Nirgrantha-1

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 97

Govardhan Panchal
Nirgrantha
His plays falling under the Prakarana type refelect his keen observation of the life around him among the people. Further, he adds two more types in the ten Rasāśrya Rūpakas, making the total number 12, as noted earlier, the two being the Nātikā and the Prakaranikä. Significantly, the Natyadarpana does not include Sattaka (written in Prakrit) as it is concerned only with the Sanskrit Nātya tradition.
Hemacandrācarya also mentions 12 types of Geya Rūpakas14 or Geya Kāvyas and defines them as padārthābhinayātmaka which broadly expressed the bhāva of a pada and were music-oriented. Besides these Geya Rūpakas, he has mentioned 12 rūpakas proper which were rasāśrya (based on rasa). He also called these latter Pathya Rūpakas, which were recitational
Hemacandra as well as Ramacandra call the Bhāvāśrya Rūpakas as anyāni rūpakāni, other forms of Rūpakas15. The author of the Bhāvaprakāśa (13th century) called them nätyābhidhah plays based on dance. It was Viśvanātha from Bengal (14th century) who, in the Sāhitya-darpana, called them Uparūpakas (minor forms of drama), the denomination which later became popular and was widely used.
Thus, we see that there were two parallel traditions of drama : One Mārgā, as Bharata's tradition came to be called, which was rasāśrya (based on rasa) and it was vākyarthābhinayātmaka (depicting detailed abhinaya of each sentence). The other tradition came to be called Deśī which was bhāvāśraya, broadly depicting the sense of a pada through bhāva (emotions), and was called padārthābhinayātmaka.
There are also clear indications that even the Mārgā tradition of Bharata, on which the later authors like Dhanañjaya, Hemacandra, and Rāmacandra-Gunacandra had based their works, had undergone some changes as the plays written during their times indicate. They include long narrative passages which would appear rather uninteresting when read 6. But, in a stage-production, in the style prevalent during those times, they could be very engrossing and entertaining. Long soliloquies or descriptive passages, instead of being spoken in merely Vācika abhinaya, if acted with Ārgika abhinaya with appropriate dance, movements, hand-gestures, anga-bhangis (body-bends), facial expressions with netrābhinaya, and accompanied by appropriate music, they could be highly interesting, entertaining, and absorbing. And hence, the criticism of some scholars that the Sanskrit drama was declining in quality during the medieval times hardly has any substance. Such criticism merely shows the lack of historical perspective in which the latter Sanskrit plays must be viewed. I would cite the example of Kerala's surviving Sanskrit dramatic tradition, called Küțiyattam. The term seemingly is of later origin, because in some of the old manuals wirtten for the actors and the stage presentation, called the Āttaprakāra-s, and the Kramadīpikā-s, the term used is küthu, which in Sanskrit could be translated as nātya, used for the prayoga of the actor's Art with its technique of four-dimensional abhinaya - Angika, Vācika, āhārya, and Sättvika. We see