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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES : Dilip Kumar Roy Here a biography is presented in the form of an exquisite verse play. It is, one might feel, a lyrical drama, for it is more expressional than representational. What is more important here is Sri Chaitanya's love of Krishna and Roy's love of both Sri Chaitanya and Krishna. Naturally, it looks, consequently, more like a poem than a play and needless to say, such a form absolutely suits the subject who lived poetry, the highest and most sacred and blissful poetry, and never knew the prose of humdrum realities of worldly life.
The titles of the three acts are misleading. One might feel ‘Aspiration, 'Conflict' and 'Illumination might be three stages like 'Exposition',
Complication' and 'Denouement' in the development of the plot. But the fact is that this spatial portrait does not have a plot. The central character of Sri Chaitanya does not aspire for Divine Truth in Act I. He has already been an accomplished mystic at that time. Then what does 'aspiration' signify ? About whose aspiration is the author talking ? Sri Chaitanya's initiation into the sannyas is a simple formality, for he has already realised in the fullest measure both dispassion and detachment which are necessary and difficult prerequisites of sannyas. With the permission of his mother, what remains to be done now is putting on the ochre coloured garb. Could it reasonably be called an aspiration ? In fact, the progress from aspiration towards achievement is singularly absent in this play.
When one reads Conflict' as the title of Act II, after “Aspiration', the title of Act I, one might feel that the path of aspiration must be running into conflict, which could be either between himself and other people around or between rival forces of the soul divided against itself. But we soon discover that there are neither internal nor external conflicts of these kinds in the play. It is difficult to imagine a drama, tragic or comic, where there is no conflict. But in this play, there is none unless you call intellectual opposition to Chaitanya's message of some of his contemporaries an element of conflict The violence of Jagai-Madhai incident might sound like a conflict. But it happens in Act III, which is inappropriately entitled 'Illumination'.
Yet the plot such as it is here, is handled with passable skill. As in Greek and Shakespearean and classical Sanskrit drama, so also here, a well-known story is woven into a drama. The lack of skill and invention, however, is off set by melodious diction and rhythm. That is how, the bare skeleton or what J. C. Ransom might call, the structure of the drama, is richly embellished with a variety of 'textural' elements.22
The characters of this play are carefully drawn. Chaitanya stands at the centre of the action of the play quite vividly and commands reverence. His character is neither reduced to mere historical delineation as in Sadunath Sarkar's Chaitanya's Life and Teachings nor spoilt by the writer's excessive sentimentality
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