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And the Hanumannātakam in the VIII act draws very heavily upon the Dutāngada play. So it can be safely surmised that, Hanumannātakam followed Dūtāngada in time and the date of the Hanumannātakam is around the 13th century.
Further this Hanumannātakam apart from the Dūtāngadam bears some affinity with some of the plays composed during this period in Gujarat. Candralekhāvijayaprakarana by Devacandragani, a disciple of Hemacandrācārya, a multi-splendoured personality of the medieval Gujarat and India, is one of them. Another play by the same author Mānamudrābhañjikā, still in a manuscriptural form has also a resemblance to this Hanumannātakam. Then there is one more play Ullāgharāghava by Someśvara who flourished in the second half of the 12th century and probably beyond the first half of the 13th century, during the reign of the Caulukua kings of Anahilvād Pātaņ in Gujarat. So these three plays viz. Candralekhāvijayaprakaraņa, Mānamudrabhañjikā and Ullāgharāghava along with the Dūtāngada form a homogenous group of plays having the close resemblance with the play Hanumannātakam under discussion.
As noted above there are some peculiar features of the Hanumannātakam. Hanumannātakam has very long stage directions, at times turning into descriptions and verses. Sometime there is a mix-up between a stage-direction and a description. To illustrate, in the Hanumannātakam 1-19, there is a stage-direction Sta: Flet and then what does Śrīrāma nāțayan is described in a verse. The entire passage runs like this :
श्रीरामः नाटयन् कपोले जानक्याः करिकलभदन्तद्युतिमुषि स्मरस्मेरं गण्डोडुमरपुलकं वक्त्रकमलम् ।
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