The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory & Practice c7.s5.30

c7.s5.30

The evidence of borrowing based on the *Mṛcchakaṭikā* by 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.