The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory & Practice c18.26

Language: English

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To understand the Indian drama we have aid from a work of curious character and importance, the *Kāmaçāstra* or *Kāmasūtra* of Vātsyāyana,¹ which was doubtless familiar to the dramatists from Kālidāsa onwards. The world which produced the classical drama was one in which the pessimism of Buddhism, with its condemnation of the value of pleasure, had given way to the worship of the great sectarian divinities Çiva and Viṣṇu, in whose service the enjoyment of pleasure was legitimate and proper. The Buddhists themselves admittedly felt the force of the demand for a life of ease; we have preserved verses satirizing their love of women, wine, soft living, and luxury, and there is abundant evidence of the decline of austerity in the order. The eclecticism of Harṣa is sufficiently significant; the policy which at the great festival at Prayāga reported by Hiuan Tsang resulted in the dedication of a statue to the Buddha on the first day, to the sun, the favourite deity of his father, on the second, and to Çiva on the third, excludes any possibility of belief in the depth of Harṣa’s Buddhist beliefs. If there were any doubt as to the strange transformation of feeling among Buddhists, it would be removed by the benediction which opens the *Nāgānanda*, where the Buddha is invoked as rallied on his hardheartedness by the ladies of Māra’s train. The process of accommodation had evidently gone very far.

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The philosophy of the age shows equally the lack of serious interest in the old tenets of Buddhism; we have the great development of logical studies in lieu of insistence on the truths of misery and the path to its removal, while the *chef-d’œuvre* of the period outside Buddhist circles is the complicated and fantastic system of the Sāṃkhya philosophy, which adequately reflects the artistic spirit of the time in its comparison of nature with a dancer who makes her début, and gracefully retires from the stage when she has satisfied her audience. The spirit of Açoka has entirely disappeared from the royal families of India, and the courts demanded amusement with refinement, just as they sought for elegance in art. The interests of this world are centred in the pleasures of life, the festivals which amused the court and the people by the pomp of their celebration from time to time, and in the intervals the amusements of the palace and the harem, sports in the water, the game of the swing, the plucking of flowers, song, dance, pantomime, and such other diversions as were necessary to while away the endless leisure of princes, who left the business of their realms to ministers and soldiers, while they spared themselves any fatigue more serious than that of love encounters. The manners of their princes were aped by their rich subjects, and there was no dearth of courtiers and parasites to aid them in their diversions.

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The man about town (*nāgaraka*) as sketched by the *Kāmasūtra*¹ is rich and cultivated; devoted to the niceties of attire and personal adornment, perfumed, pomaded, and garlanded; he is a musician, and a lover of books; cage-birds afford him pleasure of the eyes, and diversion in teaching them speech; a lovely garden with an arbour presents facilities for amusement and repose. In the daytime the care of the toilet, cock fights, ram fights, excursions in the neighbouring country, fill his time; while at night, after a concert or ballet, there are the joys of love, in which the *Kāmasūtra* gives him more elaborate instruction than the *Ars Amoris* ever contemplated. The luxury of polygamy did not suffice such a man; he is allowed to enjoy the society of courtesans, and in them, as in Athens, he finds the intellectual interests which are denied to his legitimate wives. With them and the more refined and cultured of the band of hangers-on, high and low, with whom he is surrounded, he can indulge in the pleasures of the discussion of literature, and appreciate the fine efforts of the poets and dramatists. From such a nature, of course, anything heroic cannot be expected, and the poets recognize this state of affairs; but it demands refinement, beauty, luxury, and the demand is fully met. Love is naturally a capital theme, but the dramatists suffer from one grave difficulty from the condition of the society which they depict.

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The ideal of a romantic love between two persons free and independent, masters of their own destinies, is in great measure denied to them, and they are reduced to the banality of the intrigue between the king and the damsel who is destined to be his wife, but who by some accident has been introduced into his harem in a humble position.