Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v1.c5.58

v1.c5.58

As a cognate branch of study, however, which probably supplied Poetics with a model and the poetic theory with the important content of *rasa*, Dramaturgy (*nāṭya-śāstra*) appears to have established itself a little earlier. Comparatively early texts, both brahmanical and buddhistic, speak of some kind of dramatic representation, and we have a very early reference in Pāṇini to Kṛśāśva and Śilālin as authors of *naṭa-sūtras* (IV. 3. 110-11)¹. The early existence of treatises on the dramatic art is also evidenced by the fact that all the early authors on Poetics, Bhāmaha, Daṇḍin and Vāmana, omit a discussion of this subject and refer their readers for information to such specialised works. The older specimens of these are perhaps lost; but Bharata's *Nāṭya-śāstra*, which is cited as the oldest known and most authoritative, cannot possibly be put, even in its present version, at a date lower than the 6th century A. D. Bharata himself, however devotes a whole chapter to the treatment of poetical *guṇas* and *alaṃkāras* as decorative devices of dramatic speech. It seems, therefore, that the study of Alaṃkāra was older than Bharata; and the tradition of opinion, followed by Bhāmaha and Daṇḍin, may have been post-Bharata in date, but was probably pre-Bharata in substance. Indeed, the different schools of opinion, represented by the *alaṃkāra-*, *rīti-* and *dhvani-* theories, probably flourished some centuries before their views became crytallised in the present works of Bhāmaha, Daṇḍin and the Dhvanikāra respectivly, none of whom, as we shall see, can be taken as the absolute founder of the system he represents. This process of crystallisation must have covered a tentative stage, whose productions, if they had been extant today, would have shown Bhāmaha, Daṇḍin and the Dhvanikāra in the making. We cannot, therefore, start with the works of these writers as the absolute beginnings of the science, although with them we enter upon the historic and the most creative stage of its existence. Taking this fact into consideration, we may presume without dogmatising that the Alaṃkāra-śāstra started as a separate technical discipline from about the commencement of the Christian era and probabably flourished in a relatively developed form in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. The course of this development is unfortunately hidden from us, until it emerges in a more or less self-conscious form in some chapters of Bharata and in the *Kāvyālaṃkāra* of Bhāmaha.