Ayodhyā is modelled on *Raghu* xiii and the last act of the Vulgate text of the *Mahāvīra-carita*; but the route is not only spread over a large number of terrestrial places, but also considerably diversified, deliberately for the purpose of poetical stanzas, by transporting it to the celestial regions, and by including a sight of the Mount Meru, Kailāsa and the world of the moon, the poet surpassing himself in this enormous act by composing more than one hundred and fifty stanzas.

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It will be seen that there is incredibly little action in a work which calls itself a drama, almost everything being subordinated to metrical description and declamation, and the epic succession of incidents being panoramically reproduced by these means, without the slightest attempt to convert the whole into a drama. As mouthpieces chiefly of narration or verse, the characters in the play are well known and fixed types. There is little interest in the scanty prose dialogues, which are meant mostly to furnish information, while the poetical dialogues are merely long-drawn-out series of descriptive or sentimental monologues; both are hopelessly deficient in dramatic quality and effect. The pathos and passion are consequently diffused and rhetorical. The designedly profuse and extravagant volleys of description and declamation are, of course, excuses for elaborate excercise in ornate composition; but reckoning by the poetical stanzas alone, which make a total of nearly five hundred and forty, the work is more than double the size of the *Mālatīmādhava*, as well as of the *Uttara-rāma-carita*, which, lengthy as they are, contain two hundred and thirty-four and two hundred fifty-five stanzas respectively. One wonders why the author did not attempt writing a regular poem instead. Perhaps the distinction was obliterated by the steady and disproportionate development of the reflective, narrative and sentimental aspect of the drama, of which we see the beginnings already in Bhaṭṭa Nārāyaṇa and Bhavabhūti.

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We should like to remember Murāri more as an elegant poet, capable of turning out harmonious verses, than as a dramatist in the proper sense. But even in his poetry we see only the last glow of the ashes, and not the bright gleam of the older flame of poetry. While everything he writes is facile and never ungraceful, he does nothing first-rate. He has a fine gift of sonorous words, of pretty but strained conceits and of smooth and melodious versification; but since poetry does not consist merely of all these, Murāri does not rank high even as a poet. In neither sound nor sense does he possess the finer touch of imagination and suggestiveness; his sentiment has tenderness, but no strangeness, nor always strict tragic quality. The splendid rhetoric of some of his best passages almost excuses the enthusiasm of his admirers for a style and treatment full of glaring poetic and dramatic inadequacy; but it only pleases, and does not thrill, being very seldom rhetoric of the best kind. Murāri appears to have imitated Bhavabhūti, but he borrows Bhavabhūti's prolix sentimentality and looseness without profiting by his vigour and dramatic sense; and he does not also possess the much higher poetic gift of his great predecessor.

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If Murāri is typical of the decadent Sanskrit dramatists, Rājaśekhara is perhaps more so; and some account of his works would be profitable for understanding the trend, method and treatment of the dramatic writings of this period of decline. Rājaśekhara, son of Darduka (or Duhika) and Śīlavatī, is never too modest to speak of himself; and from his works we know a great deal about him, his family, his patrons and his career as a poet.¹ He belonged to the Yāyāvara family, in which were born poets and scholars like Surananda, Tarala, Kavirāja and Akalajalada, the last-named person, famed in the Anthologies, being his great-grandfather. His ancestors lived in Mahārāṣṭra, but he himself must have spent much of his life in the midland as the preceptor (Upādhyāya) of king Mahendrapāla and his son Mahīpāla of Mahodaya (Kanauj), and later on as a protégé of Yuvarāja, who has been identified with Yuvarāja I Keyūravarṣa, the Kalacuri ruler of Tripurī. The poet’s wife, Avantisundarī, was an accomplished Kṣatriya lady of Cahuan family, whom he quotes with respect in his *Kāvya-mīmāṁsā* and for whose pleasure his *Karpūramañjarī* was composed. But since marriage beneath one’s own caste is not forbidden for a Brahman, the fact need not imply that Rājaśekhara himself was a Kṣatriya. On the other hand, his Kṣatriya descent is not negatived by his quite compatible position as an Upādhyāya, or by that of his father as the Mahāmantrin of some unnamed king. That Rājaśekhara was a man of multifarious learning admits of little doubt; and he appears to have composed a large number of works. In his *Bāla-rāmāyaṇa* (1.2) he describes himself as Bāla-kavi and author already of six works, while in his *Karpūra-mañjarī*, the style of Bāla-kavi is repeated with the addition of the proud title of Kavirāja, which he himself considers to be higher than that of a Mahākavi. If he began his career as a Bāla-kavi, apparently given to him from the word Bāla occurring in his two epic plays, then these are presumably his early productions; but the question whether his *Karpūra-mañjarī* or his *Viddha-śālabhañjikā* was the last is difficult to determine.¹ Of his six earlier works mentioned in the *Bāla-* *rāmāyaṇa*, the lost *Hara-vilāsa*, a Kavya, mentioned and quoted by Hemacandra (p. 335 comm.) and Ujjvaladatta (*ad* ii. 28), may have been one. Besides his four plays, he also wrote a general work of miscellaneous information on poets and poetry, named *Kāvya-mīmāṁsā*,¹ in which there is a reference to another work of his, called *Bhuvana-kośa*, for information on general geography. From his explicit references to Mahendrapāla, Mahīpāla and Yuvarāja, his date has been fixed with some certainty at the last quarter of the 9th and the first quarter of the 10th century. This date is supported by the fact that the latest writers quoted by Rājaśekhara are the Kashmirian Ratnākara and Ānandavardhana, both of whom belong to the middle of the 9th century, while the earliest writer to mention Rājaśekhara appears to be the Jaina Somadeva, whose *Yaśastilaka* is dated in 960 A.D.²

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¹ For a detailed account of Rājaśekhara's life and times, see V. S. Apte, *Rājaśekhara: His Life and Writings*, Poona 1886; F. Kielhorn in *EI*, I, pp. 162-179 and J. F. Fleet in *IA*, XVI, pp. 175-78; Sten Konow's ed. of *Karpūramañjarī*, pp. 177-76; Manomohan Ghosh's ed. of the same play, pp. lxv-lxxii; S. K. De, *Sanskrit Poetics*, i, pp. 122-28. The chronological order of Rājaśekhara's plays is uncertain. See, besides Sten Konow and Ghosh cited above, V. V. Mirashi in *Pathak Commemoration Volume*, Poona 1934, p. 859 f.

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¹ On this work, see S. K. De, *Sanskrit Poetics*, i, p. 125 f. ii, p. 366 f.

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² Rājaśekhara's plays are also cited anonymously in the *Daśa-rūpaka*, and Rājaśekhara is mentioned in the *Udayasundarī-kathā* of Soḍḍhala, composed about the same time (990 A.D.). Most of the Anthology verses ascribed to Rājaśekhara (see Thomas, *Kvs*, pp. 81-92) are traceable in his four plays, but a large number remains untraced. The untraced memorial verses on Sanskrit poets (in *Sūkti-muktāvalī*) may or may not belong to him.

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In his *Bāla-rāmāyaṇa*,³ which loosely dramatises in ten acts the entire story of the *Rāmāyaṇa* up to Rāma's coronation, Rājaśekhara perpetrates, both by its bulk and execution, an appalling monstrosity of a so-called drama. Like Murāri, he makes the mistake not only of choosing, with little poetic and less dramatic power, a banal epic theme, but also of attempting to outdo his predecessors⁴ in scattering, through its entire length, the debris of a too fertile talent, which, in the shape of unending quantities of descriptive and sentimental verses, come up to a total of nearly seven hundred and eighty. Even the Prologue itself, which contains, with its twenty stanzas, a voluble account of himself and his indiscernible merits, reaches almost to the dimension of an act, while each of the ten acts, averaging more than seventy verses and once running up to one hundred, has almost the bulk of a small drama! It has been calculated that more than two hundred stanzas are in the long Śārdūlavikrīḍita metre and about ninety in the still longer Sragdharā. It is a wonder how such an enormous play could have been brought on the stage; but the author takes an evident pride in its bulk (i. 12), and recommends it for *reading*, for whatever merit may be found in its diction. In the construction of plot, some variation is shown by making Rāvaṇa's misdirected passion for Sītā the prime cause of his feud, the feud itself being conceived, not originally but after Bhavabhūti, as the central motif. This substitution, however, of love and longing for mock-heroic ferocity is hardly an improvement. Rāvaṇa, with his amorousness and his disappointed hope, becomes more ludicrous than impressive, and it is not surprising that Paraśurāma, instead of lending him assistance, insults him openly. The diplomacy of Mālyavat is also repeated from Bhavabhūti with some slight variation, such as, the device of bringing about the banishment of Rāma by Mantharā and the demons in the disguise of Kaikeyī and Daśaratha.¹ The contrivance of a play within a play is also borrowed in act iii from Harṣa and Bhavabhūti. Rāvaṇa pines away with hopeless *crève-cœur*; and for his amusement a troupe of actors which visits his palace enacts, by happy or unhappy chance, a miniature play on the betrothal of Sītā to Rāma; the realism of the scene infuriates Rāvaṇa and the play is interrupted. The scene is not ineffectively conceived; but the motif is farcically repeated by a second cruder effort, in act v, to amuse Rāvaṇa by means of marionettes dressed up as Sītā, with speaking parrots inside! The idea, however, seems to have pleased the author, for he again utilises the head of a similar speaking marionette, representing the severed head of Sītā, as a part of Mālyavat's stratagem to frighten the enemies. Rāvaṇa's Viraha, in which he demands tidings of his beloved in *furor poeticus* from nature, the seasons, streams and birds, is obviously a faint imitation of Purūravas's madness in the *Vikramorvaśīya*; but it is as unnecessary as it is tedious. The narrative thereafter drags on with a profusion of description, and there is little action throughout. In the last act, Rājaśekhara describes, after Murāri, in nearly a hundred stanzas, the aerial tour of Rāma and his party, which includes a visit also to the world of the moon.

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³ Ed. Govindadev Sastri, Benares 1869 (reprinted from the *Pandit*, Old Series, iii, 1862-69); ed. Jivananda Vidyasagar, Calcutta 1884. But a good edition is still desirable.

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⁴ Indebtedness to Bhavabhūti is expressly acknowledged, and unmistakable evidence of imitation has been shown by Apte, *op. cit.*, p. 37 f; but there can be little doubt that Murāri's extravagant work also served as his model.

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¹ This device of tricking by disguise is carried to its ludicrous excess in the *Jānakī-pariṇaya* of Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita (17th century), in which Rāvaṇa, Sāraṇa, Vidyujjihva and Tāṭakā apear in disguise as Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa, Viśvāmitra and Sītā, so that a confusion arises when they meet and results in a cheap comedy of errors!

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Rājaśekhara's second epic play, the *Bāla-bhārata*,¹ which is also called *Pracaṇḍa-pāṇḍava* (i.8), was probably projected, on the same scale and plan, to be a companion Nāṭaka on the Mahābhārata story; but, mercifully, it is left incomplete. Of the two acts which remain, the first describes the Svayaṃvara of Draupadī; the second deals with the gambling scene, ill-treatment of Draupadī and departure of the Pāṇḍavas to the forest; but, with the exception of a few well turned verses, there is nothing remarkable in the fragment.

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¹ Ed. C. Cappeller, Strassburg, 1885; ed. Durgaprasad and K. P. Parab, NSP, Bombay 1887 (included in their ed. of *Karpūra*°, see below).

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The two remaining plays are smaller works in four acts, and resemble each other in form and substance. The first, *Karpūramañjarī*,² is called a Saṭṭaka (i.6), and the second, *Viddha-śālabhañjikā*,³ a Nāṭikā; but the distinction does not appear to be substantial between the two types, except that the forms is written entirely in Prakrit.¹ The theme in both the plays is the traditional amorous intrigue of court-life; but the flat rehandling would have made the plays insignificant had there not been song, dance, poetry and sentiment, even if the poetry is affected and the sentiment puny. There is an attempt at novelty in some scattered scenes and incidents, but the influence of Harṣa's *Ratnāvalī* is unmistakable. The influence, however, has not proved advantageous; for, being weakly imitative, the treatment lacks vividness and coherence, the plot is poorly managed, and the characterisation is distinctly feeble. In the *Karpūramañjarī*, we have the conventional story of king Caṇḍapāla's light-hearted, but extremely sentimental, amour with a lovely maiden of unknown status, the machinations of the Vidūṣaka and the maiden's girl-friend to bring about the meeting of the lovers who pine helplessly for each other, the jealousy of the queen and the heroine's imprisonment, the final union and the queen's acceptance of the situation with the discovery that the heroine is a princess and her cousin and that marriage with her would lead to her husband's attainment of paramount sovereignty. The important variations are that there is no plotting minister behind the scheme, that the heroine is brought on the scene and into the palace by the Tantric powers of the queen's spiritual guide, Bhairavānanda, that the king's access to the imprisoned girl is secured by making a subterranean passage, that another such passage is made enabling the prisoner to play an amusing, but silly, game of hide-and-seek with the queen, and that the queen is made to consent to the union by a hardly worthy trick played on her by her own preceptor Bhairavānanda.

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² Ed. Durgaprasad and K. P. Parab, with comm. (incomplete) of Vasudeva, NSP, Bombay 1887 (also contains *Bāla-bhārata*); ed. Sten Konow, with Eng. trs. and notes by C. R. Lanman, Harvard Orient. Ser., Cambridge Mass., 1901; ed. Manomohan Ghosh, Calcutta Univ., 1939. Also ed. in the *Pandit*, Old Series, vii (1872-73).

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³ Ed. Vamanacharya in the *Pandit*, Old Series, vi-vii (1871-73); ed. B. R. Arte, with comm. of Nārāyaṇa Dīkṣita (18th century), Poona 1886; Eng. trs. by L. H. Gray in *JAOS*, XXVII, 1906, pp. 1-71. A critical edition of this work is desirable.

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¹ The author himself states that the only difference is that the connecting scenes (Praveśakas and Viṣkambhakas) are wanting in the Saṭṭaka. It is suggested that a distinct kind of dancing was used in it. This play is practically the only example of the type we have. See Chintaharan Chakravarti in *IHQ*, VII, 1931, p. 169 f for a discussion of the nature of the Saṭṭaka. The definition of the *Sāhitya-darpaṇa* is merely a generalisation of the characteristics of the present play.

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We have the same general scheme of courtly comedy in the *Viddha-śalabhañjikā*; but the intrigue is perhaps more varied between the two plays of Rājaśekhara than between the two similar plays of Harṣa. The unknown maiden, of course, turns out in the end to be a cousin becoming the co-wife; but a better device is adopted in making her a hostage sent by her royal father to the palace of king Vidyādharamalla in the disguise of a boy, changing her name from Mṛgāṅkāvalī to Mṛgāṅkavarman. We have the old ruse of the minister Bhāgurāyaṇa (after Yaugandharāyaṇa) in arranging matters in such a way that the king falls headlong in love with the beautiful maiden. This is achieved through the motif of a dream-vision, which turns out to be an actual fact brought about by the minister's contrivance. The statue-device, from which the play takes its name, is in the same way not original, nor is it effectively employed as a central incident or motive. The entrance of the heroine is too long delayed, as she does not make her appearance till the middle of the third act and does not actually meet the king till a quarter of the fourth act is over. The usual complications and luxuriant descriptions of love, longing and secret meeting follow; and there is nothing remarkable in them, except the trick which the king's friend, the Viduṣaka, plays on the queen's foster-sister Mekhalā and the queen's induced design to avenge it by marrying the king to the boy of unsuspected sex, thereby outwitting herself by letting the king have what he desired. This last idea has points in its favour, but it is too much to make the *dénouement* follow from a puerile subsidiary incident concerning the Viduṣaka alone, while the king is kept strangely in ignorance about the true import of the pretended marriage.

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It must be admitted that Rājaśekhara has more inventiveness than Murāri, but, like Murāri, his style and treatment are chaotically poetic, rather than sensibly dramatic. In spite of a certain individuality and distinction, the note is essentially imitative; the foot-marks of Harṣa, Bhavabhūti and even Murāri are too clear to be mistaken. Rājaśekhara claims the title of Kavirāja and traces his poetic descent from the Ādi-kavi through Bhartṛmeṇṭha and Bhavabhūti, but this is only a mournful example of a bad poet and still worse dramatist not hesitating to put his own price on himself. Barring stray passages and incidents, Rājaśekhara's Rāma-drama, which mistakes quantity for quality, is an enormity in every sense. It would perhaps be unjust to criticise his two comedies of court-intrigue equally severely for lack of dramatic quality. Allowances should be made for the suggestion that they are conceived more as spectacular sentimental entertainments, having a slight plot, than as well-constructed plays, and that the main stress should be laid rather on beauty of diction and versification than on action and characterisation. But, apart from the fact that Rājaśekhara's poetry is facile and shallow, his diction conventional and his ideas full of far-fetched conceits, his two small plays of court-life lack the main interest of a comedy of intrigue, which should depend on a succession of lively incidents and lightly sketched pictures. The elaborate anatomy of theatrical passion, set forth in an equally elaborate mass of reflective and sentimental stanzas, is not only monotonous but hamper and disorganise the little action which the plays possess. The majority of these verse are, of course, out of place in a drama, but the illegitimate attraction of rhetorical poetry and tumid sentiment makes the author introduce them merely for the purpose of unnecessary display of his own skill and learning.

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Rājaśekhara is conscious of this blemish of unnecessarily prolonged elaboration, which reaches its impossible limit in his *Bāla-rāmāyaṇa*, but he thinks (i. 12) that the main question is excellence of expression. In actual practice, however, this excellence degenerates into a varied and ingenious stylistic exercise and an entire disregard of all sense of proportion and propriety. His *forte* is not dramatic construction, nor is his hand competent to create living characters, but it is his inordinate love of style which kills all reality and vividness of his attempts in these directions. The pallid heroes and faint heroines are conventional and fail to be impressive with their sentimental effusiveness; Rāvaṇa, with his amorous and pseudo-heroic rant, is no better; Bhāgurāyaṇa is an insipid edition of Yaugandharāyaṇa; while his typical Viduṣakas are tedious with their pointless jokes and still more tasteless antics. The enlarged form of pathos and sentiment becomes a muddle of the lachrymose and the rhetorical. In fairness, it must be said, however, that Rājaśekhara can write elegant and swinging verses, and the introduction of song and dance diversifies the banality of his themes and sentimental outpourings. He has a considerable vocabulary of fine words and a fund of quaint conceits both in Sanskrit and in Prakrit, which bear out his boast that he is a master of languages. His decided ability to handle elaborate metres in Sanskrit and Prakrit, especially his favourite Śardūlavikrīḍita (to which must be added Sragdharā and Vasantatilaka), justly deserves Kṣemendra's praise. Although his pictures of sunset, dawn and midday, or of the heroine's beauty and the hero's love-lorn condition, or of battles and mythical places, lose their interest on account of their artificial character, yet his weakness for elaborate description gives us some heightened, but vivid, accounts of the various aspects of court-life, its pleasures and its luxury. But Rājaśekhara does not seem to possess much critical sense, nor even the grace to be ashamed of faults which he has not the virtue to avoid. Even in poetry, for which he claims merit, his art is supremely conscious. His verses are often pleasant and always readable, but seldom touching; and he flings out fine things and foolish things in *copia verborum* with equal enthusiasm or equal indifference. The rhetoricians and anthologists quote his verses with considerable admiration (though not always without censure); but even his best passages seek and receive applause more by meretricious rhetorical contrivances than by genuine poetic quality. He deliberately models his style and even copies from the splendid examples of poetry and drama of his predecessors, but he fails to transfer to his own works their ease and brilliancy.

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