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DAŪRTĀXHYANA:
his ridicule is abundantly directed against the Lātas and the Buddhist order; and the Dāgerakas, Saurāştras and Mālavas are not spared from casual hits. These Bhåņas are often obscene, if not vulgar; and the primal sensations are portrayed with a rough realism and terrible sincerety. For a student of literature, as Dr. De rightly remarks, 'it is more than useless to read austere morals into these old-time play-wrights or damn them for want of morals.'
Turning to the Prahasana, the popular farce, there is ample scope for social satire in it by the very nature of its subject matter; but the specimens that have survived are far from being satisfactory. Their wit and humour, which would make one laugh, lie in deliberately vulgar exhibitions and expressions: in short, the whole atmosphere in the Prahasana, on account of conventional characters and incidents and the high-strung erotic sentiment, is low and depressing. The Mattavilāsa of Mahendravikrama (7th Century A. D.) is a slight farcical sketch depicting the drunken and passionate revelry of a Saiva mendicant, calling himself a Kapālin on account of the human skull carried by him in lieu of his alms-bowl which is said to be stolen by a hypocritical Buddhist monk. A degenerate Pasupata comes to settle the case of theft, and finally the missing bowl is obtained from a madman who had retrieved it from a dog. Thus the wreckless wrangling in the monastic order is broadly satirised. The Prahasanas like Laţaka-melaka, Dhūrtasamāgama, etc. have much to do with rogues and knaves; the Jaina and Buddhist monks are held in ridicule; but with their symbolic characters, whatever little wit and satire they possess is often defaced by open vulgarity and erotic descriptions. Stray satirical verses in Sanskrit and Prākrit may be collected from anthologies and from illustrations on the rhetorical device called vyāja-stuti; but they cannot, being isolated verses, exhibit any sustained style as such. Thus this survey leaves us cold that early Indian literature has not achieved much in the field of satire.
Haribhadra is a genius by birth and a satirist by temperament. He has bequeathed to posterity a valuable contribution to Indian literature through his Dhürtäkhyāna which is unique in various respects. We might try to assess its Falae, as a work of art, from the point of view of a modern critic of letters. The terminology of English criticism' cannot be literally applied to Indian works, because the terms have sometimes specized associations and import, The Dhû, apparently looks like a parody in as much as it ridicules by imitation, but if we go into details we find that it cannot be called a parody for various reasons: no work or class of works is continuously ridiculed through word-, form- or sense-rendering ; secondly, the imaginary tales narrated by rogues do not easily remind us of any one story or of any work or class of works; thirdly, the legends that are ridiculed do not come serially or at random from any one composition, but they are heaped from different sources to hold in ridicule their common motif
i see the artioles on Parody by Christopher Stone and on Satire by Gilbert Cannan
ia The Art and Craft of Letters Series. See also English Satires, in the Casket Library Sories, especially the Introduction.
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