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INTRODUCTION
31 nowhere does he claim that his is the first creation?. His definition only indicates that it was not quite familiar to his court circle.
Bharata's treatise has left a great influence on subsequent authors. He recognises Nātikā, and later theorists define Sattaka in the back-ground of Nātikā. This does not mean that Sattaka is a popular and subsequent remodelling of Nātikā. But it is the reverse that appears to be true and historically justified. As a dramatic representation with dance, depicting love intrigue, enacted by a troop of girls, replete with marvellous sentiment and composed in popular Prākrit, the Sattaka has something graceful and attractive about it. The theorist may not have liked to admit it as it is, but it was bound to attract his attention. The cultured classes and court circles would certainly enjoy it; it is to satisfy their craving the Sattaka was made to conform to the orthodox canons of Nataka; and the result of such an effort is the Nātikā which is duly described by Bharata and others. Thus Nātikā is an orthodox edition of the popular Sattaka. The variety of the forms of Nātikā, as suggested by the Dasarūpaka, perhaps indicates different attempts to raise the popular Sattaka to a status acceptable to a court audience. Once Nātikā was evolved and defined by an authority like Bharata, subsequent authors simply followed him; and Saţtaka was, for a while, say during the period between Kohala and Rājasekhara, superseded by Nātikä. Under such circumstances Bādarāyaṇa and others wanted a bit of Sanskrit also to be introduced, through the royal mouth, in the popular Sattaka which was, in the biginning, entirely in Prākrit.
f) SATTAKAS KNOWN SO FAR Ancient specimens of Sattaka have not come down to us. Prior to Rājasekhara, the Sattaka, though recognised as a type of drama by Kohala etc., never received a literary status among the accepted forms; it is only his Karpūra-mañjarī that became a classical example of Sattaka. The Prākrit had assumed a static form by Rājasekhara's time; and a play entirely in Prākrit was bound to be a rigorous task for average poets in subsequent centuries : it is only some poets of rare or erratic genius that were tempted
1
Prof. Chakravarty holds somewhat different view; see his paper Characteristic Features of the Saţtaka form of Drama', Indian Historical Quarterly, VII, pp. 169-73. For the extracts about Nātikā and Sattaka, see the Appendix.
2
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