Indian Antiquary Vol 62

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 110

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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
(MAY, 1933
the subtle representation of emotion in a romantic setting, since nature endowed him with a genuine and delicate, if somewhat slight, lyrical talent, a capacity for intensely dramatic dialogue and a subtle sense of humour. Two instances of the latter I explain below, but many allusions and hits, which would have been apparent enough to the audience of his day, are veiled for us by our ignorance of contemporary literature. In these last two aspects of his genius I doubt if he is surpassed by any other Sanskrit playwright, not even by Kalidasa himself. But in the first point he did not fully exploit the possibilities of the use of verse on the stage. For the spectator is also an auditor, and nicely calculated verbal music by its capacity for expressing emotional tension is able to bring home to him the full bearing of the situation.
One curious detail, dealt with below, separates these two plays from the remainder, namely that in them alone are to be found definite allusions to the works of Asvaghoşa. There are a few passages in the other plays which bear some resemblance to passages in the Buddhist poet, but they are not of a nature which enables it to be said that the resemblance is anything but fortuitous.
Of the remaining plays the excellence of the DC has always been recognised, but I fail to see how it can possibly be by the same hand as the SV and PY. The author has an admirable melodramatic talent, and the centre of gravity lies in the story, not in the delineation of character or of shades of emotion. While his story-telling is good, his command of the details of dramatic technique is weak, and, as shown by Dr. Morgenstierne, a good part of Sadraka's work in taking over the play lay in smoothing out the minor discrepancies and improbabilities. Bhasa shows no such crudities in his plays. The verse of the play is competent, sometimes good, but of stronger, coarser, texture than that of Bhâsa's delicate muse; the occasional clumsinesses may be due, in some cases at least, to a faulty text tradition. As compared with the SV and PY, the dialogue is crisper, wittier, more idiomatic, with sharp. er outlines, the conversation of a cultured gosthi refined to a high degree. But it throws its light only on the exterior facets of life, explaining the immediate action of the stage, but not the hidden life behind. Bhâsa eschews a vivid presentation of the outer scene in order to let us see, reflected as it were in the mirror of their words, the emotions that move his persong. The hard, bright forms that bring the story of the DC to life would ruin the delicate tone-scheme of the SV, whose shimmering talk with its careful attention to values transports us to a world where the outer accidents of life seem but shadows, the inner life the reality. And thus each figure in the latter, generalised though it be to the point of blurring the indivi. dual traits, stands out before us like a statue in the round, whereas the DC is a bas-relief, animated and exciting, but essentially flat in pattern. It is not surprising therefore that its dialogue contains far more difficulties than those of the other two plays, and in detail of style and language it seems to me to belong to a slightly later period. It may be noted as a curiosity that these three works are fond of the construction with kamam (8V once, PY twice, DC three times, as against twice all told in the remaining ten plays).
If I cannot see the hand of Bhasa in the DC, still less can I see it in the remainder, which dramatically stand on a much lower level and linguistically seem to belong to a substantially later period. It is significant of earlier Indian opinion of their value that, while there is definite evidence connecting Bhasa with the SV, and while the PY and the DC are known to the dramatic theorists, we have no allusion to any of the other plays and only one or two of their verses are quoted in the anthologies. For language I may note that these plays are decidedly fond of using the idiom by which a verb meaning 'go' governs an abstract noun in ota to indicate the assumption of a state or likeness; this idiom is not to be found in the first three plays or in the earliest kdvya generally. To take one play, the Avimdraka, I would refer to the addiction of its author for the verb mandibha (four times), not found in the other plays. It seems to be an attempt to imitate the DC in its method, but the author