XIV. The Indian Theatre.
1. The Theatre 358
2. The Actors 360
3. The Mise-en-scène and Representation of the Drama 364
4. The Audience 369
ABBREVIATIONS
AID. Über die Anfänge des indischen Dramas, Munich, 1914.
AJP. American Journal of Philology.
AP. Agni Purāṇa, ed. BI.
BI. Bibliotheca Indica, Calcutta.
BS. Bhāsa-Studien, Leipzig, 1918.
BSS. Bombay Sanskrit Series.
CHI. Cambridge History of India.
DR. Daçarūpa, cited from Hall’s ed. BI.
EI. Epigraphia Indica.
GGA. Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen.
GIL. Geschichte der indischen Litteratur, by M. Winternitz,
Leipzig, 1904–22.
GN. Nachrichten der königl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu
Göttingen.
GOS. Gaekwad’s Oriental Series.
GSAI. Giornale della Società Asiatica Italiana.
HOS. Harvard Oriental Series.
IA. Indian Antiquary.
ID. Das indische Drama, Berlin, 1920.
IS. Indische Studien.
JA. Journal Asiatique.
JAOS. Journal of the American Oriental Society.
JBRAS. Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.
JPASB. Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
JRAS. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
KF. Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Sprachgeschichte Ernst Kuhn gewidmet.
Breslau, 1916.
KM. Kāvyamālā series, Bombay.
N. Nāṭyaçāstra.
R. Rasārṇavasudhākara, ed. TSS. 1916.
SBAW. Sitzungsberichte der königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Berlin.
SD. Sāhityadarpaṇa, cited by the sections of the BI. ed.
SP. Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics, I, London, 1923.
TI. Le théâtre indien, Paris, 1890.
TSS. Trivandrum Sanskrit Series.
VOJ. Vienna Oriental Journal.
ZDMG. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft.
PART I
THE ORIGIN OF THE SANSKRIT DRAMA
I
DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN VEDIC LITERATURE
1. THE INDIAN TRADITION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE DRAMA
Indian tradition, preserved in the Nāṭyaçāstra, [1] the oldest of the
texts of the theory of the drama, claims for the drama divine origin,
and a close connexion with the sacred Vedas themselves. The golden age
had no need for such amusements: ignorant of all pain, the sorrow,
which is as essential to the art as joy itself, was inconceivable. The
creation of the new form of literature was reserved to the silver age,
when the gods approached the all-father and bade him produce something
to give pleasure to the ears and eyes alike, a fifth Veda which, unlike
the other four, would not be the jealous preserve of the three
twice-born castes, but might be shared by the Çūdras also. Brahmā gave
ear to the pleading, and designed to fashion a Veda in which tradition
(itihāsa) should be combined with instruction in all the ends of men.
To accomplish his task he took from the Ṛgveda the element of
recitation, from the Sāmaveda song, from the Yajurveda the mimetic art,
and from the Atharvaveda sentiment. Then he bade Viçvakarman, the
divine architect, build a playhouse in which the sage Bharata was
instructed to carry into practice the art thus created. The gods
accepted with joy the new creation; Çiva contributed to it the Tāṇḍava
dance, expressing violent emotion, Pārvatī, his spouse, the tender and
voluptuous Lāsya, while Viṣṇu was responsible for the invention of the
four dramatic styles, essential to the effect of any play. To Bharata
fell the duty of transferring to earth this celestial Veda in the
inferior and truncated form of the Nāṭyaçāstra.
The legend is interesting for its determination to secure the
participation of every member of the Hindu Trinity in the creation of
the new art, and for its effort to claim that the fifth Veda of
tradition was the Veda of the dramatic art. The older tradition,
recorded and exploited by the epic, [2] recognizes as the fifth Veda
the mass of traditions, and the Nāṭyaçāstra tacitly concedes this by
representing the Nāṭyaveda as including these traditions. The legend,
therefore, is not of great antiquity, nor need we place it long before
the compilation of the Nāṭyaçāstra itself. The date of that text is
uncertain, but we cannot with any assurance place it before the third
century A.D. With the Indian tendency to find divine origins, it may
well be that the tradition existed much earlier, but in the absence of
any corroboration that must remain a mere hypothesis, for which no
conclusive ground can be adduced. What is important is that none of the
theorists on the drama appeal to any Vedic texts as representing
dramas, whence it is natural to draw the conclusion that there was no
Indian tradition extant in their time which pointed to the preservation
among the sacred texts of dramas. Indeed, if it were worth while, the
conclusion might legitimately be drawn that the absence of any drama in
the Vedic literature was recognized, since it was necessary for the
gods to ask Brahmā to create a completely new type of literature,
suitable for an age posterior to that in which the Vedas already
existed.
2. THE DIALOGUES OF THE VEDA
The silence of Indian tradition is all the more remarkable because
there do exist in the Ṛgveda itself a number of hymns which are
obviously dialogues, and which are expressly recognized as such by
early Indian tradition. [3] The number of such hymns is uncertain, for
it is possible to add to those which clearly bear that character others
whose interpretation might be improved by assuming a division of
persons. There are, however, at least fifteen whose character as
dialogues is quite undeniable, and most of these hymns are of marked
interest. Thus in x. 10 Yama and Yamī, the primeval twins, whence in
the legend are derived the races of men, engage in debate; the poet,
with a more refined sentiment than the legend, is uneasy regarding this
primitive incest, and represents Yamī as intent on an effort, fruitless
so far as the hymn goes, to induce Yama to accept and make fruitful her
proffered love. A tantalizing, but certainly interesting, hymn in the
same book (x. 95) gives a dialogue between Purūravas, and the nymph
Urvaçī; he rebukes her inconstancy, but does not succeed in making her
refrain from withdrawing from his gaze. In viii. 100 Nema Bhārgava
utters an appeal to Indra, to which the god is pleased to give a reply.
Sometimes there are three interlocutors; thus Agastya, the sage, has a
conversation (i. 179) of an enigmatic type with his wife, Lopāmudrā,
and their son; not less obscure is the dialogue between Indra and
Vasukra, in which the wife of the latter plays a small part, in x. 28;
and in iv. 18 we have a most confused dialogue between Indra, Aditi,
and Vāmadeva. Even less intelligible is the famous debate between
Indra, his wife, Indrāṇī, and Vṛṣākapi (x. 86), each interpreter of
which is able to show the absurdity of the versions of his predecessors
but seems incapable of recognizing the defects of his own. Or one of
the interlocutors may be a troop, not an individual. Thus Saramā, the
messenger of Indra, seeking the kine which have been taken away, goes
to the demons, the Paṇis, and holds with them lively debate (x. 108).
The gods also have a hard business (x. 51–3) to persuade Agni, the
living fire, to persevere in the tedious occupation of bearing to them
the oblations of mortals, and the dialogue in which they engage is
vivid in the extreme, extending even to the breaking of a stanza into
portions for two interlocutors. Two dialogues are of interest for their
historical allusions, the converse of Viçvāmitra and the rivers (iii.
33) which he seeks to cross, and that of Vasiṣṭha with his sons (vii.
33), if indeed that is the correct interpretation of the speakers of
the hymn. Indra again disputes with the Maruts (i. 165 and 170), who
had disgraced themselves in his eyes by deserting him in the thick of
his contest with the demon Vṛtra, but who succeed at last in placating
his anger; in the former hymn Agastya seems also to intervene, by
summing up the result at the close, and invoking the favour of the gods
for himself. Similarly the account of Viçvāmitra’s dialogue ends with
the assertion that the Bharatas successfully crossed the rivers in
search of booty, having won a passage by the intercession of their
priest. The interesting, but obscure, hymn (iv. 42), in which Indra and
Varuṇa seem to engage in a dispute as to their relative pre-eminence,
is clearly commented on by the poet himself, and his intervention may
be suspected even where it is not essential.
Now it is clear that the tradition of the ritual literature did not
know what to make of the dialogues of the Ṛgveda. The genre of
composition was one which died out in the later Vedic age; it is
significant that the Atharvaveda knows but one hymn of that type (v.
11) in which the priest, Atharvan, begs the god for the payment due, a
cow; the god is little inclined to accord his prayer, but finally is
induced to relent and to add to the guerdon due the promise of eternal
friendship. It is not in the least surprising, therefore, if we find
that Yāska and Çaunaka in the fifth century B.C. were at variance as to
whether the hymn x. 95 was a dialogue, as the former held, or a mere
legend, as the latter believed. [4] In the commentary of Sāyaṇa we find
that the tradition was unable to ascribe any ritual use for nearly all
the hymns; the case of x. 86 is an exception, but it is significant
that that hymn has little of a true dialogue, the three speakers rather
uttering enigmas than conversing, and it was therefore easier to fit it
into the inconspicuous part it occupies in the later ritual. We must,
therefore, admit that we have in these dialogues the remnant of a style
of poetry which died out in the later Vedic period.
Its original purpose is obscure, but a very interesting suggestion was
made in 1869 by Max Müller in connexion with his version of Ṛgveda i.
165. [5] He conjectured that the ‘dialogue was repeated at sacrifices
in honour of the Maruts or that possibly it was acted by two parties,
one representing Indra, the other the Maruts and their followers’. In
1890 the suggestion was repeated with approval by Professor Lévi, [6]
who added to it the argument that the Sāmaveda shows that the art of
music had been fully developed by the Vedic age. Moreover the Ṛgveda
[7] already knows maidens who, decked in splendid raiment, dance and
attract lovers, and the Atharvaveda [8] tells how men dance and sing to
music. There is, therefore, a priori no fatal objection to assuming
that the period of the Ṛgveda knew dramatic spectacles, religious in
character, in which the priests assumed the rôles of gods and sages in
order to imitate on earth the events of the heavens.
The logical consequence of this doctrine is seen in Professor von
Schroeder’s elaborate theory [9] that the dialogue hymns, and also
certain monologues, for instance x. 119, in which Indra appears as
glorifying himself in the intoxication of his favourite Soma drink, are
relics of Vedic mysteries, an inheritance in germ from Indo-European
times. Ethnology shows us the close relation of music, dance, and drama
among many peoples, and the curious phenomenon that Vedic religion
knows of gods as dancers cannot be explained satisfactorily save on the
assumption that the priests were used to see performed ritual dances,
in themselves imitations of the cosmic dance in which the world was, on
one view, created. Such dances partake of the nature of sympathetic
magic, and they have an obvious parallel in the great sacrificial
rites, which in the Brāhmaṇa period are undertaken in order to
represent on earth the cosmic creation. It is true that we do not find
in the Ṛgveda the phallic dances which in Greece and Mexico alike are
held to be closely connected with the origin of drama, but that was
because the priests of the Ṛgveda were in many respects austere, and
disapproved of phallic deities of any kind. The dramas of the ritual,
therefore, are in a sense somewhat out of the main line of the
development of the drama; the popular side has survived through the
ages in a rough way in the Yātrās well known in the literature of
Bengal, while the refined and sacerdotalized Vedic drama passed away
without a direct descendant.
Independent support for the view of the dialogues as mystery plays in
nuce is given by Dr. Hertel, [10] whose argument is largely based on
the doctrine that the Vedic hymns were always sung, and that in singing
it would have been impossible for a single singer to make the necessary
distinction between the different speakers, which would have been
possible if the hymns had not been sung. The hymns, therefore,
represent the beginnings of a dramatic art, which may be compared with
the form of the Gītagovinda. [11] But, what is more important, he seeks
to find an actual drama on an extended scale in the Suparṇādhyāya, [12]
a curious and comparatively late Vedic text. In his view, accordingly,
the Vedic drama does not stand isolated; it is seen in the Ṛgveda only
in its beginnings; the Suparṇādhyāya displays it en route to further
development, and in the Yātrās we can see a continuation of the old
type, which aids us in following the growth from the Vedic drama of the
classical drama of India. In this regard there is a distinct divergence
of view between the two supporters of the dramatic theory, for
Professor von Schroeder regards the Yātrās as genuinely connected with
the later drama, being developed in close connexion with the cult of
Viṣṇu-Kṛṣṇa and Rudra-Çiva, but as representing a different development
from the same root as the Vedic dialogues. Of this other side of the
drama he finds hints in the traditional connexion of the Gandharvas and
Apsarases with the drama, for these in his view are essentially phallic
deities.
There is, of course, no doubt of the possibility of the dialogues
really representing portions of the old ritual in which the priests
assumed the character of gods or demons, for there are abundant
parallels for such a supposition. But there is no sufficient ground to
compel us to seek for such an explanation of these hymns; that the
Ṛgveda contains nothing save what is connected with ritual is a
postulate which is not made by the Indians themselves, and has no
justification save in the desire for symmetry. On the contrary, it is
perfectly legitimate and much more natural to regard the Ṛgveda as a
collection of hymns, in the vast majority of cases of ritual origin,
but including some more secular poetry, to which genus alone can we
reasonably attribute the battle hymns of Viçvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha. The
fact that such hymns disappear in the later Vedic literature is then
natural, for that literature represents unquestionably hymns collected
definitely for ritual uses, and therefore nothing was admitted which
could not be employed therein. To assume, therefore, that a ritual
explanation must be found, and to find it in ritual drama is
illegitimate, and the only justification for accepting the view in any
case must lie in the fact that it affords a better explanation of the
hymn than any which can be given otherwise.
It is impossible to feel any certainty that the necessary proof has
been brought in any case. The hymn ix. 112, which describes in four
stanzas in a rather humorous style the various ends of men, ending with
the refrain in each case, ‘O Soma, flow for Indra’, is transformed into
the marching song of a popular festival at which mummers represent
vegetation deities and symbols of fertility are carried. The tradition
knows nothing of these happenings, and the hymn certainly suggests none
to the average intelligence. On the contrary, it seems a very natural
piece of witty sarcasm, to which point is lent by the use of the
refrain, and to deny the possibility of sarcasm to the thinkers who
produce the advanced and sceptical views expressed in the Ṛgveda is
certainly unwise. [13] To explain the Vṛṣākapi hymn (x. 86) as a piece
of fertility magic in dramatic form is ingenious, but unluckily it in
no way contributes towards the explanation of the hymn, and, therefore,
is as valueless as the other possible explanations which have been
offered. The same condemnation must be passed on the effort to find a
mimic race at a festival described in the strange Mudgala hymn (x. 102)
which if it is intelligible at all, seems to have a mythological
reference, and not to refer either to actual or mimic races.
An ingenious effort is that made to adduce ethnological parallels to
prove that the hymn x. 119, which is a straightforward monologue,
placed in the mouth of Indra, celebrating the effect of drinking the
Soma, must be regarded as part of a ritual in which at the close of the
drinking of the Soma in the rite, a priest comes forward, assuming the
rôle of Indra, and celebrates in monologue the strength of the juice of
the holy plant. Among the Cora Indians, after a wine festival, a god is
introduced showing the effects of the drink, while a singer celebrates
its potent merits. There is, however, a fatal hiatus in the proof; the
poem by itself is perfectly clear, and to seek for an explanation so
far-fetched is idle expenditure of energy. The same condemnation must
be expressed of the effort to find in the frog hymn (vii. 103) a song
sung by men masked as frogs, dancing as a spell to secure rain. If we
grant that the hymn is really intended as a rain spell, which is
moderately probable though not proved, it needs no further explanation
whatever, and, if we do not accept this suggestion but adopt the older
view that it satyrizes in an amusing way the antics of certain
performers of the ritual, the character of the hymn as a fertility
spell vanishes at once. The errors of method are seen excellently in
the fantastic conclusion that the gambler’s hymn (x. 34), in which a
gambler deplores the fatal love for the dice which has led to his
reducing even his beloved wife to ruin, is a dramatic monologue in
which dancers represent the leaping and falling dice. The dialogue of
Yama and Yamī reduces itself to a fertility drama, from which the
prudishness of the Vedic age has omitted the vital part of the union of
the pair. The curious hymn, iv. 18, which tells of Indra’s unnatural
birth becomes a drama by the assumption that of thirteen verses seven
are ascribed to the poet himself. We are in fact in every case
presented with a bare possibility, which sometimes involves
absurdities, and in all cases does nothing whatever to help us in
interpreting the hymns. There is nothing, it is true, inconceivable in
the view that the hymn of Saramā and the Paṇis was actually recited by
two different parties, and thus was a ritual drama in nuce; what is
certain is that the later Vedic period knew nothing whatever of such a
practice; the only hymn in dialogue form for which it finds a use (x.
86) is assigned an employment in which there is nothing dramatic
whatever. The absurdity of the whole process reaches perhaps its
fullest exhibition in the dissertation on the hymn regarding Agastya
and Lopāmudrā (i. 179), for it becomes a fertility rite performed after
the corn has been cut; Lopāmudrā becomes ‘that which has the seal of
disappearance upon it’, a feat which is impossible in the Vedic
language; the hymn itself suits far better the obvious alternative [14]
of ‘one who enjoys love at the cost of breaking her marital vows’. To
explain the hymns of Indra and the Maruts (i. 170, 171, and 165) we are
to hold that we have three scenes of a dramatic performance, which
takes place at a Soma sacrifice to celebrate the victory of Indra over
the serpent Vṛtra, ending with a dance of the Maruts, represented by
youths fully armed. This weapon dance is a relic of old vegetation
ritual, the driving out of the old year, winter, or death, which is the
foundation of the dances of the Roman Salii, the Greek Kouretes, the
Phrygian Korybantes, and the German sword dancers. How can it be
justifiable to spin theories thus in order to explain hymns which are
taken by themselves without serious difficulty save in detail?
It is equally impossible to find any cogency in Dr. Hertel’s arguments
from the necessity of assuming two sets of performers, since the hymns
were sung and a single voice in singing could not distinguish the
interlocutors. Doubtless, if we accepted this necessity, we would be
inclined to admit a priori that the song would tend to be accompanied
by action and by the dance, so that drama would be on the way to
development. But we do not know that the hymns of the Ṛgveda were
always sung; on the contrary we do know with absolute certainty that,
while the verses of the Sāmaveda were sung (gai), the verses of the
Ṛgveda were recited (çaṅs). True, we do not have precise information of
the exact character of the recitation, but there is not the slightest
ground to suppose that a reciter could not have conveyed by differences
in his mode of recitation the distinction between two different
interlocutors, and the fact that this point is ignored in the argument
is fatal to it. Moreover, we must admit that we are wholly ignorant as
to the degree in which it was desired by the authors or reciters of
these hymns to convey these differences of person. We do not know, and
the ritual text-books did not know, exactly in what way these hymns
were used. We find in the Ṛgveda a number of philosophic hymns; why
should we not admit that a philosophic dialogue such as that of Yama
and Yamī is possible without demanding that it should be a fragment of
ritual? We have historical hymns in Maṇḍala vii; why should we turn the
dialogue of Viçvāmitra and the rivers into a drama? Why should we
insist that all hymns were composed for ritual use, when we know that
ancient tales were among the things used to pass the period immediately
following the disposal of the dead, and that during the pauses in the
great horse sacrifice, performed to assert the wide sovereignty of the
king, both Brahmins and warriors sang songs to fill up the time? We may
legitimately assume that in the Ṛgveda we have hymns of other than
directly ritual or magic purpose; the gambler’s hymn cannot by any
reasonable stretch of the imagination be taken as ritual. [15]
It is also impossible to accept the view that the Vedic drama died out
under the chilling effect of the disapproval of the priests of
fertility ritual. We find, on the contrary, that fertility ritual is
fully recognized later in the Mahāvrata ceremonial, and also in the
horse sacrifice, which are both known to the other Vedic Saṁhitās,
though this feature of the rite is not referred to, directly at least,
in the Ṛgveda. Moreover, even if the disapproval of fertility rites had
been real, why should it have brought to a close the drama? The
dialogues of Agni and the gods, of Saramā and the Paṇis, of Varuṇa and
Indra, of Indra and the singer—and perhaps Vāyu also (viii. 100), have
no connexion with fertility, and this aspect of drama need not have
perished. Dr. Hertel is certainly right in demanding traces of
development, not of decadence, but his great effort to find a full
drama in the Suparṇādhyāya must definitely be pronounced a failure. It
involves an elaborate invention of stage directions, the preparation of
a list of dramatis personae largely on the basis of imagination, and a
translation of the piece based on this theory, which can be shown in
detail to be open to the certainty of error. Add to this the fact that
there is no hint in Indian tradition that the Suparṇādhyāya, on the
face of it a late imitation of Vedic work proper, had ever any dramatic
intention or use.
A very different theory of the purpose of these hymns is that which we
owe to Professors Windisch, [16] Oldenberg, [17] and Pischel. [18] They
represent an old type, Indo-European in antiquity, of composition of
epic character, in which the verses, representing the points of highest
emotion, were preserved, and the connecting links were in prose which
was not stereotyped, and therefore has not come down to us. The theory
is capable of combination with the suggestion that these hymns in
dialogue were dramatic; thus Prof. Pischel explained the combination of
prose and verse in the Sanskrit drama as a relic of this early form of
literature, which thus might serve both epic and dramatic ends. [19]
Despite the considerable vogue which the theory has at one time or
other attained, and the energetic defence of it by Professor Oldenberg,
who has based upon it an elaborate theory of the development of Indian
prose, it is doubtful whether we can accept the view. [20] It is a very
real difficulty here also that the tradition shows no trace of
knowledge of this characteristic of the hymns, and we do not find any
work actually in this form in the whole of the Vedic literature. The
alleged instances of this type, such as those of the tale of Çunaḥçepa
in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa, or the working up in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa
of the legend of Purūravas and Urvaçī cannot possibly be made to fit
the theory. In the latter case we have a tale, which manifestly does
not agree with the verses of the Ṛgveda, and which is openly and
obviously an attempt to work that hymn into the explanation of the
ritual; in the former we have the use of gnomic verses to illustrate a
theme, a form of literature which is preserved through the history of
Sanskrit prose, and portions of a verse narrative. The true type,
verses used at the point of emotion, especially, therefore, to give the
vital speeches and replies, is thus not represented by any text of the
Vedic literature. Whether it ever existed at all in the sense
postulated by the theory, whether there are traces of it in the Pāli
Jātakas, or whether its existence even there is a misunderstanding, are
questions which are not in vital connexion with the origin of Sanskrit
drama, and may, therefore, here be left undiscussed. One consideration,
however, is germane; if it were necessary to explain the Vedic
dialogues by this theory, it would certainly be possible to do so far
more effectively and simply than by the theory of their being the
remains of ritual dramas. The most serious objection to both theories
is that they are not really necessary. Professor Geldner [21] who
formerly patronized the theory of Oldenberg has sought to explain the
hymns in question as ballads. [22]
Nor of course is it necessary to make any use of this theory in order
to explain the mixture of prose and verse in the Sanskrit drama. The
use of prose needs no defence or explanation; that of verse is what was
essentially to be expected, in view of the importance of song as a form
of amusement as well as in worship both in Vedic times and later, and
of the fact that our extant dramas draw so largely on epic tradition,
preserved in versified texts. Nothing indeed is more noteworthy in
Sanskrit literature than the determination to turn everything, law,
astronomy, architecture, rhetoric, even philosophy into a metrical
form. The theorists on the drama give no suggestion that the prose was
regarded as any less fixed in character than the verses, or that it was
not the duty of the author of the drama to be as careful in preparing
the one as the other, and the manuscript tradition of the drama does
not hint at any distinction of the two elements as regards source.
3. DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN VEDIC RITUAL
When we leave out of account the enigmatic dialogues of the Ṛgveda we
can see that the Vedic ritual contained within itself the germs of
drama, as is the case with practically every primitive form of worship.
The ritual did not consist merely of the singing of songs or
recitations in honour of the gods; it involved a complex round of
ceremonies in some of which there was undoubtedly present the element
of dramatic representation; that is the performers of the rites assumed
for the time being personalities other than their own. There is an
interesting instance of this in the ritual of the Soma purchase for the
Soma sacrifice. The seller is in some versions at the close of the
ceremony deprived of his price, and beaten or pelted with clods. Now
there can be no doubt that we have here, not a reflex of a disapproval
of trafficking in Soma, but a mimic account of the obtaining of Soma
from its guardians the Gandharvas, and there is some truth in the
comparison drawn between the Çūdra who plays the rôle of the mishandled
seller and the much misused Devil of the mediaeval mystery plays. [23]
But we must not exaggerate the amount of representation; it falls very
far short of an approach to drama, a point which is overlooked by
Professor von Schroeder throughout his discussions. A drama proper can
only be said to come into being when the actors perform parts
deliberately for the sake of the performance, to give pleasure to
themselves and others, if not profit also; if a ritual includes
elements of representation, the aim is not the representation, but the
actors are seeking a direct religious or magic result. It would be
absurd, for instance, to treat the identification in the marriage
ritual of the husband and wife with the sky and the earth as in any
sense dramatic or to see any drama in the performance of the royal
consecration, which is based carefully on the divine consecration of
Indra, doubtless in the view that thus the king was for the time being
identified with the great god, and so acquired some measure of his
prowess.
In the Mahāvrata [24] we find elements which are of importance as
indicating the materials from which the drama might develop. The
Mahāvrata is plainly a rite intended to strengthen at the winter
solstice the sun, so that it may resume its vigour and make fruitful
the earth. Now an essential part of the rite is a struggle between a
Vaiçya, whose colour is to be white, and a Çūdra, black in colour, over
a round white skin, which ultimately falls to the victorious Vaiçya. It
is impossible, without ignoring the obvious nature of this rite, not to
see in it a mimic contest to gain the sun, the power of light, the
Aryan, striving against that of darkness, the Çūdra. In the face of the
ethnological parallels it is impossible also to sever this episode from
the numerous forms of the contest of summer and winter, the first
represented by the white Aryan, the second by the dark Çūdra. We have
in fact a primitive dramatic ritual, and one which it may be added was
popular throughout the Vedic age. The same ceremony is also marked by a
curious episode; a Brahmin student and a hetaera are introduced as
engaged in coarse abuse of each other, and in the older form of the
ritual we actually find that sexual union as a fertility rite is
permitted, though later taste dismissed the practice as undesirable.
The ritual purpose of this abuse is undeniable; it is aimed at
producing fertility, and has a precise parallel in the untranslatable
language employed in the horse sacrifice during the period when the
unlucky chief queen is compelled to lie beside the slaughtered horse,
in order to secure, we may assume, the certainty of obtaining a son for
the monarch whose conquests are thus celebrated. [25]
There are, however, nothing but elements here, and we have reasonable
certainty that no drama was known. In the Yajurveda we have long lists
of persons of every kind covering every possible sort of occupation,
and the term Naṭa, which is normally the designation of the actor in
the later literature is unknown. We find but one term [26] which later
ever has that sense, Çailūṣa, and there is nothing whatever to show
that an actor here is meant; a musician or a dancer may be denoted, for
both dancing and singing are mentioned in close proximity.
Professor Hillebrandt, [27] on the other hand, is satisfied that we
have actual ritual drama before us, and Professor Konow [28] insists
that these are indeed ritual dramas, but that they are borrowed by the
ritual from the popular mime of the time, which accordingly must have
known dialogue, abusive conversation and blows, but of which the chief
parts were dance, song, and music which are reckoned in the Kauṣītaki
Brāhmaṇa [29] as the arts, but of which the Pāraskara Gṛhya Sūtra [30]
disapproves for the use of men of the three higher castes. The evidence
for this assumption is entirely lacking, and it is extremely
significant that the Vedic texts ignore the Naṭa, [31] whose activity
belongs according to all the evidence to a later period. It is, of
course, always possible to deprecate any argument from silence, though
the value of this contention is diminished by the very remarkable
enumerations of the different forms of occupation given in the
Puruṣamedha sections of the Yajurveda, where in the imaginary sacrifice
of men the imagination of the Brahmins appears to have laboured to
enumerate every form of human activity. But in the absence of any proof
that secular pantomime is older than religious throughout the world,
and in the absence of anything to indicate that it was so in the case
of India, it seems quite impossible to accept Professor Konow’s
suggested origin of drama.
Of other elements which enter into drama we find the songs of the
Sāmaveda, and the use of ceremonial dances. Thus at the Mahāvrata
maidens dance round the fire as a spell to bring down rain for the
crops, and to secure the prosperity of the herds. Before the marriage
ceremony is completed [32] there is a dance of matrons whose husbands
are still alive, obviously to secure that the marriage shall endure and
be fruitful. When a death takes place, and the ashes of the deceased
are collected, to be laid away, the mourners move round the vase which
contains the last relics of the dead, and dancers are present who dance
to the sound of the lute and the flute; dance, music, and song fill the
whole day of mourning. [33] Dancing is closely associated throughout
the history of the Indian theatre with the drama, and in the ritual of
Çiva and Viṣṇu-Kṛṣṇa it has an important part. Hence the doctrine which
has the approval of Professor Oldenberg [34] and which finds the origin
of drama in the sacred dance, a dance, of course, accompanied by
gesture of pantomimic character; combined with song, and later enriched
by dialogue, this would give rise to the drama. If we further accept
the view that the dialogue in prose was added from the ritual element
seen in the abuse at the horse sacrifice and the Mahāvrata, then within
the Vedic ritual we may discern all the elements for the growth of
drama present.
In this sense we may speak of the drama as having its origin in the
Vedic period, but it may be doubted whether anything is gained by such
a proposition. Unless the hymns of the Ṛgveda present us with real
drama, which is most implausible, we have not the slightest evidence
that the essential synthesis of elements and development of plot, which
constitute a true drama, were made in the Vedic age. On the contrary,
there is every reason to believe that it was through the use of epic
recitations that the latent possibilities of drama were evoked, and the
literary form created. One very important point in this regard has
certainly often been neglected. The Sanskrit drama does not consist, as
the theory suggests, of song and prose as its vital elements; the vast
majority of the stanzas, which are one of its chief features, were
recited, not sung, and it was doubtless from the epic that the practice
of recitation was in the main derived. Professor Oldenberg [35] admits
in fact the great importance of the epic on the development of drama,
but it may be more accurate to say that without epic recitation there
would and could have been no drama at all. Assuredly we have no clear
proof of such a thing as drama existing until later than we have
assurance of the recitation of epic passages by Granthikas, as will be
seen below.
II
POST-VEDIC LITERATURE AND THE ORIGIN OF THE DRAMA
1. THE EPICS
The great epic of India, the Mahābhārata, in the whole extent of its
older portions, does not recognize in any explicit manner the existence
of the drama. [36] The term Naṭa indeed occurs, and, if it meant actor,
the existence of the drama would be proved, but it may equally well
merely denote pantomimist. This conclusion, moreover, is strongly
supported by the strange fact that, if the epic knew the drama, it
should never mention any of its characteristics or such a standing
character as the Vidūṣaka. There is, what is still more significant,
even in the later parts of the epic, such as the Çānti and Anuçāsana
Parvans, no clear allusion to the art, for the passage in the Çānti
[37] in which Professor Hillebrandt has found an allusion to dramatic
artists can perfectly well apply to pantomimes, and in the latter text
[38] the passage in which the commentator Nīlakaṇṭha finds comedians
and dancers (naṭa-nartakāḥ) yields perfectly good senses as
pantomimists and dancers, both occupations there repudiated by
Brahmins. To find the drama we are compelled to have recourse to the
Harivaṅça, [39] which is a deliberate continuation of the Mahābhārata,
and there we have explicit evidence, for we learn of players who made a
drama out of the Rāmāyaṇa legend. But this is of no importance for the
purpose of determining the date of the drama; the Harivaṅça is of
uncertain date, but in all probability, as we have it, it cannot be
placed earlier than the second or third century A.D., long after the
time when there is no doubt of the existence of a Sanskrit drama.
The Rāmāyaṇa lends no aid to the attempt to establish an early
existence of drama; we hear of festivals and concourses (samāja) where
Naṭas and Nartakas delight themselves, [40] and even of the speaking of
Nāṭakas; [41] in another passage the term Vyāmiçraka [42] denotes, if
we believe the commentator, plays in mingled languages. But, accepting
all these references as genuine, which we are not obliged to do, the
passages have manifestly no claim to early date, for other reasons than
the allusions, and leave us again without any early evidence.
But, while the epics cannot be said to know the drama, there is
abundant evidence of the strong influence on the development of the
drama exercised by the recitation of the epics. The long continued
popularity of these recitations is attested throughout the literature;
at the beginning of the seventh century A.D. [43] a Brahmin,
Somaçarman, akin to the royal house of Cambodia, presented to a temple
in that far-off outpost of Indian civilization a complete copy of the
Bhārata, in order that regular recitations might take place, and almost
contemporaneously Bāṇa in the Kādambarī depicts the queen as hastening
to the temple of Çiva to hear the recitation of the epic. Four
centuries later Kṣemendra reproaches his contemporaries with their
equal eagerness to hear such recitations, and their reluctance to carry
out in practice the excellent advice contained in them. We have vivid
accounts from recent time of such recitations not only in temples but
in villages, when the generosity of some rich man has secured the
presence, if need be, for three months or longer of the reciters,
Kathakas, to go over the huge poem, which claims to be an encyclopaedia
of all useful knowledge as well as the best of poems. The reciters
divide themselves into two classes, the Pāṭhakas, who repeat the poem,
and the Dhārakas, who expound it in the vernacular for the edification
of the people, whose deep interest in the recitations is attested; if
the Rāmāyaṇa is the epic chosen for recitation, the departure of the
hero into exile excites their tears and sobs, even to the interruption
of the recital; when he returns and ascends the throne the village is
illuminated and garlanded. [44] Fortunately we have in a bas-relief
[45] from Sānchi, which may safely be placed before the Christian era,
a representation of a group of these Kathakas. We see in it that they
accompanied with music in some degree their recitations, danced, and
indicated by gestures the sentiments of the characters they presented.
We have thus something which in its nature is far from undramatic;
given the use of dialogue, the drama would be present in embryo. This
step is foreshadowed but not actually taken in the account given in the
later additions to the Rāmāyaṇa [46] of the first recitation of that
poem. Vālmīki, the author of the narrative of Rāma’s deeds, teaches the
poem to Kuça and Lava, the children whom Sītā in exile bears to Rāma;
they enter Ayodhyā at the moment when the king performs the horse
sacrifice, and excite the curiosity of the king himself, who hears the
recitation of his own deeds by the two rhapsodes, and recognizes them
for his own sons.
The term Bhārata, [47] which is an appellation of the comedian in the
later texts, attests doubtless the connexion of the rhapsodes with the
growth of the drama. It has survived in the modern form of Bhāṭ
denoting a class of reciters, who are the inheritors of a tradition of
recitation of the epics, and who are expert in genealogy, enjoy general
consideration, and by their mere presence with a caravan assure its
passage in safety. The Bhāratas must be the rhapsodes of the Bhārata
tribe, [48] whose fame is great in the early history of India, whose
special fire is known to the Ṛgveda, and who have a special offering
(hotrā) of their own. The Mahābhārata is the great epic of the family,
preserved by their care. With the passage of time the rhapsodes
doubtless took upon them the newer art of drama. Bhavabhūti in the
Uttararāmacarita shows himself conscious of the debts owed by the drama
to the epic, and the clearest proof is now available in the dramas of
Bhāsa, with their wide indebtedness to the great epic itself.
The term Kuçīlava, which occasionally denotes actor, is apparently
derived from the Kuça and Lava of the Rāmāyaṇa; the mode of formation
of the compound is indeed strange, for it is not obvious why it should
have been formed on the mode of compounds in which the first member
represents a woman’s name, but it is equally, if not more difficult, to
imagine how it could be derived from the prefix ku and çīla manners,
denoting ‘of bad morals’. Weber’s attempt to compare this name with
Çailūṣa of the Vedic texts and Çilālin, who is connected with a Sūtra
for Naṭas, is obviously impossible, and it may be that the name,
derived originally from Kuça and Lava, was later by a witticism altered
to Kuçīlava as a hit against the morals of the actors, which were
recognized on every hand to be bad. [49]
2. THE GRAMMARIANS
In Pāṇini [50] we find mention of Naṭasūtras, text-books for Naṭas,
ascribed to Çilālin and Kṛçāçva; the fact is recorded because of the
formation of the names assumed by their followers, Çailālins and
Kṛçāçvins. The names are curious; it has been suggested by Professor
Lévi to see in them ironical appellations; the Kṛçāçvins are those
whose horses are meagre, with an ironic reference to the great
Indo-Iranian hero Kṛçāçva, while the Çailālins have nothing but stones
for their beds in pitiful contrast with the fame of the Vedic school of
that name, whose Çailāli Brāhmaṇa is known to us. But we unfortunately
are here as ever in no position to establish the meaning of Naṭa, which
may mean no more than a pantomime. The conclusion is important, for
Pāṇini’s date is most probably the fourth century B.C., and the fact
that he has no term certainly denoting drama is of significance.
In Patañjali, [51] the author of the Mahābhāṣya, whose date is
certainly to be placed with reasonable assurance about 140 B.C., we
find much more effective evidence bearing on the existence of drama. We
learn from his criticism on a rule laid down by his predecessor
Kātyāyana, as to the use of the imperfect tense of things which a
person has himself seen, that it was normal to use in his time phrases
describing a past event as if it had occurred before the eyes of the
speaker; we can understand this only of a character in a dramatic
performance of some kind, and it is significant that the phrase cited
in illustration of the usage is ‘Vāsudeva has slain Kaṅsa’. The
reference is to the famous legend of Kṛṣṇa, son of Vasudeva, and his
wicked uncle Kaṅsa, who first sought to destroy him in his childhood,
and afterward paid the penalty of his evil deeds by death at the hands
of Kṛṣṇa. This notice receives further elucidation by a famous passage,
first adduced by Weber, in which Patañjali explains the justification
of the use of phrases such as ‘He causes the death of Kaṅsa’, and ‘He
causes the binding of Bali’. [52] Both these deeds, the actual killing,
the actual binding, are deeds of the remote past; how then can the
present be in place? The answer, we learn, is that the events are
described in the present because the sense is, not that they are being
actually done, but that they are being described. Of the modes of
description no less than three are then set out. In the first place we
have the case of the Çaubhikas or Çobhanikas, who before the eyes of
the spectators actually carry out—naturally in appearance only in the
first case—the killing of Kaṅsa and the binding of Bali; they represent
in fact by action, without words, so far as this passage formally tells
us, the slaying of the wicked Kaṅsa, the binding of the evil Bali.
Secondly, we have the painters; they describe by their paintings, for
on the canvases themselves we see the blows rained on Kaṅsa and the
dragging of him about; a painter, that is to say, kills Kaṅsa and has
Bali bound by painting a scene describing these incidents. Thirdly, we
have those who use words, and not action of the Çaubhika type, the
Granthikas; they also, while relating the fortunes of their subjects
from their birth to their death, make them real to the minds of their
audience, for they divide themselves into two parties, one set adhering
to Kṛṣṇa, and one to Kaṅsa, and they adopt different colours, the
adherents of Kaṅsa black, and those of Kṛṣṇa red, though, by what is
probably an erroneous correction, the colours are ascribed in the
inverse order by many of the manuscripts.
This is clear and intelligible, and it is unfortunate that it has
recently been misunderstood by Professor Lüders, [53] with disastrous
results for the comprehension of the notice. The Çaubhikas are made to
be persons who explain to the audience shadow pictures, a view which
has not even the merit of Indian tradition, and, as will be seen below,
contradicts entirely the facts known as to the shadow play in India,
where it is recorded only in late mediaeval times. The traditional
rendering in India of the statement is recorded by Kaiyaṭa, more than a
thousand years later; it is frankly obscure; Professor Lévi [54]
renders it as meaning that the Çaubhikas are those who teach actors,
representing Kaṅsa, and so on, the mode of recitation, a version which
is doubtless very difficult. The sense accorded to it by Professor
Lüders is that the Çaubhikas explain to the audience dumb actors, a
form of drama which is recorded as performed by the Jhāṁkīs of Bombay
and Mathurā in modern India, but of which in ancient times we have no
certainty, since this is the only passage which even remotely can be
supposed to allude to it. The obvious view, that of Weber, [55] that we
have a reference to a pantomimic killing and binding, seems
irresistible; the use of the causative is explained by this fact; if
Bali and Kaṅsa were persons of to-day the simple verb would express
their binding and slaying; because it is mere actors, the causative is
used, and its use denotes that the act is not now real but an
exposition of a past act. ‘He causes the binding of Bali’ means ‘he
describes the binding of Bali’. The only legitimate doubt on the
passage is that regarding the exact mode of performance of the
Çaubhikas; the word pratyakṣam in the text insists that it is done
before the eyes of the audience, and we may justly assume that the
Çaubhikas performed manual acts. Did they also use dialogue? There is
nothing in the passage either to show that they did or that they did
not; the contrast which follows later with Granthikas, whose medium was
words, is sufficiently pointed if they used action as well as words.
The most that can be said is that Çaubhika or Çobhanika does not obtain
currency later as denoting an actor, which may tell against the view
that Patañjali is here actually alluding to drama proper. Further we
cannot go; to argue that, if he had known drama proper, he must have
clearly mentioned it, is to ignore entirely the manner of Patañjali,
whose silence as to what he must have known is as common as his
incidental mention of current topics.
The error of Professor Lüders in insisting on a literal interpretation
of the passage as referring to different sorts of narrators by words
comes out with special clearness as regards the second class of persons
alluded to by Patañjali. That they are painters whose canvases are
living speeches was clearly recognized by the commentators in India.
Haradatta tells us in the simplest and plainest language that when men
look at a picture on which is shown the death of Kaṅsa at the hands of
Vāsudeva they interpret the picture as the slaying of the wicked Kaṅsa
by the blessed Vāsudeva, and thus by the pictured Vāsudeva cause to be
slain the pictured Kaṅsa, for this is the conception which they form as
they gaze, and he adds, very naturally, that this explains the practice
of saying of artists that they cause the slaying of Kaṅsa, the binding
of Bali. [56] It would be difficult to see how the idea could have been
more forcibly expressed, but Professor Lüders interprets it in the
sense that artists occasionally explain their own pictures to others,
an idea which is not merely wholly impossible, but renders Haradatta’s
language nonsense. On this basis he finds that the Çaubhikas added to
their business of explaining shadow pictures that of showing and
explaining other pictures, in this respect again without any support
from tradition.
Finally Professor Lüders denies any division of parties among the
Granthikas, whose name he derives, like the scholiasts, from the use of
manuscript books in recitation, rejecting the idea of cyclic rhapsodes
suggested by Dr. Dahlmann. [57] The derivation is too speculative in
sense to be relied upon, but there is no doubt that the Granthikas were
reciters. Their exact means of expressing the sense is not quite clear
owing to the unlucky divergence of reading in the text, and the fact
that the precise meaning of the second word in the most probable
reading (çabda-gaḍu-mātram) [58] is wholly unknown. It is, accordingly,
wholly illegitimate to assert that they used words alone, and on the
score of that to deny that they could be said to divide themselves into
two parties, one of followers of Kaṅsa, one of adherents of Kṛṣṇa,
bearing appropriate colours. This view reduces us to the impossible
theory that the division of parties refers to the audience. Apart from
all questions of regard for the Sanskrit language, which Patañjali
should be assumed capable of writing, the ludicrous result is achieved
that among a pious audience of Kṛṣṇa adorers we are to suppose that
there were many who favoured Kaṅsa, the cruel uncle whose vices are
redeemed by not a single virtue, and for whose fate Sanskrit
literature, pious and devout, shows not a sign of regret. The change of
colour, which is asserted to be the only possible sense of the term
varṇānyatvam, wholly without ground, is referred to the spectators, who
turn red with anger if supporters of Kaṅsa, black with fear if they
support Vāsudeva. Professor Hillebrandt, who has unfortunately accepted
the new theory to the extent that he believes that there were persons
who carried round pictures and explained them for a living, justly
declines to believe in the possibility of a Hindu audience containing
persons who wished the success of Kaṅsa, and he accepts the plain fact
that the Granthikas took parts. The colours he explains, however, as
indicating the sentiments which the two parties feel, a view for which
there is the authority of the Nāṭyaçāstra which ascribes to each
sentiment an appropriate colour, and, accepting the reading of
Kielhorn, he is compelled to assume that the supporters of Kaṅsa on the
stage showed as the dominant sentiment fury, while those of Kṛṣṇa are
reduced to manifest fear as the sentiment of their side. But it is
frankly incredible that the followers of Kṛṣṇa, the invincible, who
calmly and coolly proceeds from victory to victory culminating in the
overthrow of his wicked uncle, accomplished with ease and celerity,
should show fear as the dominant sentiment, and it is clear that on
this view we should accept the reading which inverts the descriptions,
[59] thus allotting to the supporters of Kaṅsa the fear, to those of
Kṛṣṇa the fury of slaughter and revenge. But in this trait it is more
probable, as will be seen below, that we have a trace of the religious
origin of the drama. [60]
3. RELIGION AND THE DRAMA
We seem in fact to have in the Mahābhāṣya evidence of a stage in which
all the elements of drama were present; we have acting in dumb show, if
not with words also; we have recitations divided between two parties.
Moreover, we hear of Naṭas who not only recite but also sing; we find
that in the days of the Mahābhāṣya the Naṭa’s hunger is as proverbial
as the dancing of the peacock, that it was no rare thing for him to
receive blows, and that a special term, Bhrūkuṅsa, existed to name him
who played women’s parts, appropriately made up. [61] The Mahābhāṣya
does not seem to recognize women as other than dancers or singers, [62]
so that it may well be that in the infancy of the dramatic art the
rôles of women were reserved for men, though in the classical drama
this was by no means necessarily the case. We cannot absolutely prove
that in Patañjali’s time the drama in its full form of action allied to
speech was present, but we know that all its elements existed, and we
may legitimately and properly accept its existence in a primitive form.
That form, from the express mention of the subjects of the dramatic
exhibitions, we may deduce to have been of the nature of a religious
drama. It is difficult not to see in the Kaṅsavadha, the death of Kaṅsa
at the hands of Kṛṣṇa, the refined version of an older vegetation
ritual in which the representative of the outworn spirit of vegetation
is destroyed. Colour is given to this theory by the remarkable fact
that in one reading the partisans of the young Kṛṣṇa are red in hue,
those of Kaṅsa are black. Now as Kṛṣṇa’s name indicates black, it would
be almost inevitable that the original attribution of red to his
followers should be corrected by well-meaning scribes to black, and
this explains effectively the transposition found in the bulk of the
manuscripts. In the red hue of Kṛṣṇa’s supporters as against the black
of those of Kaṅsa we probably have a distinct reminiscence of another
side of the slaying of the vegetation spirit. [63] The contest is often
presented as one between summer and winter, and we have seen in the
Mahāvrata what is probably a primitive form of this contest; the white
Vaiçya fights with the black Çūdra for the sun, and attains possession
of its symbolical form. The red of Kṛṣṇa’s following then proclaims him
as the genius of summer who overcomes the darkness of the winter.
With this view accords most interestingly the theory of the origin of
the Greek drama from a mimic conflict of summer and winter, as
developed by Dr. Farnell. [64] In the legend of the conflict between
the Boiotian Xanthos and the Neleid Melanthos we hear that at the
moment of conflict Melanthos descried a form beside his foe, whom he
taunted with bringing a friend to aid him. Xanthos turned round, and
Melanthos slew him. The form was that of Dionysos Melanaigis, and for
his intervention the Athenians rewarded him by admission to the
Apatouria, the festival of deceit. Thus the black Melanthos with the
aid of Dionysos of the black goatskin slays the fair; the dark winter
destroys the light of summer. Even in modern times in Northern Thrace
[65] is celebrated a popular festival in which a man clad in a goatskin
is hailed as king, scatters seed over the crowd—obviously to secure
fertility—and ultimately is cast into the river, the usual fate for the
outworn spirit of vegetation. In a similar mummery performed near the
ancient Thracian capital there is a band of mummers, clad in goatskins,
of whom one is killed and lamented by his wife. It is natural to deduce
hence that tragedy had its origin in a primitive passion-play performed
by men in goatskins, in which an incarnation of a divine spirit was
slain and lamented, whence the dirge-like nature of the Greek drama.
The primitive Indian play differs in one essential from this suggested
origin of tragedy; the victory lies, as we have seen, with Kṛṣṇa, with
the Vaiçya, not with the dark Kaṅsa, the black Çūdra. We have,
therefore, not sorrow, though there is death, and the fact that the
Sanskrit drama insists on a happy ending is unquestionably most
effectively explained if it be brought into connexion with the fact of
the origin of the drama in a passion play whose end was happiness
through death, not grief. This view has received a remarkable measure
of confirmation from the discovery of the plays of Bhāsa; that
dramatist does not conform to the rule of the later theory that there
must be no slaying on the stage, but he most assuredly conforms to the
principle of the Kaṅsavadha that the slaying is to be of an enemy of
the god; the Ūrubhan̄ga, which has erroneously [66] been treated as a
tragedy is, on the contrary, the depicting of the deplorable fate of an
enemy of Kṛṣṇa, and we have from Bhāsa himself the Bālacarita which
describes the death of several monsters at Kṛṣṇa’s hands, and finally
of Kaṅsa himself.
In the recitation of the Granthikas divided into two parties we have an
interesting parallel to the place played according to Aristotle [67] by
the dithyramb in the development of the Greek drama. Action was
required neither of the singers of the dithyramb nor of the Granthikas,
but it was only necessary in one case and the other to introduce
action, and the form of the drama would be complete.
Both in the Greek and the Sanskrit drama the essential fact in the
contest, from which their origin may thus be traced, is the existence
of a conflict. In the Greek drama in its development this conflict came
to dominate the play, and in the Indian drama this characteristic is
far less prominent. But it is distinctly present in all the higher
forms of the art, and we can hardly doubt that it was from this
conflict that these higher forms were evolved from the simplicity of
the early material out of which the drama rose.
For the religious origin of drama a further fact can be adduced, the
character of the Vidūṣaka, the constant and trusted companion of the
king, who is the normal hero of an Indian play. The name denotes him as
given to abuse, [68] and not rarely in the dramas he and one of the
attendants on the queen engage in contests of acrid repartee, in which
he certainly does not fare the better. It would be absurd to ignore in
this regard the dialogue between the Brahmin and the hetaera in the
Mahāvrata, where the exchange of coarse abuse is intended as a
fertility charm.
Another religious element may, it has been suggested, be conjectured as
present in the Vidūṣaka, the reminiscence of the figure of the Çūdra
who is beaten in the ceremony of the purchase of the Soma; possibly it
is to this that the hideous appearance attributed to the Vidūṣaka is
due. Professor Hillebrandt [69] compares the history of the Harlequin
who was originally a representative of the Devil and not a figure of
mirth. It may be that these factors concurred in shaping the character
of the Vidūṣaka, but the fact that he is treated as a Brahmin is
conclusive that the abusive side of his character is the more
important. It is to this doubtless that his use of Prākrit is due; it
cannot be conceived that a dialogue of abuse was carried on by the
Brahmin in the sacred language, which the hetaera of the primitive
social conditions of the Mahāvrata could not possibly be expected to
appreciate. Professor Hillebrandt suggests indeed that there is change
in the character of the Vidūṣaka in the literature as compared with the
account given in the Nāṭyaçāstra, but there is clearly no adequate
ground for this view.
There is further abundant evidence of the close connexion of the drama
with religion; it is attested in the legend of Kṛṣṇa whose feat of
slaying Kaṅsa is carried out in the amphitheatre in the presence of the
public, where he defeats the wrestlers of his uncle’s court, and
finally slays the tyrant. The festival of his nativity is essentially a
popular spectacle; as developed later, in detail which has often evoked
comparison with the Nativity, [70] the young mother, Devakī, is shown
on a couch in a stable, with her infant clinging to her; Yaçodā is also
there with the little girl, who in the legend meets the fate intended
for Kṛṣṇa by Kaṅsa; gods and spirits surround them; Vasudeva stands
sword in hand to guard them; the Apsarases sing, the Gandharvas dance,
the shepherdesses celebrate the birth, and all night is spent by the
audience in gazing at the gay scene. Kṛṣṇa, again, is the lover of the
shepherdesses and the inventor of the ardent dance of love, the
Rāsamaṇḍala. Of great importance in this regard is the persistence in
popularity of the Yātrās, which have survived the decadence of the
regular Sanskrit drama. They tell of the loves of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā, his
favourite among the Gopīs, for cowherdesses replace in the pastoral the
shepherdesses of European idyllic poetry. Kṛṣṇa is by no means a
faithful lover, but the end is always the fruition of Rādhā’s love for
him. And in Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda we have in literary form [71] the
expression of the substance of the Yātrā, lyric songs, to which must be
added the charms of music and the dance. A further consideration of the
highest importance attests the influence of the Kṛṣṇa cult: the normal
prose language of the drama is Çaurasenī Prākrit, and we can only
suppose that it is so because it was the ordinary speech of the people
among whom the drama first developed into definite shape. Once this was
established, we may feel assured, the usage would be continued wherever
the drama spread; we have modern evidence of the persistence of the
Brajbhāshā, the language of the revival of the Kṛṣṇa cult after the
Mahomedan invasions in the ancient home of Çaurasenī, as the language
of Kṛṣṇa devotion beyond the limits of its natural home. [72] Mathurā,
the great centre of Kṛṣṇa worship, still celebrates the Holi festival
with rites which resemble the May-day merriment of older England, and
still more the phallic orgies of pagan Rome as described by Juvenal. It
is an interesting coincidence with the comparison made by Growse [73]
of the Holi and the May-day rites that Haraprasād Śāstrin should have
found an explanation of the origin of the Indian drama in the fact that
at the preliminaries of the play there is special attention devoted to
the salutation of Indra’s banner, which is a flagstaff decorated with
colours and bunting. [74] The Indian legend of the origin of drama
tells that, when Bharata was bidden teach on earth the divine art
invented by Brahmā, the occasion decided upon was the banner festival
(dhvajamaha) of Indra. The Asuras rose in wrath, but Indra seized the
staff of his banner and beat them off, whence the staff of the banner
(jarjara) is used as a protection at the beginning of the drama. The
drama was, therefore, once connected with the ceremonies of bringing in
the Maypole from the woods at the close of the winter, but in India
this rite fell at the close of the rainy season, and the ceremony was
converted into a festival of thanksgiving for Indra’s victory over the
clouds, the Asuras. The theory in itself is inadequate, but the
preliminaries of the drama are sufficient to show the extraordinary
importance attached to propitiation of the gods, a relic of the old
religious service, which would be quite out of place if the origin of
the drama had been secular.
The importance of Kṛṣṇa must not cause us to ignore the prominent place
occupied by Çiva in the history of the drama. To him and his spouse are
ascribed the invention of the Tāṇḍava [75] and the Lāsya, the violent
and the tender and seductive dances, which are so important an element
in the representation of a play. Nor is it surprising that a god who in
the Vedic period itself is hailed as the patron of men of every
profession and occupation should be regarded as the special patron of
the artists. But it is probable that this importance in the drama is
later than that of Kṛṣṇa, and it is not without significance that
Bhāsa, who is older than any of the other classical dramatists, unlike
them, celebrates in full Kṛṣṇa, and is a Vaiṣṇava, while Çūdraka,
Kālidāsa, Harṣa, and Bhavabhūti alike are adorers of Çiva in their
prefaces. The Mālavikāgnimitra of Kālidāsa introduces a dancing-master
who speaks of the creation of the dance by the god and its close
connexion with the drama. The sect of the Pāçupatas, adorers of Çiva as
lord of creatures, include in their ritual the song and the dance, the
latter consisting in expressing the sentiments of the devotees by means
of corporeal movement in accord with the rules of the Nāṭyaçāstra. In
the decadent ceremonial of the Tantras the ritual includes the
representation of Çiva by men, and of his spouse as Çakti, female
energy, by women.
The part of Rāma in the growth of drama was certainly not less
important than that of Kṛṣṇa himself, for the recitation of the
Rāmāyaṇa was popular throughout the country, and has persisted in
vogue. The popularity of the story is proved to the full by the effect
of the Rām-Līlā or Daçārha festival, at which the story is presented in
dumb show, children taking the places of Rāma, Sītā, and Lakṣmaṇa
before a vast concourse of pilgrims and others. No effort is made to
speak the parts, but a series of tableaux recalls to the minds of the
devotees, to whom the whole tale is familiar, the course of the history
of the hero, his banishment, his search for Sītā, and his final
triumph. In Rāma’s case the influence of the epic on the drama appears
in its full development. [76]
The religious importance of the drama is seen distinctly in the
attitude of the Buddhists towards it. [77] The extreme dubiety of the
date of the Buddhist Suttas renders it impossible to come to any
satisfactory decision regarding the existence of drama at any early
date, while the terms employed, such as Visūkadassana, Nacca, and
Pekkhā, and the reference to Samajjas leave us wholly without any
ground for belief in an actual drama. We see, however, that the
objection of the sacred Canon to monks engaging in the amusement of
watching these shows, whatever their nature, was gradually overcome,
and it is an important fact that the earliest dramas known to us by
fragments are the Buddhist dramas of Açvaghoṣa. With the acceptance of
the drama, the Lalitavistara [78] does not hesitate to speak of the
Buddha as including knowledge of the drama as among his
accomplishments; the Buddha is even called one who has entered to gaze
on the drama of the Great Law. The legend is willing to admit that even
in Buddha’s time there were dramas, for Bimbisāra had one performed in
honour of a pair of Nāga kings, [79] and the Avadānaçataka, [80] a
collection of pious tales, places the drama in remote antiquity. It was
performed by the bidding of Krakucchanda, a far distant Buddha in the
city Çobhāvatī by a troupe of actors; the director undertook the rôle
of the Buddha himself, while the other members of the troupe took the
rôle of monks; the same troupe in a later age, under Gautama the Buddha
himself, performed at Rājagṛha, the actress Kuvalayā gaining enormous
fame, and seducing the monks, until the Buddha terminated her career by
turning her into a hideous old woman. She then repented and attained
the rank of a saint. The same idea of a play bearing on the life of the
Buddha himself is preserved in another tale in Tibet where an actor
from the south sets up in rivalry with the monks in giving
representations of the life of the Buddha. These Buddhist dramas have
left their imprint on the form of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, the Lotus of
the Good Law, itself, which has none of the epic character of the
Lalitavistara, but is presented as a series of dialogues in which the
Buddha himself, now supernatural, is the chief, but not the only
interlocutor. The same love of the Buddhists for artistic effects is
seen in the use of music, song, dance, and some scenic effects in the
ceremonial attaching to the foundation of Thūpas in Ceylon by a prince
of the royal house; the Mahāvaṅsa assumes that dramas were displayed on
such occasions, though this may be an anachronism. The frescoes of
Ajantā show the keen appreciation felt for music, song, and the dance,
though they date from a time when there is certain evidence of the full
existence of the drama. We find also in Tibet [81] the relics of
ancient popular religious plays in the contests between the spirits of
good and those of evil for mankind, which are part of the spring and
autumn festivals. The actors wear strange garments and masks; monks
represent the good spirits, laymen the evil spirits of men. The whole
company first sings prayers and benedictions; then an evil spirit seeks
to seduce into evil a man; he would yield but for the intervention of
his friends; the evil spirits then arrive in force, a struggle ensues,
in which the men would be defeated but for the intervention of the good
spirits, and the whole ends with the chasing away with blows of the
representatives of the spirits of evil.
With Jainism it is as with Buddhism; we find censure of such ideal
enjoyments as the arts akin to the drama, but also recognition of song,
music, dance, and scenic presentations in the Canon. [82] But it is
hopeless, in view of the utter uncertainty of the date of that
collection, to draw any conclusion from it as to the age of the drama.
As in the case of Buddhism, Jainism in its development was glad to have
recourse to the drama as a means of propagating its beliefs. [83]
The evidence is conclusive on the close connexion of religion and the
drama, and it strongly suggests that it was from religion that the
decisive impulse to dramatic creation was given. The importance of the
epic is doubtless enormous, but the mere recitation of the epics,
however closely it might approach to the drama, does not overstep the
bounds. The element which fails to be added is that of the dramatic
contest, the Agon of the Greek drama. That this was supplied by the
development of such primitive vegetation rituals as that of the
Mahāvrata, until they assumed the concrete and human form of the Kṛṣṇa
and Kaṅsa legend would be a conjecture worth consideration, but without
possibility of proof if we had not the notice of the Mahābhāṣya which
expressly shows that the story of Kṛṣṇa and Kaṅsa could both be
represented by Granthikas, who coloured their faces and expressed
vividly the emotions of those whom they represented, but also, in dumb
show seemingly, by Çaubhikas. If there did not exist an Indian drama
proper, in which these sides were combined when Patañjali wrote, it is
fair to say that it would be surprising if it did not develop shortly
afterwards, and we have perfectly certain proof that the Naṭas of
Patañjali were much more than dancers or acrobats; they sang and
recited. The balance of probability, therefore, is that the Sanskrit
drama came into being shortly after, if not before, the middle of the
second century B.C., and that it was evoked by the combination of epic
recitations with the dramatic moment of the Kṛṣṇa legend, in which a
young god strives against and overcomes enemies.
The drama which was nascent in Patañjali’s time must be taken to have
been, like the classical drama, one in which Sanskrit was mingled with
Prākrit in the speeches of the characters. The epic recitations of the
slaying of Kaṅsa which he records must have been in Sanskrit, but, if
the drama was to be popular—and the Nāṭyaçāstra in its tale of the
origin of the art recognizes both its epic and popular characteristics,
the humble people who figured in it must have been allowed to speak in
their own vernacular; this accords brilliantly with the presence of
Çaurasenī as the normal prose of the drama of the classical stage. A
different view is taken by Professor Lévi, [84] who conceives that the
drama sprang first into being in Prākrit, while Sanskrit was only later
applied at the time when Sanskrit, long reserved as a sacred language,
re-entered into use as the language of literature; India, he contends,
was never anxious for contact with reality, and it is absurd to suppose
that the mixture of languages was adopted as a representation of the
actual speech-usage of the time and circles in which drama came into
being. This contention is supported by the observation that a number of
the technical terms of the Nāṭyaçāstra are of strange appearance, and
the frequency of cerebral letters in them suggests Prākrit origin. The
contention can hardly be treated as satisfactory, nor is it clear how
it can possibly be reconciled with the evidence of Patañjali. The early
drama, it seems clear, was not secular in origin, and Professor Lévi
emphasizes its dependence on the cult of Kṛṣṇa; to refuse to use
Sanskrit in it, therefore, would be extremely strange, unless we are to
assume that the existence of true drama goes back to a period
considerably earlier than Patañjali, and that it came into being among
a milieu which was not Brahminical. There are very serious difficulties
in such a theory; we may legitimately hold that such a literary form as
the true drama was not created until the Brahmin genius fused the ethic
and religious agonistic motives into a new creation of the highest
importance for the literary history of India. The presence of a number
of Prākrit terms in the Nāṭyaçāstra is probable, but it does not mean
that a theory of drama was first excogitated in Prākrit; the main
theory in all its essentials is expressed in Sanskrit, and all that is
borrowed from Prākrit is some technical terms of subsidiary importance,
borrowed, doubtless, from the minor arts, which go to aid but do not
constitute the drama, song, music, dancing, and the mimetic art.
The religious origin of the Sanskrit drama in Kṛṣṇa worship is also
admitted as part, however, of a wider thesis by Dr. Ridgeway, [85] who
contends that Greek drama, and drama all over the world, are the
outcome of the reverence paid to the spirits of the dead, which again
is the source of all religion, a revival in fact of the doctrine of
animism in one of its connotations. The contention as applied to the
Indian drama involves the view that the actors in the primitive drama
were representatives of the spirits of the dead, and that the
performance was meant to gratify the dead. It is supported by the
doctrine that not only Rāma and Kṛṣṇa were believed once to be men, but
that Çiva himself had this origin; [86] all gods indeed are derived
from the memory of noble men. The evidence adduced for this thesis is
simply non-existent. A valuable collection of material due to Sir J. H.
Marshall proves the prevalence throughout India of popular dramatic
performances celebrating the deeds of Rāma and Kṛṣṇa, and the modern
Indian drama deals also with the lives of distinguished historical
characters such as Açoka or Candragupta. But there is nothing to show
that the idea of gratifying the dead by the performances of dramatic
scenes based on their history was ever present to any mind in India,
either early or late. Rāma and Kṛṣṇa to their worshippers were long
before the rise of so late an art as drama, just like Çiva, great gods,
of whom it would be absurd to think as dead men requiring funeral rites
to give them pleasure. Nor is it necessary further to criticize his
reconstruction of Vedic religion on the basis of his animistic theory,
for these issues of origins have no possible relevance to the specific
question of the origin of the Indian drama. Whether elsewhere the
worship of the dead resulted in drama is a matter open to grave doubt;
certainly in the case of the Greek drama, which offers the most
interesting parallel to that of India, the evidence of derivation from
funeral games is wholly defective.
Definite support for this view of the origin of drama may be found in
the accounts of dramatic performances which are given in the Harivaṅça,
the supplement of the Mahābhārata. That work cannot, as has been
mentioned, be dated with any certainty or probability earlier than the
dramas of Açvaghoṣa, and, therefore, it cannot be appealed to as the
earliest mention now extant of the dramatic art. But it is of value as
showing how closely connected the drama was in early times with the
Kṛṣṇa cult, thus supplementing the conclusions to be derived from the
Mahābhāṣya, and falling into line with the evidence of Bhāsa.
At the festival performed by the Yādavas after the death of Andhaka, we
find that the women of the place danced and sang to music, while Kṛṣṇa
induced celestial nymphs to aid the merriment by similar exhibitions,
including a representation by the Apsarases, apparently by dancing, of
the death of Kaṅsa and Pralamba, the fall of Cāṇūra in the
amphitheatre, and various other exploits of Kṛṣṇa. After they had
performed, the sage Nārada amused the audience by a series of what may
fairly be called comic turns; he imitated the gestures, the movements,
and even the laughter of such distinguished personages as Satyabhāmā,
Keçava, Arjuna, Baladeva, and the young princess, the daughter of
Revata, causing infinite amusement to the audience, and reminding us of
the part played by the Vidūṣaka in the drama. The Yādavas then supped,
and this enjoyment was followed by further songs and dances by the
Apsarases, whose performance thus resembled a modern ballet with songs
interspersed. [87]
In a later passage [88] in connexion with the story of the demon
Vajranābha, whom Indra asked Kṛṣṇa to dispose of, we learn of an actor
Bhadra who delighted all by his excellent power of representation;
Vajranābha is induced to demand his presence in his abode, and Kṛṣṇa’s
son Pradyumna and his friends disguise themselves to penetrate there;
Pradyumna is to be the hero, Sāmba the Vidūṣaka, and Gada the assistant
of the stage director, while maidens, skilled in song, dance, and
music, are the actresses; they delight the demons by presenting the
story of Viṣṇu’s descent on earth to slay the chief of the Rākṣasas, a
dramatised version of the Rāmāyaṇa, presenting the figures of Rāma, his
brother, and in special the episode of Ṛṣyaçṛn̄ga and Çāntā, that
curious old legend based on a fertility- and rain-ritual. [89] After
the play the actors showed their skill in depicting situations
suggested by their hosts, and Vajranābha himself induces them to
perform an episode from the legend of Kubera, the rendezvous of Rambhā;
after music from the orchestra the actresses sing, Pradyumna enters and
recites the benediction, and then a verse on the descent of the Ganges,
which is connected with the subject-matter of the piece; he then
assumes the rôle of Nalakūbara, Sāmba is his Vidūṣaka, Çūra plays
Rāvaṇa, Manovatī Rambhā. Nalakūbara curses Rāvaṇa, and consoles Rambhā,
and the audience was delighted by the skilled acting of the Yādavas,
who by a magic illusion had presented mount Kailāsa on the stage.
4. THEORIES OF THE SECULAR ORIGIN OF THE DRAMA
Professors Hillebrandt [90] and Konow [91] agree in the main in
maintaining the view that it is an error to look to religious
ceremonies as explaining the origin of the drama. True, these
ceremonies have a share in the development of the drama, but they
themselves are merely the introduction into the ritual of elements
which have a popular origin. We are to believe that a popular mime
existed, which, with the epic, lies at the bottom of the Sanskrit
drama.
It must be admitted at once that we have extremely little authentic
information regarding the performers of these mimes, believed to have
existed before the origin of drama. The statements made by Professor
Konow, who finds in them experts in song, dance, music, but also in
matters such as jugglery, pantomime, and the allied arts, all rest on
evidence which is either contemporary with the Mahābhāṣya or later than
it; the fact that Naṭas sang is recorded for us in the Mahābhāṣya,
which of course may refer to genuine actors, and not to professors of
the mime, and their connexion with sweet words is attested in the
Jātaka prose only, which dates several centuries after the existence of
the true drama. We need not, of course, doubt that music, song, and
dance, popular in the Vedic age, preserved that character throughout
the later period, and we have evidence from Açoka’s time onwards of the
existence of Samājas which he condemned, doubtless because of the
fights of animals which took place at them. [92] That Naṭas and
Nartakas were present at such festivals we learn from the Rāmāyaṇa; but
we cannot say whether pantomimes and dancers or actors and dancers are
referred to. Our knowledge, in fact, of the primitive mime is
hypothetical, and it rests in effect on certain considerations which
Professor Hillebrandt adduces to show a popular as opposed to a
religious origin for drama. His view is supported by the general
argument that the drama as comedy is a natural expression of man’s
primitive life of pleasure and appreciation of humour and wit. It is,
however, unnecessary to enter into any examination of this general
principle, which he defends against the theory accepted by Dr. Gray
that it is highly problematical whether any view of pleasure to the
actors or audience is associated with primitive drama. [93] These
ultimate origins are a matter of indifference to the concrete question
of the origin of so late a production as the classical drama of India.
That the mimetic character is natural to man may be granted; the
essential point in question is whether the Sanskrit drama in its
characteristics shows signs of religious or secular origin.
Of the points adduced by Professor Hillebrandt most have clearly no
relevance in the argument. The use of Sanskrit and dialects in the
classical drama is claimed as a proof of popular origin; as has been
explained above, the Prākrit element is due to the fact that the drama
contains an essential popular, but also religious, element, the Kṛṣṇa
worship. The mixture of prose and song, and the union of both with
music and the dance, are as natural on the theory of religious origin
as on that of secular derivation. The simplicity of the Indian stage,
which knows no arrangements for providing changes of scenery, is
certainly no proof of secular origin; the Vedic religion is singularly
sparing in any external apparatus, and there is the strongest
similarity between its practice to mark out altars for its great
sacrifices at pleasure, and to have no regular sacrificial buildings,
and the tradition throughout the Sanskrit dramas which neither requires
nor needs fixed theatres.
The popular origin of the Vidūṣaka is obvious, but the point is whether
this origin is religious or secular, and we have seen that the Vedic
literature offers us in the Brahmin of the Mahāvrata the prototype,
possibly with reminiscences of the Çūdra in the Soma sale, of this
figure, a fact admitted by the supporters of the theory of secular
origin. It is manifestly unnecessary and illegitimate, when the descent
of this figure from the Vedic literature is clear, to insist that it
was borrowed directly from popular usage, for which there is no proof,
but only conjecture.
There remains the argument derived from the fact that the classical
drama usually begins with a dialogue between the Sūtradhāra and the
Naṭī, who is usually represented as his wife; in this we have, it is
said, a reflex of the old popular mime. But an examination of the
practice and theory, as found in Bhāsa and the Nāṭyaçāstra, shows that
we have no simple or naïve arrangement, but a very elaborate literary
device by which the actors bridge over the transition from the
preliminaries of the drama to the drama itself. The preliminaries are
essentially popular religion, and the detail was left largely in the
hands of the Sūtradhāra and his assistants, aided by a chorus of
dancers and by musicians; they are doubtless older than the drama, and
it was an ingenious and happy device which was invented to carry on the
preliminaries, so that the transition to the drama was effective and
satisfactory. It is, however, a perversion of all probability to find
in this item the trace of a primitive popular secular performance.
The evidence, therefore, for a secular origin disappears; it is
curious, indeed, that Professor Hillebrandt [94] himself adduces proof
that the western parallel of the Vidūṣaka is connected with religious
ceremonies rather than a secular creation. But what is most remarkable
of all is that Professor Konow adduces as evidence of the secular
origin of the drama the Yātrās, which are essentially bound up with the
religion of Kṛṣṇa, and the rough dramatic sketches performed at Almora
at the Holi festival, also essentially religious. [95] It is indeed to
ignore how essentially religion enters into the life of the Hindu to
imagine that it is possible to trace the beginnings of drama to a
detached love of amusement. It is apparently difficult for the modern
mind to appreciate that religion may cover matters which to us appear
scarcely connected with it or even repugnant; but this is a delusion
largely due to the narrower and more exalted conception of religion of
the northern and western lands of Europe.
Less plausible still is the attempt of Pischel [96] to find evidence
that the puppet-play is the source of the Sanskrit drama, and that
moreover it has its home in India, whence it has spread over the world.
The curious and odd art may indeed have an Indian origin, but it would
be wholly unwise to suppose that the drama is due to it, nor is the
theory apparently accepted on any side at the present time. The
existence of such a play is attested by the Mahābhārata, [97] though
the antiquity of the device is not thus made clear; in the
Kathāsaritsāgara, following perhaps the Bṛhatkathā of Guṇāḍhya,
possibly of the third century A.D., we hear of a damsel, daughter of
the wonderful craftsman Asura Maya, who amused her companion with
puppets which could speak, dance, fly, fetch water, or pluck and bring
a garland. In the Bālarāmāyaṇa of Rājaçekhara Rāvaṇa is represented as
deceived by a puppet made to resemble Sītā, in whose mouth a parrot was
placed to give his entreaties suitable replies. Shaṅkar Pāṇḍuraṅg
Paṇḍit [98] records of his time that in the Marāṭha and Kanarese
country there are travelling marionette theatres, the only form of
drama known in the villages; the puppets made of wood or paper are
managed by the director, whose style is Sūtradhāra; they can stand or
lie, dance or fight. From this puppet-play, it was suggested, the names
of the Sūtradhāra, as the puller of the strings, and of the Sthāpaka,
arranger, his assistant, passed over to the legitimate drama. The
Vidūṣaka, in Pischel’s view, owed also his origin to the puppet-play.
Professor Hillebrandt [99] has argued against this theory on the ground
that the puppet-play assumes the pre-existence of the drama, on which
it must essentially be based, and he then uses the early date of the
puppet-play as a proof of the still earlier existence of the drama. The
latter argument, however, is unsatisfactory on various grounds. Apart
from the fact that we cannot date the epic references or prove them
earlier than the Mahābhāṣya, we have the doubt whether such a
contention can possibly be justified. The use of puppets is primarily,
of course, derived from the make-belief of children in playing with
dolls; the terms for puppets which denote ‘little daughter’ (putrikā,
puttalī, puttalikā, duhitṛkā), show this clearly enough, and the
popularity of puppets is indicated by the erotic game known as the
imitation of puppets, where the word for puppet (pāñcālī) suggests that
the home of the puppet-play in India was the Pañcāla country. The
growth of the drama doubtless brought with it the use of puppets to
imitate it in brief, and from the drama came the Vidūṣaka, and not vice
versa.
Though Pischel’s theory [100] of the puppet-play as the origin of drama
has failed to find supporters, the shadow play, on whose importance in
India he was the first to lay stress, has emerged in lieu in the hands
of Professor Lüders [101] as an essential element in the development of
the Sanskrit drama, a position accepted by Professor Konow. The place
found for the drama is in connexion with the displays of the Çaubhikas
of the Mahābhāṣya. Owing to the misinterpretation of that passage it is
held that the Çaubhikas were persons who explained matters to the
audience to supplement either dumb actors [102] or shadow figures. It
is admitted by Professor Lüders that there is no proof which of these
two eventualities is correct, but he endeavours both to prove the
existence of the shadow-play in early India and to show that the
Çaubhikas had the function of showing them. Based on this
misinterpretation of the Mahābhāṣya and on the hypotheses—wholly in the
air—which it necessitates, is his view that the influence of the epic
on the drama was conveyed through the use of shadow-figures to
illustrate the epic recitation; this, united with the art of the old
Naṭas, gave birth to drama, though he is not certain whether such a
real drama existed or not at the time of Patañjali, and Konow sets its
appearance much later.
The early evidence adduced for the existence of the shadow-drama is
wholly unreliable. Professor Konow suggests that the term Rūpa used in
the fourth Rock Edict of Açoka, where he speaks of exhibiting
spectacles of the dwellings of the gods, of elephants and bonfires,
refers to a shadow device, in apparent ignorance of the true sense
abundantly illustrated by the attested facts as to the mode of such
representations in Buddhist literature; [103] he accepts the wholly
absurd view that Rūpaka as a name of the drama is derived from such
shadow projections, while in fact it obviously denotes the visible
presentation, the normal and early sense of Rūpa. Equally unfortunate
is the effort to discover that the Sītābengā cave [104] shows signs of
grooves in front, which might have served in connexion with the curtain
necessary for a shadow play, and much more so is the effort to explain
Nepathya, the name of the tiring-room behind the curtain in the
Sanskrit drama, from a misunderstood Prākrit nevaccha, which in its
turn might represent a Sanskrit naipāṭhya—never found—denoting the
place for the reader; apparently the shadows are in this view explained
by some person behind the curtain. The philological combination is
quite impossible.
Pischel’s evidence for the early existence of the shadow-drama is all
of it without value. The term rupparūpakam occurs in v. 394 of the
comparatively old Therīgāthā of the Buddhist Canon, but it may indicate
a puppet-play, and this is rendered very probable by the mention of a
puppet only just before in the text; if not, it doubtless means, as
taken by the commentator, a piece of jugglery, an art always loved in
India; unfortunately the age of the text is uncertain, so that even for
the puppet-play it gives no precise date. It is certain that
rūpadakkha, a term used in the Milindapañha [105]—a work of dubious
date—has no such reference, nor lūpadakha in a cave at Jogīmārā. To
find rūpopajīvana in the Mahābhārata used in the sense of shadow-play
is impossible; the explanation is given by Nīlakaṇṭha, [106] and proves
the existence in his time, the seventeenth century A.D., of the custom,
but the term is used in close proximity with appearing on the stage
(ran̄gāvataraṇa), and there is conclusive evidence that the word refers
to the deplorable immorality of the players, who actually have as a
synonym in the lexicons the style of ‘living by (the dishonour of)
their wives (jāyājīva)’. The same fact explains the term rūpopajīvin
used by Varāhamihira in the sixth century A.D. in proximity to
painters, writers, and singers: the actor is essentially mercenary.
[107] It is impossible to accept the suggestion that the Aindrajālikas,
who appear working magic results in the Ratnāvalī, the
Prabodhacandrodaya, and the Pūrvapīṭhikā of the Daçakumāracarita, were
really shadow-dramatists; Indian magicians are well known even at
present, and the illusions which to some extent they produce have
nothing whatever to do with shadow-plays. The scenes which the magician
describes to the king in the Ratnāvalī were doubtless left to the
imagination of the audience, just as was the apparent fire which burned
the inner apartments and enveloped the princess. To believe in realism
in these cases runs contrary to the stage directions of the play
itself. From the name Çaubhika, with its Prākrit equivalent Sobhiya,
nothing whatever can be made out; the word has no relation to shadows
and is never explained by any authority in that sense.
We are left, therefore, with the evidence to be derived from the term
Chāyānāṭaka, which is interpreted by Pischel as a ‘shadow-drama’, and
is applied to several dramas, among which the oldest which can be dated
with sufficient certainty is the Dūtān̄gada of Subhaṭa in the thirteenth
century A.D. The exact meaning of the term is uncertain, as it might
denote a ‘drama in the state of a shadow’, and this would accord
perfectly with the Dūtān̄gada itself. That such a drama was a
shadow-drama is best supported by the Dharmābhyudaya of
Meghaprabhācārya, [108] which is styled a Chāyānāṭyaprabandha, and in
which a definite stage direction is found directing that, when the king
expresses his intention to become an ascetic, a puppet is to be placed
inside the curtain in the attire of an ascetic. But the date of this
play is uncertain, and it is extremely difficult to argue with any
certainty from it to the Dūtān̄gada; why, it is inevitable to ask,
should the latter play contain no stage direction of this kind? We know
that the shadow-drama arose in some part of India, for Nīlakaṇṭha
recognizes it, but we have no evidence that it existed at the time of
the Dūtān̄gada.
Whatever judgement be passed on this view, [109] and the matter must be
left undecided in the absence of any effective evidence, it is wholly
impossible to accept the argument of Professor Lüders which would take
the Dūtān̄gada as the type of Chāyānāṭaka, and thence deduce that the
Mahānāṭaka and the Haridūta are shadow-dramas. The one Chāyānāṭya which
we know to have been a shadow-drama in fact is an ordinary play without
kinship to the Dūtān̄gada, and the same remark applies to the other
dramas known to us which are styled Chāyānāṭakas. There are, however,
points of similarity between the Dūtān̄gada and the Mahānāṭaka; the
prevalence of verse, often epic in character, over prose, the absence
of Prākrit, the large number of characters, and the omission of the
Vidūṣaka, which explain themselves easily in the latter case by the
assumption that we have literary drama before us, a play never intended
to be acted. The conviction is strengthened by the shameless
plagiarisms of the plays from earlier Rāma dramas. In any case,
however, we are dealing with the late developments of the Sanskrit
drama, and it is clear that nothing can be gained from any assumption
of a part played by the shadow-play in the evolution of the Sanskrit
drama. Even on Professor Lüders’s own interpretation of the Mahābhāṣya,
all that is requisite is dumb players, and this form of drama is
attested for India in modern times.
That the Sūtradhāra and Sthāpaka derive their names from manipulating
the puppets for either the puppet- or the shadow-drama is a suggestion
which, though recently repeated by Dr. Hultzsch, cannot be regarded as
plausible. [110] The term Sthāpaka is colourless, and may merely denote
‘performer’; if it comes from the puppet-play, it is difficult to see
why such a person was needed beside the Sūtradhāra, who moved the
strings. Moreover, the theory recognizes the Sūtradhāra clearly as the
man who lays out the temporary playhouse needed for the exhibition, and
this sense passes easily over into that of director; this derivation is
preferable on the whole to the other, accepted by Professor
Hillebrandt, [111] which would make him the man who knows the rules of
his art.
The shadow-play, we have seen, cannot have influenced the progress of
the early drama, and we may, therefore, leave aside the question
whether it does not essentially presuppose the drama, as Professor
Hillebrandt contends; the parallel from Java adduced to refute this
opinion is clearly wholly inadequate, unless and until it can be proved
that the shadow play sprang up in Java without any previous knowledge
of real drama.
5. GREEK INFLUENCE ON THE SANSKRIT DRAMA
It is undoubtedly a matter far from easy for any people to create from
materials such as existed in India a true drama, and it was a perfectly
legitimate suggestion of Weber’s [112] that the necessary impetus to
creation may have been given by the contact of Greece with India,
through the representation of Greek plays at the courts of the kings in
Baktria, the Punjab, and Gujarāt, who brought with them Greek culture
as well as Greek forces. This view suffered modification in view of
further consideration of the evidence of an Indian drama in the
Mahābhāṣya, and the final opinion of Weber was content with the view
that a certain influence might have been exerted by the Greek on the
Sanskrit drama. The vehement repudiation of this opinion by Pischel
[113] was followed by the elaborate effort of Windisch [114] to trace
the extent of the influence which he believed he could establish.
Windisch’s attitude is of special importance because he recognizes
fully the elements which made for the development of an independent
Indian drama, the epic recitations and the mimetic art of the Naṭa,
whose name indicated, as a Prākritism of the root nṛt, dance, that he
was at first a dancer, in the Indian sense of the term, that is one who
represents by his postures and gestures emotions of varied kinds, or,
in the terminology of the Greek and Roman stage, a pantomime. But he
insists on the distinction between the dramatization of the epic
material suggested by the Mahābhāṣya, and the features of the classical
form of the drama. The subject-matter differs, heroic and mythic
figures are presented in the relations of everyday life, the chief
theme is a comedy of love, the plot is artistically developed and the
action divided into scenes, character types are developed, the epic
element recedes before the development of dialogue, verse is mingled
with prose, Sanskrit with Prākrit. The change is remarkable; was it
aided by the influence of the Greek drama? Admittedly on any theory we
must allow for powerful causes to produce so splendid a development,
and it would be idle to ignore the possibility of such influence.
Since Windisch wrote, the extent of Greek influence on India before and
after the Christian era has been the subject of much investigation,
which has yielded its richest fruits in the sphere of art. That India
borrowed the incitement to the art of Gandhāra from Greece as its
ultimate source is undeniable, and it is equally clear that the
Buddhist adoption of the practice of depicting the human form of the
Buddha, in lieu of merely indicating his presence by some symbol such
as his seat, was due to Greek artistic influences. The extent to which
the rise of the Mahāyāna school of Buddhism was furthered by the influx
of religious and philosophical ideas from the west is still uncertain;
but it is noteworthy that Professor Lévi, [115] who most strongly
opposed the theory of Windisch, has himself attributed to western
influences the development of the new spirit in Buddhism which he
traces in Açvaghoṣa, whom he places in the entourage of Kaniṣka, dating
the former in the first century B.C. If this were the case, there would
be decided difficulties in maintaining any chronological objections
such as Professor Lévi [116] originally urged to the theory of
Windisch; when he attacked that theory he could place the earliest
Sanskrit dramas preserved, those of Kālidāsa in his view, five or six
centuries A.D. But now we have dramas of about A.D. 100 which are
certainly not the earliest of their type, and it is impossible to deny
that the Sanskrit drama came into being during the period when Greek
influence was present in India. The highest point of that influence
politically was doubtless attained under Menander; in the middle of the
first century B.C., roughly a century after Menander’s conquests, the
Greek princes were on the verge of being absorbed by new influences
culminating in the establishment of the Kuṣana [117] domination, but
there is nothing chronologically difficult in assuming the influence of
Greek drama on the drama in India.
The question, however, arises how far there was actual presentation at
the courts of Greek princes in India of dramatic entertainments. On
this topic the evidence is no doubt scanty. [118] We know indeed that
Alexander was fond of theatrical spectacles with which he amused
himself in the intervals allowed by his victories, and we hear that at
Ekbatana there were no fewer than three thousand Greek artists who had
come from Greece. We are told also that the children of the Persians,
the Gedrosians and the people of Susa, sang the dramas of Euripides and
Sophokles; if we are to believe Philostratos’s Life of Apollonios of
Tyana, [119] a Brahmin boasted that he had read the Herakleidai of
Euripides, and Plutarch has described in inimitable fashion the strange
scene at the court of Orodes of Parthia when the messenger arrived,
bearing the head of Crassus, and the actor Iason substituted the
ghastly relic for the head of Pentheus in the Bakchai, which he was
then performing. We need not doubt from these and other passages the
existence of performances of Greek dramas throughout the provinces
which formed the Empire of Alexander; the scepticism of Professor Lévi
[120] in this regard is clearly inadmissible. It is perfectly true that
of dramatic performances in India we have no express mention, but in
view of the miserably scanty information we possess regarding these
principalities of the Greeks in India there is nothing surprising in
the fact. Nor is it likely that princes who could employ artists of
sufficient ability to produce beautiful coins would be indifferent to
what is after all the greatest literary creation of Greece.
Nor can we lay much stress on the difficulty of India borrowing
anything from the Greek drama, owing to the great difference between
the two civilizations, Indian exclusiveness, Indian ignorance of
foreign languages, or similar general considerations, because we have
really no evidence of value of the feelings and actions of the Indians
during the period when the Greek invasion was only the forerunner of
invasions by Parthians, Çakas, and Kuṣanas, followed by other less
famous but not unimportant immigrants, whose advent vitally affected
the population and civilization of the north-west of India. It is plain
that in the Gupta dynasty of the fourth century A.D. we find a great
Hindu revival, but a revival which evidently drew strength primarily
from the east, and we do not know anything definite to enable us to
reason a priori on what was, or was not, possible as regards
assimilation of the drama. The only decisive evidence possible is that
of the actual plays, and unfortunately the results to be attained by
examination of them are not at all satisfactory.
It is held by Windisch that the New Attic Comedy, which flourished from
340–260 B.C., must be deemed the source of influence on Indian drama;
the fact that no mention of this comedy is specifically made in the few
notices we have of drama in the east is doubtless not of importance. On
the other hand, we know that Alexandria under the Lagidai became a
great centre of Greek learning, and that between Alexandria and
Ujjayinī through the port of Barygaza [121] there was a brisk exchange
of trade which may have aided in intellectual contact, [122] perhaps
especially in the period when Menander’s conquests gave Greek products
of every sort a special vogue. The new comedy by its making its subject
of the everyday life of man was far more suited than any other form of
drama to attract imitation.
The actual points of contact between the New Comedy and the Sanskrit
drama are, however, scanty. The division of both the Roman drama [123]
and the Sanskrit into acts, distinguished by the departure of all the
actors from the stage and the number of five as normal, though often
exceeded in India, are facts which need not be more than casual
coincidences: the divisions in the Sanskrit drama rest on an analysis
of the action which is not recorded in Greece or Rome. There is
similarity in the scenic conventions, in the asides, in the entry and
exit of characters, more notably in the practice that the advent of a
new character is usually expressly notified to the audience by a remark
from one of the actors already on the stage. But these are all matters
which must almost inevitably coincide in theatrical performances
produced under approximately similar conditions. Even in the modern
theatre with its programmes the necessity of indicating at once the
identity of the new comers to the stage is keenly felt.
More value attaches to the argument from the use of Yavanikā, [124] or
its Prākrit form Javanikā, for the name of the curtain which covered
the tiring room and formed the background of the stage. The word
primarily is an adjective meaning Ionian, the Greeks with whom India
first came into contact. But it was not confined to what was Greek in
the strict sense of the word; it applies to anything connected with the
Hellenized Persian Empire, Egypt, Syria, Bactria, and it therefore
cannot be rigidly limited to what is Greek. As applied to the curtain
it is an adjective, and describes doubtless the material of the curtain
(paṭī, apaṭī) as foreign, possibly as Lévi suggests, Persian tapestry
brought to India by Greek ships and merchants. The word Yavanikā has no
special application to the curtain of the theatre, as would be the
case, if it were borrowed as a detail of stage arrangement from Greece.
Nor in fact was there any curtain in the case of Greek drama, so far as
is known, from which it could be borrowed; Windisch’s contention merely
was that the curtain was called Greek because it took the place of the
painted scenery at the back of the Greek stage.
As little can any conclusion of Greek borrowing be drawn from the
Yavanīs, Greek maidens, who are represented as among the body-guard of
the king; [125] for this the Greek drama offers no parallel; it
represents the fondness of the princes of India [126] for the
fascinating hetaerae of Greece, and the readiness of Greek traders to
make the high profits to be derived from shipping these youthful
cargoes.
The points of resemblance in regard to the plot are of interest. There
is some similarity between the stock theme of the Nāṭikā, the love of a
king for a maiden, hindered by various obstacles, and finally
successful through events which reveal her as a princess, destined for
him in marriage but concealed in this aspect by some accident, and the
New Comedy picture of the youth whose affection for a fair lady,
apparently of status which forbids marriage by Attic law, but in
reality of equal birth, is finally rewarded by the discovery of the
mark which leads to her identification. The use of a mark of
recognition is undoubtedly common in both dramas. We have in the
Çakuntalā the ring [127] which gives part of the title of the play
Abhijñāna-Çakuntalā, and in the Vikramorvaçī the stone of reunion
(saṁgamamaṇi) which enables Purūravas to recognise his beloved despite
her change into a creeper. In the Ratnāvalī we have the necklace which
permits the identification of the heroine; in the Nāgānanda, the jewel
which, falling from the sky, denotes the fate of the prince; in the
Mālatīmādhava the garland plucked by Mādhava, worn by Mālatī, which
Saudāminī produces at the dénouement as a sign of recognition; and in
the Mṛcchakaṭikā the clay cart in which are placed the jewels used as
evidence against the hero. In the same general category fall the ring
of the queen in the Mālavikāgnimitra, which the Vidūṣaka obtains from
her in order to cure a snake-bite, and employs to bring about the
release of Mālavikā; the arrow of Āyus, in the Vikramorvaçī, which
reveals to Purūravas his son; and the seal of Rākṣasa in the
Mudrārākṣasa of which Cāṇakya makes use to confound his schemes. In
some cases the similarity of use of these emblems is close; Mālavikā,
taken away by brigands, and Ratnāvalī, rescued from the sea, are real
parallels to the heroine of the Rudens, stolen from her father by a
brigand, sold to a leno and wrecked on the Sicilian coast, whose
recognition is brought about by the discovery of her childish
ornaments.
These are striking facts, and the only way to meet them is to show that
the motifs in Sanskrit drama have an earlier history in the literature,
and can, therefore, be regarded as natural developments. The difficulty
presented here is that the literature available consists either of
tales, which in any form available to us are later than the period of
the supposed Greek influence, or the epic which is of uncertain date,
so that no strict proof is available that any of its minor issues
antedates the Christian era. But we do find in the epic indications
that it was not necessary for Greece to give to India the ideas
presented in the drama. The story of the love of Kīcaka for Draupadī,
when disguised as handmaiden she served Sudeṣṇā, wife of the king
Virāṭa, has a tragic outcome, for his love is repulsed, but it has
undoubted affinities with the plot of the Nāṭikā. In the case of the
old tale of Nala and Damayantī, the heroine is more happy, for, when
separated from her husband who has abandoned her in the distraction of
losing his kingdom at dice, she lives in peace, guarded securely from
interference; at last she is recognized by a birthmark. In the Rāmāyaṇa
the use of signs of this sort is extended to artificial modes: Sītā,
stolen away from Rāma, drops her jewels to the ground; the monkeys bear
them to their king, who hands them to Rāma, and the hero thus knows
beyond a peradventure the identity of the ravisher. To console her in
her detention pending his efforts at rescue he sends Hanumant to her,
bearing his messages, and gives him his ring to serve to identify him;
Sītā sees it and takes heart. We may admit that such incidents are
almost inevitable in a primitive society, in which the means of
identification were necessarily material, or personal. Nor in the
Sanskrit drama is there any preponderant use of this factor; the letter
and the portrait [128] are other means, the use of which is recognized
in the theory.
The evidence of borrowing based on the Mṛcchakaṭikā by Windisch
requires reconsideration in the light of the facts now known regarding
the authority of that drama for the early Sanskrit drama. To Windisch
it seemed to present every appearance of an early age, and to show
close relations to a Greek model. The title he compared with the
Cistellaria, ‘little chest’, or the Aulularia, ‘little pot’; the
mixture of a political intrigue and a love drama with the mention—only
incidental however—of political events contemporaneous with the action
in Plautus’s Epidicus and Captivi; the court scene he held to be of
Greek inspiration; the meeting of Cārudatta and Vasantasenā he compared
with that of the hero and heroine of the Cistellaria; the theft of
Çarvilaka, in order to buy the freedom of the slave girl he loves, to
the dishonest means adopted by the hero in the new comedy to procure
means to purchase his inamorata; the setting free of the slave by
Vasantasenā with the attaining of the position of a freedwoman in the
Greek drama; finally the elevation of Vasantasenā to the rank of a
woman of good character to permit of her legal marriage to Cārudatta is
compared with the discovery in the Greek drama of the existence of a
free status as the birthright of the maiden whom the hero loves. The
Mṛcchakaṭikā, however, is not an early representative of the Indian
drama in the sense held by Windisch; it is based on the Cārudatta of
Bhāsa, in which there is no mingling of the political and love
intrigue, at any rate as we have that play; the title Mṛcchakaṭikā,
which departs from the usual model, was probably deliberately chosen to
distinguish the new drama from the old. The plays cited have no real
combination of political and love intrigues, and the other parallels
are far too vague to be taken seriously. The raising of Vasantasenā to
a new status is an extraordinary event, which is dependent on an action
of the new king Āryaka, who, as an overthrower of the former monarch,
exercises the supreme right of sovereignty in favour of the lady, in
defiance of the rules of caste. The political intrigue thus becomes a
vital element in the play.
Nor can any special value be ascribed to the rule, which is laid down
in the theory, and observed in practice, and which confines the events
in an act to the limits of a single day, as compared with the rule of
Aristotle [129] that the events of a drama should not exceed, or only
by a little, the duration of a day. If the rule was borrowed, it was
greatly changed in sense by permitting long periods, up to a year, to
elapse between the acts in the Sanskrit drama, and the mere moral needs
of the approximation to reality requisite for illusion would produce
the state of the Sanskrit drama without external influence.
The characters of the drama present problems which are not solved by
the theory of borrowing. The figure of the queen, loving her husband,
noble and dignified, is compared by Windisch with that of the matrona
of the Roman comedy, while her attempts to prevent the union of her
husband and the new love are compared to the efforts of the senex to
dissuade his son from a rash marriage or intrigue. But it is clear that
the comparisons are idle; the rivalry of the old love and the new is an
incident of the life of the harem inevitable in polygamy, while it
affords an admirable opportunity for the poet to depict the contrast of
types and the different aspects of love, his chief theme. Windisch,
however, lays most stress on his comparison of the three figures of the
Viṭa, Vidūṣaka, and Çakāra, with the parasite, the servus currens, and
the miles gloriosus of the Greek drama, and his arguments have a
certain weight. It is true that these three, with the Sūtradhāra and
his assistant, are given by the Nāṭyaçāstra in a list of actors, and
that the five correspond fairly closely with the male personnel of a
Greek drama; it is also true that, while Kālidāsa and the Mṛcchakaṭikā
with the Cārudatta know the Çakāra, he vanishes from the later drama,
and the Viṭa shows comparatively little life, suggesting that the Greek
borrowings were gradually felt unsuited to India and died a natural
death. But the argument is inadequate to prove borrowing. The Viṭa is,
indeed, more closely akin to the parasite than to any other character
of the Greek or Roman comedy, but the parasite is lacking in the
refinement and culture of his Indian counterpart, who is clearly drawn
from life, the witty and accomplished companion who is paid to amuse
his patron, but whose dependence does not make him the object of
insolence and bad jokes. The Vidūṣaka has, in all likelihood, as has
been seen, his origin in the religious drama; his Brahmin caste, and
his use of Prākrit can best thus be explained. The alternative views
all present far more difficulties; the transformance of the slave into
a Brahmin is far too violent a change to be credible, while Lévi’s
[130] view which makes him a borrowing from the Prākrit drama, which
depicted with truth the type of Brahmin who serves as go-between in
love affairs, masking his degraded trade under the cloak of religion,
renders it unintelligible why the Brahmins should have consented to
maintain him in the Sanskrit drama. Equally unconvincing is Professor
Konow’s [131] effort to explain him as a figure of the popular drama,
which loved to make fun of the higher classes, especially the Brahmins.
There was no conceivable reason why the Brahmins should have kept such
a figure in a drama which never appealed to the lower classes, and it
is significant that there is no trace of a comic figure of the Kṣatriya
class, although the populace doubtless was as willing to make fun of
the rulers as of the priests. The similarity between the Çakāra and the
miles gloriosus is by no means small, but the argument from borrowing
is refuted by the reflexion that such a figure can be explained
perfectly easily from the actual life of India in the period of Bhāsa
and the Mṛcchakaṭikā, when mercenary soldiers must have been painfully
familiar to Indians.
The number of actors is certainly not in accord with the Greek
practice; not only has Bhāsa large numbers, but the Çakuntalā has
thirty, the Mṛcchakaṭikā twenty-nine, the Vikramorvaçī eighteen, the
Mudrārākṣasa twenty-four, and it is only in the later and less
inventive Bhavabhūti that we find but thirteen in the Mālatīmādhava and
eleven in the Uttararāmacarita.
The prologue in both dramas serves the purpose of announcing the
author’s name, the title of the play, and the desire of the dramatist
for a sympathetic reception, but the Indian prologue is closely
attached to the preliminaries, and has a definite and independent
character of its own in the conversation between the Sūtradhāra and his
wife, the chief actress, so that borrowing is out of the question. Nor
does any importance attach to the fact that Çiva, who is in a special
sense the patron of drama, is the nearest Indian representative of
Dionysos, or that the time of the festival at which plays were often
shown was spring, as in the case of the Great Dionysia at Athens when
new plays were usually presented. There is similarity between the
Protagonist and the Sūtradhāra, for both undertake the leading parts in
the drama, but this and other minor points such as can be adduced are
of no value as proofs of historical connexion.
Windisch admitted that in regard to the theatrical buildings there was
no possibility of comparison, as the Indian theatre was not permanent,
but Bloch [132] has endeavoured to show that the Sītābengā cave theatre
has marked affinities to the Greek. The attempt, however, is clearly a
failure; the construction of the whole is merely that of a small
amphitheatre cut out in the rock for a small audience without any
special similarity to the Greek theatre of any period.
More recently the tendency of those who seek to find Greek influence in
the making of the Sanskrit drama has turned to the mime as the form of
art which exercised influence on India, and the older arguments of
Windisch have been given a new shape and in part strengthened in this
regard. [133] The mime was performed without masks and buskins, as was
the Indian drama. Moreover the mime, at any rate in Roman hands, had a
curtain (siparium), which may be compared with the curtain of India.
There was also no scene painting in the mime; different dialects were
used, and the number of actors was considerable. Further, some of the
standing types of the mime may be paralleled in the Indian drama; the
zēlotypos has some similarity to the Çakāra, the mōkos to the Vidūṣaka.
Some of the arguments adduced against this theory of Reich’s are
admittedly untenable. It is impossible to argue as does Professor Konow
that the use of the Mṛcchakaṭikā as a work of early date is a mistake,
since the oldest dramas preserved are of quite another type and have no
similarity with Greek works. True, the Mṛcchakaṭikā is not as old as it
was thought, but the Cārudatta can be substituted in lieu, and there
are no dramas older than it, save those of the same author and some
fragments of Buddhist drama. Nor have we any very satisfactory evidence
of a mime in India at an early date, for a mime means a great deal more
than the mere work of a Naṭa. But there are adequate grounds for
disregarding the theory. The similarity of types is not at all
convincing; the borrowing of the idea of using different dialects from
the mime is really absurd, and the large number of actors is equally
natural in either case. The argument from the curtain is wholly without
probative power; as we have seen, the term Yavanikā refers to material
only; it would be very remarkable that the term Greek should be
confined to the curtain alone, if the stage were really a Greek
borrowing, and, last not least, we have no proof that the Greek mime
had the curtain. The new form of the theory must, therefore, claim no
more credence than the old. We cannot assuredly deny [134] the
possibility of Greek influence, in the sense that Weber admitted the
probability; the drama, or the mime, may, as played at Greek courts,
have aided in the development of a true drama, but the evidence leaves
only a negative answer to the search for positive signs of influence.
There are, undoubtedly, certain considerations which a priori tell
against borrowing; to judge from the Roman borrowings from Greece and
those of France from the classics, the trace of imitation if it were
real would be clear and emphatic. But we can hardly place very great
faith in arguments from analogy; India has a strange genius for
converting what it borrows and assimilating it, as it did in the case
of the image of the Buddha which it fabricated from Greek models. More
important is the possibility of tracing the sources of the dramas in
the epic and the tales, though here the difficulty of dates prevents
the demonstration being complete. The epic and undramatic character of
the Sanskrit drama is true enough, but not universally applicable, and
the argument is liable to be turned by adopting the view that only
Greek influence is contended for, not the exclusion of Indian native
influences. The typical nature of the characters, adduced by Professor
Konow as a point of difference, seems to indicate a forgetfulness that
the Greek drama, and especially the New Comedy, is rich in types, and
that the mime depicts types. Nor in that comedy do we find any
particularly effective heightening of interest or development of the
situation from the characters of the persons, or solutions produced
without recourse to cutting the knot by artificial means. In all these
matters indeed the Indian drama rather is akin to the Greek than
otherwise.
6. THE ÇAKAS AND THE SANSKRIT DRAMA
Professor Lévi, [135] whose opposition to Windisch regarding the
possibility of Greek influence on the Indian drama has been noted, is
himself responsible for the suggestion that the rise of the Sanskrit
drama, as opposed to the more popular religious drama in Prākrit, is to
be attributed to the Çakas, whose advent to India was one of the causes
of the rapid decadence of the Greek principalities in the north-west.
The theory is based on a general view of the elevation of Sanskrit to
the rank of the language of literature, as opposed to its restriction
to use as the learned and sacred language of the Brahmins. The
inscriptions, on the whole, show that Sanskrit as an epigraphic
language was introduced by Rudradāman whose Girnār inscription of A.D.
150 is wholly in Sanskrit, though Sanskrit appears in part in
Uṣavadāta’s inscription of A.D. 124. The Western Kṣatrapas, of Çaka
origin, were, he holds, the first to bring Sanskrit down to earth,
while not vulgarizing it, as contrasted with the Hindu and orthodox
Çātakarṇis of the Deccan who retained Prākrit in their inscriptions
down to the third century A.D. The character of the Çakāra may be
regarded in this light; in its hostility to the Çakas it reveals a
period when either a prince was opposed to the Çaka rule, or the Çaka
dominion had just fallen and was fresh in the minds of the people. The
Mṛcchakaṭikā may retain a confused version of the events of the second
century A.D. A specific connexion between the Çakas and the creation of
drama may be seen in the terminology of the Nāṭyaçāstra, and that of
their inscriptions. Rudradāman refers to his grandfather Caṣṭana as
Svāmin and Sugṛhītanāman, and Svāmin is freely used in the epigraphic
records of the kings of the line from Nahapāna (A.D. 78) onwards.
Further Rudrasena in A.D. 205, in referring to his royal ancestors,
Caṣṭana, Jayadāman, Rudradāman, and Rudrasena, gives them the epithet
of Bhadramukha, ‘of gracious countenance’. These terms, Lévi argues,
correspond with the use laid down in the Nāṭyaçāstra, which must have
borrowed from contemporary official usage. Further, Rudradāman uses the
term Rāṣṭriya as applying to Puṣyagupta, who under Candragupta, the
Maurya, some four and a half centuries earlier established the
reservoir which he had repaired, and this term occurs in the Çakuntalā
and the Mṛcchakaṭikā in the sense of brother-in-law of the king, the
sense given to it in the Amarakoça, the earliest Sanskrit lexicon of
established authority. To these considerations may be added that
Ujjayinī, the capital of the Western Kṣatrapas of Mālava, is a centre,
round which as a fan radiate the three great literary Prākrits of the
drama, Çaurasenī, Māgadhī, and Māhārāṣṭrī, thus accounting for their
use, which else would be difficult to explain.
Lévi’s suggestion, which was accompanied by an admission that the
Mṛcchakaṭikā or its source was older than he had formerly argued, and
that the possibility of Greek influence was thus increased, has been
accepted by Professor Konow [136] with the important modification that
in face of the fact that the oldest dramas known to us, the fragments
of Açvaghoṣa and those of Bhāsa, ignore Māhārāṣṭrī and that Çaurasenī
is the normal prose tongue, he accepts Mathurā as the home of the
drama, and ascribes it to about the middle of the first century A.D.
This view he supports by the fact that the rulers of Mathurā were also
Çaka Kṣatrapas, or Satraps, whose control extends back at least to the
beginning of the first century A.D.
It may be feared that neither theory will stand critical investigation,
however tempting it may be to obtain an exact date for the Sanskrit
drama. The discovery of Açvaghoṣa’s fragments shows that the drama has
already attained a very definite and complete form, and we really
cannot with any probability assume that the creation of drama preceded
this by no more than a century. Even a century, however, brings us
further back than the middle of the first century A.D., for Konow’s
date of Kaniṣka, about A.D. 150, [137] is probably considerably too
late, and should be placed fifty years earlier at least. We are thus
separated from Rudradāman by a period of 150 years, probably more, and
the theory that the Western Kṣatrapas introduced Sanskrit into the
drama falls hopelessly to the ground on chronological considerations
alone.
The argument from the use of technical terms is clearly untenable. That
Rāṣṭriya in Rudradāman’s inscription has the sense of ‘brother-in-law’
is not supported by the slightest evidence, and is most improbable; the
term doubtless denotes governor, and the restricted use is a later
development. The use of Svāmin as the mode of addressing the king is
not recorded in the Nāṭyaçāstra, and to argue that it, being given in
the Daçarūpa and the Sāhityadarpaṇa, must be borrowed from Bharata, as
Konow does, is quite impossible. On the contrary, Bharata [138] gives
the style to the Yuvarāja, or Crown Prince, presumably as distinct from
the king. In the extant dramas after Bhāsa it is not used of the king
or Crown Prince. Sugṛhītanāman, denoting perhaps ‘whose name is uttered
with respect’, has no parallel in Bharata; only in the later theory do
we find Sugṛhītābhidha, which, however, is prescribed merely for the
address of a pupil, child, or younger brother to a teacher, father, or
elder brother, and therefore stands in no conceivable relation to the
term used by Rudradāman. Bhadramukha is the address to a royal prince
in Bharata; it is used of kings by Rudrasena, and the literature
ignores the specific or royal use. The lack of accord is complete and
convincing; if the drama had originated under the Western Kṣatrapas of
Ujjayinī, it would not have been so flagrantly out of harmony with the
official language.
The whole error of these arguments rests in the belief that the drama
developed as a Prākrit drama before it was turned into Sanskrit. The
same theory has been applied to every department of secular Sanskrit
literature without either plausibility or success; the Mahābhāṣya knows
Sanskrit Kāvya before any Prākrit Kāvya is recorded. [139] But, apart
from this, it is essential to remember that the drama was religious in
origin and essentially connected with epic recitations, and that for
both reasons Sanskrit claimed in it a rightful place from the
inception. It is certain that the recitations known by Patañjali were
in Sanskrit, and it is difficult in the extreme to understand how in
the view of Lévi and Konow a Prākrit drama proper ever came into being.
Before the coalescence of the epic recitation and the primitive mime
believed in by Konow, there cannot have been any drama on his own
theory; when they coalesced, Sanskrit must have from the first been
present.
The discovery of Açvaghoṣa’s fragments undoubtedly helps greatly to
bring the creation of the drama very close up to the time of Patañjali,
if not to that date. The first century B.C. can with fair certainty be
assumed to be the very latest period at which the appearance of a
genuine Sanskrit drama can be placed. If indeed Professor Lüders’s
former date for Kaniṣka were correct and he were the founder of the
Vikrama era of 57 B.C., [140] then the Sanskrit drama must be dated a
century at least earlier, and we would have the paradoxical position
that on Professor Lüders’s date of Açvaghoṣa he must place the drama at
not later than Patañjali, while when dealing with the Mahābhāṣya
evidence he doubts the existence of the drama. Professor Lüders has
overlooked this dilemma, which, however, we may evade on his behalf by
recognising that he erred in assigning to Kaniṣka a date which the
evidence available in 1911 already showed to be quite untenable.
7. THE EVIDENCE OF THE PRĀKRITS
The discovery of Açvaghoṣa’s fragments not only disposes effectively of
Professor Lévi’s dating of the rise of Sanskrit drama, since he
probably preceded Rudradāman by at least half a century, but it casts a
vivid light on the question of the Prākrits and Sanskrit. It must be
remembered that Açvaghoṣa was the exponent of a faith which had
originally insisted on the use of the vernacular as opposed to
Sanskrit, and that it is absurd to imagine that it would have occurred
to him to use Sanskrit in dramas of Buddhist inspiration and aim, had
not the use of that language been established in the drama of the day.
This leads us back once more to the conclusion that the drama from the
outset was written in part at least in Sanskrit, and that, therefore,
it stands in genetic relation with the dramatic recitations described
by Patañjali which were in Sanskrit.
That the drama was also in part in Prākrit from the outset seems
extremely probable. The mere recitation of the epic indeed did not
demand any intervention of Prākrit, but that such recitations by
themselves would produce a true drama is most improbable, and we may
legitimately hold that it was only the union of these recitations with
action from the religious contest that produced the drama. In that
contest we may assume that the lower classes were represented and spoke
their own language; in the Vedic Mahāvrata we cannot suppose that the
Çūdra who contested the right of the Vaiçya to the symbol of the sun
spoke in Sanskrit, nor that the Brahmin and the hetaera exchanged their
ritual abuse in the classical tongue, or its Vedic antecedent. The
religious festival in which Kṛṣṇa appeared as slaying Kaṅsa must
similarly have demanded the use of the vernacular by the humbler
members of those who took part in it. The fact that Prākrit appears
mainly in the dialogue, Sanskrit pre-eminently in verses, strengthens
the view that the new drama derived its verse in the main from the epic
recitation, its prose dialogue from the religious contest. The two
elements never entirely merged; the Vidūṣaka who comes from one side of
the religious ceremonial, that which in Greece lies at the basis of
comedy as opposed to tragedy, is not a figure normal in the dramas of
mainly epic inspiration; but this is not enough to prove that the drama
ever in its early days was merely in Sanskrit. It may indeed have been
the case; Bhāsa’s Dūtavākya has no Prākrit, and so far the probability
is rather for than against it, as an alternative form.
The question how many Prākrits were used in the primitive Sanskrit
drama presents difficulties. The obvious conclusion is that the
vernacular employed would be that of the region where the drama came
into being, and that this was the Çūrasena country is not to be denied.
Çaurasenī in fact appears throughout as the normal prose of the drama;
it is the language of the Vidūṣaka and the hetaera and normally of all
the characters of a play who are born in Āryāvarta, and no other
dialect even in theory vies with it in importance. The theory and the
practice after Bhāsa ascribe to Māhārāṣṭrī the honour of the language
of verses sung by maidens who would in prose speak Çaurasenī. There can
be no doubt that this is not primitive, but is a reflex of the growth
and development of the fame of the artificial lyric poetry of which we
have an anthology under the name of Hāla, perhaps to be ascribed to the
third or fifth century A.D. [141]