eating” instead of perpetrating the obnoxious act.[1] The charming love-scene in the Sākuntalā (at least in the earlier recension of the play) breaks off just as the hero is about to act the part of the bee to the honey of the heroine’s lips.[2] But later writers are less squeamish, or less refined. In two dramas[3] the heroine is dragged on the stage by her braid of hair; and this outrage is in both instances the motive of the action. In a third,[4] sleeping and the marriage ceremony occur in the course of the representation.
The dramatic construction of the Indian plays presents no very striking peculiarities. They open with a benediction (nāndī), spoken by the manager (supposed to be a highly accomplished person), and followed by “some account” of the author, and an introductory scene Construction.between the manager and one of the actors, which is more or less skilfully connected by the introduction of one of the characters with the opening of the play itself. This is divided into acts (ankas) and scenes; of the former a nātāka should have not fewer than 5, or more than 10; 7 appears a common number; “the great nātāka” reaches 14. Thus the length of the higher class of Indian plays is considerable—about that of an Aeschylean trilogy; but not more than a single play was ever performed on the same occasion. Comic plays are restricted to two acts (here called sandhis). In theory the scheme of an Indian drama corresponds very closely to the general outline of dramatic construction given above; it is a characteristic merit that the Scenes and situations. business is rarely concluded before the last act. The piece closes, as it began, with a benediction or prayer. Within this framework room is found for situations as ingeniously devised and highly wrought as those in any modern Western play. What could be more pitiful than the scene in Sākuntalā, where the true wife appears before her husband, whose remembrance of her is fatally overclouded by a charm; what more terrific than that in Mālatī and Mādhava, where the lover rescues his beloved from the horrors of the charnel field? Recognition—especially between parents and children—frequently gives rise to scenes of a pathos which Euripides has not surpassed.[5] The ingenious device of a “play within the play” (so familiar to the English drama) is employed with the utmost success by Babhavūti.[6] On the other hand, miraculous metamorphosis[7] and, in a later play,[8] vulgar magic lend their aid to the progress of the action. With scenes of strong effectiveness contrast others of the most delicate poetic grace—such as the indescribably lovely little episode of the two damsels of the god of love helping one another to pluck the red and green bud from the mango tree; or of gentle domestic pathos—such as that of the courtesan listening to the prattle of her lover’s child, one of the prettiest scenes of a kind rarely kept free from affectation in the modern drama. For the dénouement in the narrower sense of the term the Indian dramatists largely resort to the expedient of the deus ex machina, often in a sufficiently literal sense.[9]
Every species of drama having its appropriate kind of hero or heroine, theory here again amuses itself with an infinitude of subdivisions. Among the heroines, of whom not less than three hundred and eighty-four types are said to be distinguished, are to be noticed the courtesans, Characters.whose social position to some extent resembles that of the Greek hetaerae, and association with whom does not seem in practice, however it may be in theory, to be regarded as a disgrace even to Brahmans.[10] In general, the Indian drama indicates relations between the sexes subject to peculiar restraints of usage, but freer than those which Mahommedan example seems to have introduced into higher Indian society. The male characters are frequently drawn with skill, and sometimes with genuine force. Prince Samsthanaka[11] is a type of selfishness born in the purple worthy to rank beside figures of the modern drama, of which this has at times naturally been a favourite class of character; elsewhere,[12] the intrigues of ministers are not more fully exposed than their characters and principles of action are judiciously discriminated. Among the lesser personages common in the Indian drama, two are worth noticing, as corresponding, though by no means precisely, to familiar types of other dramatic literatures. These are the vitā, the accomplished but dependent companion (both of men and women), and the vidūshaka, the humble associate (not servant) of the prince, and the buffoon of the action.[13] Strangely enough, he is always a Brahman, or the pupil of a Brahman—perhaps a survival from a purely popular phase of the drama. His humour is to be ever intent on the pleasures of a quiet life, and on that of eating in particular; his jokes are generally devoid of both harm and point.
Thus, clothing itself in a diction always ornate and tropical, in which (as Rückert has happily expressed it) the prose is the warp and the verse the weft, where (as Goethe says) words become allusions, allusions similes, and similes metaphors, the Indian drama essentially depended upon its Diction.literary qualities, and upon the familiar sanctity of its favourite themes for such effects as it was able to produce. Of scenic apparatus it knew but little. The plays were usually performed in the hall of a palace; the simple devices by which exits and entrances were facilitated it is unnecessary to describe, and on the contrivances employed for securing such “properties” as were required (above all, the cars of the gods and of their emissaries),[14] it is useless Scenery and costume.to speculate. Propriety of costume, on the other hand, seems always to have been observed, agreeably both to the peculiarities of the Indian drama and to the habits of the Indian people.
The ministers of an art practised under such conditions could not but be regarded with respect, and spared the contempt or worse, which, except among one other great civilized people, the Greeks, has everywhere, at one period or another, been the actor’s lot. Companies of actors seem to have Actors.been common in India at an early date, and the inductions show the players to have been regarded as respectable members of society. In later, if not in earlier, times individual actors enjoyed a widespread reputation—“all the world” is acquainted with the talents of Kalaha-Kandala.[15] The managers or directors, as already stated, were usually gifted and highly-cultured Brahmans. Female parts were in general, though not invariably, represented by females. One would like to know whether such was the case in a piece[16] where—after the fashion of more than one Western play—a crafty minister passes off his daughter as a boy, on which assumption she is all but married to a person of her own sex.
The Indian drama would, if only for purposes of comparison, be invaluable to the student of this branch of literature. But from the point of view of purely literary excellence it holds its own against all except the very foremost dramas of the world. It is, indeed, a mere phrase to call Kālidāsa the Indian Summary.Shakespeare—a title which, moreover, if intended as anything more than a synonym for poetic pre-eminence, might fairly be disputed in favour of Babhavūti; while it would be absolutely misleading to place a dramatic literature, which, like the Indian, is the mere quintessence of the culture of a caste, by the side of one which represents the fullest development of the artistic consciousness of such a people as the Hellenes. The Indian drama cannot be described as national in the broadest and highest sense of the word; it is, in short, the drama of a literary class, though as such it exhibits many of the noblest and most refined, as well as of the most characteristic, features of Hindu religion and civilization. The ethics of the Indian drama are of a lofty character, but they are those of a scholastic system of religious philosophy, self-conscious of its completeness. To the power of Fate is occasionally ascribed a supremacy, to which gods as well as mortals must bow;[17] but, if man’s present life is merely a
- ↑ Nāgānanda, act i.
- ↑ Act iii.; cf. Nāgānanda, act iii.
- ↑ Veni-Samhāra; Prachaṅda-Paṅdāva.
- ↑ Viddha-Salabhanjika.
- ↑ Sākuntalā; Uttara-Rāma-Charitra.
- ↑ Ib. act vii.
- ↑ Vikrama and Urvāsī, act iv.
- ↑ Ratnāvalī.
- ↑ Vikrama and Urvāsī: Arichandra; Nāgānanda.
- ↑ Mȓichchhakatīkā.
- ↑ Mȓichchhakatīkā.
- ↑ Mudrā-Rakshasa.
- ↑ Sākuntalā; Nāgānanda.
- ↑ Sākuntalā, acts vi. and vii; Mālatī and Mādhava, act v.
- ↑ Induction to Anargha-Rāghava.
- ↑ Viddha-Salabhanjika.
- ↑ Vikrama and Urvāsī.
