Introduction to Indian Classical Literature

 

Kalidasa’s best known Sanskrit play Abhijñâna Shahakuntalâ, which tells the tale of a young girl raised in a hermitage by a sage and who is actually, the daughter of an extremely learned sage Vishwamitra and a celestial dancer Menaka. King Duhsanta is hunting in the forest near the hermitage where Shakuntala lives with the hermit Kanva, raised as his daughter, after being abandoned by Vishwamitra and Menaka for various reasons. He comes to the hermitage unadorned as a commoner and falls in love with Shakunatala.

 

Shakuntala and the King get married in the hermitage and she is with child. He has to leave for his Kingdom but he gives Shakuntala his signet ring as a token of his love for her. However, as fate would have it, Shakuntala is lost in the thought of the King while, Durvasa Rishi a learned saint with an extreme temper is calling out to Shakuntala. She obviously does not hear him and irritated by her lack of response, he curses her saying: You who do not notice me, A hoard of merit standing at your doorstep, Because you are lost in thoughts of one To the exclusion of all else, You shall be lost in his thoughts: Though you goad his memory hard, He shall fail to remember you, Even as a man drunk remembers not Thereafter, the tale he told before. When the girls at the hermitage plead with him, he modifies his curse and tells Shakuntala that the King will remember her when he sees the ring. Inevitably, en route to the Palace, Shakuntala loses the ring. It falls off her finger and is swallowed by a fish which is caught and later gutted by a fisherman who finds the ring and wears it, till he is spotted by a palace guard who recognises the ring and brings the fisherman whom he believes to be a thief, before the King.

 

 

Meanwhile when Shakuntala reaches the Palace the King has no recollection of her but agrees to let her stay in the Palace till the child is born. When the fisherman is brought before the King, Durvasa Rishi’s curse is lifted and he remembers Shakuntala. There are other events at play but this is the main story line of the play. Eventually King Duhsanta, Shakuntala and their son are reunited and they return to the palace.

Prescribed text:

Kalidasa’s Abhijñâna Shakuntalâ, translated by Chandra Rajan called Kalidasa: The Loom of Time, (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989).

 

 

 

 

 

Like any literary genre, drama has its own history both in terms of its origin and evolution. The drama that we see or study in classrooms today did not begin as such. As a literary composition, drama usually tells us a story, but not just through words, in the form of dialogues, but also through gestures, movements, and facial expressions of the characters, dances, costumes, background landscape, music, stage setting etc. Drama is, therefore, a performative art that includes many components and participants such as the playwright, actors, director, audience, costume designer, make-up artists and so on.

 

The Indian dramatic tradition was influenced by the dramatic elements found in the Vedas, in dialogue, hymns and Vedic rituals. Thus, it is in the Vedic era (1500- 1000 BCE) that we see dramatic elements that will come to define drama in the years to come and eventually usher in a genre known as Indian Classical Drama as we know it. Even the epics, such as the Mahabharata support the existence of performers or nata as early as 400CE. However, the most extant treatise on Indian drama is the Natyashastra by Bharatamuni, which emerged in 3rd CE. Bharata ascribes a divine origin to the dramatic tradition, which highlights its Vedic religious beginnings. The very existence of such a text suggests that it was the culmination of a fairly long process of dramatic development taking place at that time.

 

 

The Greek invasion of the Indian subcontinent has led a few critics such as Weber to assert a Greek influence on Indian drama. There are certainly some similarities such as the plot being mainly centered on historical, mythical figures but the Indian tradition has the added element of supernatural figures such as gods and goddesses that populate the world of drama. The division of the Play into Acts and Scenes, use of the Chorus, developments of stock characters demonstrate this Greek influence on all drama. 

However, major differences also exist between the two traditions, specifically the absence of tragedy in the Indian dramatic tradition. Greek drama’s adherence to the Three Unities of time, place and action is not strictly observed in Indian drama where the action shifts from earthly spaces to heavenly ones, taking place across many years as well. Furthermore, dance and song are an important part of Indian drama and not found in the Greek counterpart. Other scholars highlight the influence of Buddhist and Jain traditions in the formalising of the Indian dramatic tradition. Thus, we can conclude that there might have been a strain of the Greek influence along with influences from other literary traditions and cultures such as the Buddhist and Jain traditions that worked together with ancient Vedic ones to create the Classical Indian dramas we know it today. This may be particularly true of the Tamil Epic Cilappatikaram which is influenced also by the Buddhist and Jain traditions.

 

A vast country like India cannot have a singular dramatic tradition, given as we discussed before the various influences on the genre as well as the diversity of the subcontinent and how these communities received and adapted drama. However, one of the most prominent dramatic traditions to have emerged is Sanskrit drama. Others include the dance drama of southern India as well the Sanskrit tradition of southern India such as the Koodiyattam in Kerala. According to the Natyashastra, a dramatic work’s purpose was to provide not just entertainment and pleasure but instruction, wealth, justice, and spiritual liberation. That’s why Sanskrit drama does not have a tragic ending because in Hindu cosmology, death is not the end but a means to either achieve spiritual liberation from the cycle of life or be reborn till it is achieved.

 

Moreover, the Rasa or the aesthetic sentiment is an important aspect of Sanskrit drama, and can be best defined as the audience’s refined emotional response evoked by the play. Rasa is broadly composed of vibhava, anubhava, vyabhicharibhava, and sthayibhava, which are the different types of emotional responses to a work of art. Alternatively rasa can be explained as a blissful aesthetic experience achieved via drama, and is seen as Sanskrit drama’s highest purpose.

 

Natyashastra also elucidates the different types of plays, the major type (Rupaka) or the minor type (uparupaka). Rupaka consists of ten varieties out of which the Nataka, are plays based on myths and heroic tales, and the Prakarana, are plays based on fictitious stories and where less important characters are dominant. Sanskrit drama’s idealised plot structure consists of five transitions that lead to a final culmination of the events depicted.

 

The first is the “origin” (mukha), which states the seeds or the beginning of the plot; these condisthe“incident”(pratimukha), which develops the plot line further by showing both good and bad events; the third is “germ” (garbha) where goodactions/events seem to lead towards the “aim” (phala); the fourth is “crisis”  (vimarsa) where bad actions / events seem to outweigh the good and strays away from the “aim”; the fifth is “completion” (nirvahana) that brings together all the different narratives in the play to a definitive conclusion.

 

One of the unique aspects of Sanskrit drama is its bilingual nature. The protagonists who belonged to the upper castes such as Brahmins and Kshatriyas spoke in Sanskrit where as characters from other sections of society such as soldiers, servants, women and children etc. spoke in the various Prakrit languages. The stock characters encountered here such as the Sutradhar (director), the Nayak (hero), the Nayaki (Heroine),and the Vidusaka (jester) speak either in Sanskrit or Prakrit depending on their caste, class, gender, and age.

 

 Such a linguistic construction of the play restricted the variety of people who could watch and enjoy it. Thus, the audience was mostly limited to are fined circle of upper castes such as the royalty, aristocrats, Brahmins and Kshatriyas, leading to royal patronages. Even the Natyashastra states that the ideal spectators should be educated and noble men, all four castes could watch a play as long as they were seated separately. It is no surprise then that Sanskrit drama failed to be a people’s drama such as those in ancient Greece and medieval England. However, this is not to say no other form of drama existed or evolved in India outside of the Sanskritic tradition, folk theater and street plays (nukkad natak) abound even now and are a testament to the vitality of contemporary Indian theatre. Another aspect that differentiates Sanskrit drama from its European counterpart is the composition of actors. Unlike the ban on female actors in European classical drama, the Sanskritic tradition did not have such prohibitions that required male actors to perform the role of female leads, and drama could be performed by men alone, women alone or a mix of both, depending on the plot.

 

Despite its many unique characteristics, the major drawback of Sanskrit drama was its linguistic barrier as well as the strict adherence to the rules of dramaturgy that did not leave much space for individual imagination and experiments with the genre. Its failure to transition into popular art because of the decline of Sanskrit as a living language led to the gradual disinterest in Sanskritic works.

 

However, Sanskrit plays are still being written and performed in India by playwrights such as Manmohan Acharya (ArjunaPratijnaa, Shrita-kamalam, Pada-pallavam, Divya-Jayadevam, Pingalaa, Mrtyuh, Sthitaprajnah, Tantra-mahasaktih, Purva-sakuntalam, Uttara Sakuntalam and Raavanah); Vidyadhar Shastri (Purnanandam, Kalidainyam and Durbala Balam) and Prafulla Kumar Mishra (Chitrangada and Karuna), that are a living testimony to the endurance of the genre. Sanskrit literature may have failed to become popular literature but it is still studied in academia and seen as an important aspect of Indian culture and tradition.