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Classification of Poetry
951 thereby omitting nātikā, toțaka and sattaka, there are writers who consider even them as nrtya. He himself seems to have no view to offer.
dombī śrīgaditam bhāṇaḥ bhāṇī-prasthāna-rāsakāḥ, kāvyam ca, sapta nộtyasya bhedāḥ syus te'pi bhāṇavat ity āhuḥ kecid, anye tān sarvān
nộtyā”tmakān viduḥ. (p. 256) It is said in the above lines that some consider only the seven varieties as nộtyas. What about the rest? There are ten more. Sāradātanaya further says that writers differ also on the names of these types
etā nāmántaraiḥ kaiścit ācāryaiḥ kathitā api, samvidhāna-kramaḥ tāsām
na kadācana bhidyate. p. 255. While the statement in the first line is correct, that in the second line is not borne out by the text. In the very beginning of his work, Śāradātanaya says that he himself saw actually all the thirty types, that is, ten rūpakas and twenty uparūpakas, played by the nāryā"cārya named Diwakara in a Saraswati temple during a festival (p. 2). But the chapters on rūpakas and uparūpakas, 8th and 9th, do not justify this claim. These chapters show the author's indebtedness to certain earlier texts from which widely differing descriptions are simply pulled out and heaped together in a haphazard manner.
In the uparūpaka section, satďaka is again defined at the end of p. 269. Under the name of rāsaka, on pp. 265-266, Bhoja's description of kāvya and citrakāvya and the Anustubh definitions of dombi etc., quoted in the Abhinavabhāratī, are clubbed together. In the description of all the uparūpakas the first part is generally from some earlier work, which consistently describes all of them as regular dramatic compositions, with the mention of the number and number of sandhis, nāyakas, vrttis etc. To these definitions are added the definitions borrowed from Bhoja. The first part and the second part differ very widely. Eg., according to the first part, even the Hallisaka is a play of one or two acts, with Brahmanas, Ksatriyas, Vanikputras, - all dependent on ministers for their success and so on !".
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