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PLAYS
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they are purely fictitious beings or when they belong to a distant period of history. Even when these characters are his real contemporaries, each of them appears to be having only one particular aspect which Roy loves to see in him. He fails to delineate sharp differences and points of contrast.
In this play also Sri Chaitanya is god-like throughout, and gods have a simple nature and they do not change. Roma and Murari are as devoted to Sri Chaitanya at the end as they are at the beginning. Keshav ceases to be a dry pundit and becomes a true bhakta in the course of drama. But do we know any other facet or element of his personality ? Sachi is an idealised version of a typical Hindu mother and Vishnupriya is an idealised version of a typical Hindu wife like Sita. Do we leam anything more about these two characters? In what way do they become memorable if you are not a devotee of Sri Chaitanya but simply well-versed spectators with properly trained and sophisticated taste ?
Some of Shakespeare's history plays do become what may technically be called 'political morality plays'. Henry V is an instance in point. But Shakespeare is a dramatist first and everything else next. Dilip Roy simply uses drama to express his devotion for Sri Chaitanya. Such devotion plays are singularly absent in the Western tradition of drama though 'miracle plays' do have a touch of such devotion.
A drama must have a definite pattern. Northrope Frye writes:
"A tragic or comic plot is not a straight line: it is a parabola following the shapes of the mouths on the conventional masks. Comedy has a U-shaped plot, with the action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending. Tragedy has an inverted U, with the action rising in crisis to a peripety and then plunging downward to catastrophe through a series of recognitions, usually
of the inevitable consequences of previous acts."30
Sri Chaitanya is neither a tragedy nor a comedy as far as the design is concerned. But we do discover Roy's usual design in this drama, too. In every work of Roy's we find round about an enlightened person who naturally does not grow, a few aspirants, who strive to reach the highest height. They do not appear to be fully successful. But a development towards the goal is unmistakably discernible in all of them. Hence, it is not in the principal character's life and fortune, but in other characters around him that we discover movement. This movement is neither in a 'U' pattern nor in an inverted 'U' pattern but in an arrow pattern that shoots to the sky without completely reaching it.
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