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The Classical Drama of India

Studies in its Values for the

Literature and Theatre of the World

HENRY W. WELLS

Issued under the auspices of

THE LITERARY lfALF-YEARLY

ASIA PUBLISHING HOUSE

BOMBAY· CALCUTTA· MADRAS· NEW DELHI

LUCKNOW . LONDON · NEW YORK

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© HRNRY W. WELLS

PRINTED IN INDIA

BY Z. T. BANDUKWALA AT LEADERS PRESS PRIVATE LIMITED, BOMBAY AND PUBLISHED BY F. S. JAYASINGHE, ASIA PUBLISHING HOUSE, BOMBAY

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/ Contents

1 INTRODUCTION 1

2 . POETIC DRAMA IN ENGLAND AND INDIA 6

,I( 3 SANSKRIT DRAMA AND THE WORLD STAGE 20

4 SANSKRIT DRAMA AND THE MODERN STAGE 31

5 SANSKRIT DRAMA AND INDIAN THOUGHT

6 ACHIEVEMENT IN EQUILIBRIUM 52

7 SACRED DRAMA 71

8 DEFICIENCIES 81

9 THE ART OF. SWOONING 90 /

;( 10 THEATRICAL TECHNIQUE ON THE SANSKRIT

STAGE 99

II SANSKRIT DRAMATIC STYLE II5

12 A PRAKARANA: THE LITTLE CLAY CART 131

13 A NAT AKA : RAMA'S LATER HISTORY

Index 193

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I / Introduction

THE SOMEWHAT unusual form of this book, which is determined by the character of its subject, warrants a short prefatory explanation. If the truly remarkable Sanskrit drama were more familiar or readily accessible than is in fact the case, a descriptive method would be rightly preferred. But in fact no account that is not concentrated upon fundamentals can be seriously rewarding. The book is, accord- ingly, a sequence of reflective essays built around a central idea, developing a single thesis from various angles, considering first the features of the Indian drama the nearest to that of the West, and so coming by deliberate degrees to the unique problem posed by a theatre at once spiritually contemplative and theatrically successful. The reader should not, then, anticipate an historical surveyor a comprehensive description. The earlier chapters define the aims which this drama serves, the later chapters, the means which the playwrights employ through their manipulation of form and detail.

Few books have thus far appeared in English and surprisingly few in the Western languages as a whole dealing with the Sanskrit theatre in any general terms whatsoever. Studies in India itself have been in almost every sense of the word dispersed, issuing from many hands, appearing in widely different parts of the country, and as a rule treating some highly specialized topics. Feeling, perhaps, that an insuperable wall has been created by the oub:ide world against a current interest in the Sanskrit theatre, the Inc4an scholars themselves have shown scant interest in interpreting to others the splendors of their dramatic literature. In short, they have written relatively little from the point of view of comparative literature. Meanwhile the attention of the West has been primarily

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The Classical Drama of I ndia

occupied with its own rich accumulations of drama and has, fortu- nately, made some fruitful excursions into the theatre of the Far East, especially of China and Japan. Even that eminently going concern, the dance-theatre of Bali, has attracted popular attention in the West and recent Hindu dancers, as Shan Kar, whose art dispenses with language, have seemed better carriers of the spirit of India than the great dramatists who wrote some fifteen hundred years ago in a language now almost exclusively academic.

A further obstruction to fresh study by English scholars has been the oblique blessing of an undoubted masterpiece in exposition of literary and dramatic history, A. B. Keith's Sans~rit Drama, published over a generation ago. Few Indians have thus far written with equal authority. So thorough a survey, generous in its extent, meticulous in its documentation, and mature in its jUdgments, apparently has had for several decades the dubious good fortune of discouraging fresh inquiry. Yet' his unquestionable erudition notwithstanding, it has gradually become clear that Keith wrote from a number of prepossessions ill adapted to favoring a broad- minded or sympathetic view. His defect is partly owing to a commit- ment to British morality but much more to a conservative view in aesthetics leading him to discover the norm for serious drama in Greek tragedy and the ultimate wisdom in theatrical opinion in the theories of Aristotle. Thus classical prejudices are superimposed upon British principles, the British principles themselves leaning considerably more upon the precepts of Matthew Arnold than upon the practices of Shakespeare. Keith approached Indian drama and poetry with an analytical mind but a cold heart. Within the last forty years, a warmer and more sympathetic understanding has developed. Imagination in the theatre-or out of it-is very diff- erent today from what it was in the times of Pinero. The change in the times encourages a new outlook.

Because its method is primarily speculative, this book is organized on lines totally different from those of an orthodox history of drama- tic literature. The evolution of the drama from the historical view- point is barely mentioned; none of the singularly vexed chrono- logical puzzles are debated; no author is studied intensively; no apparatus for scholarly research is proposed and no textual exegesis offered. No philological problems are discussed and analysis is presented more with the English-speaking reader or even stage- producer or man of the theatre in mind than the professional

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Introduction

Sanskrit scholar. The writer himself is not of that fraternity but author of several books dealing with poetry, drama, and compara- tive literature. It is from the standpoint of world drama and world literature that the Indian plays are reviewed, with confident belief that from this perspective they will be found worthy of high place among plays in a harvest comprehending all times and lands.

The first chapter defines both the likeness and difference between English poetic drama, especially the Shakespearean and Elizabethan, on the one hand and the Sanskrit on the other, interpreting the theatre presumably the less well known, at least in England and America or even in such a country as Japan, with reference to that more readily accessible to the modem mind wherever it exists. Comparisons are made not to the advantage of one and detriment of the other but simply to clarify what their respective aims are, where these are alike and where they diverge. The second chapter, more judicial, more pragmatic, and less specialized, discusses the simpler question, why certain plays, unlike others, still have validity not so much for audiences in India itself (though that question is by no means disregarded) as for audiences today throughout the world. A succeeding section examines the imaginative modem plays closest to the Sanskrit in spirit and in form.

Since Indian drama is deeply grounded in Indian thinking, both philosophical and religious, the fourth chapter offers an exposition of the spirit of the drama in relation to that of serious and reflective Indian literature in general. The architecture of the successful native theatre was strictly determined by the spiritual terrain on which it was built, even though no other literary or artistic expression of Indian culture in its final form closely approached that of the stage-no more, for example, than Shakespeare's plays are "representative" of Elizabethan literature as a whole.

The fifth and most crucial chapter expounds the book's main thesis, an exposition of spiritual equilibrium as the goal to which the plays aspire.

Most of them are homogeneous expressions of a highly sophisticat- ed court culture and many, as the masterpiece of romantic comedy, The Little Clay Cart, even reflect a well developed urban life. But throughout all the plays the current of religious sentiment runs strong. In a few dramas, the best of which, interestingly enough, lie outside the general pale of Sanskrit, religious feeling and folk- culture actually predominate. A chapter on the sacred drama is

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primarily concerned with two such works, the famous Tamil play, Arichandra, from southern India, and the Tibetan traditional drama, Tchrimek~tndan. Analysis of these should illuminate even the main s tream of Sanskrit drama, since they are unsurpassed distillations of religious conceptions in dramatic form.

The Indian drama, it should be confessed, must reveal certain inveterate delinquencies, especially in Western eyes. If as dramatic art it has certain great virtues, so it has also palpable defects. Often both these qualities, ironically enough, arise from the same core of experience and mutually interpret each other. A short chapter, then, examines features which this writer, at least, can only regard as deficiencies in the literature, in the theatre, or in both. There are also qualities that tend to limit the appeal of inferior plays to the land of their origin. Chapter Seven is thus the anti- thesis of Chapter Two. One deals with plays falling short of universal currency, the other, with those sharing in it.

Three chapters follow offering a general view of the technique of the plays. One is concentrated on a single convention, the use of swooning, from a close study of which much of the aesthetics of the Sanskrit drama can be deduced. There follows a more excursive statement of the style in which the plays were presumably first presented and which must, at least to some extent, be used when- ever they are successfully performed. Thereafter is an analysis of the technique of the plays considered primarily as dramatic literature.

Finally, lest the argument remain too abstract , too negative, or too doctrinaire, two major plays representative of the two most 'important types of drama known to the Hindus are studied with considerably closer attention to detail. The words comedy and tragedy do not apply here though they do give a rough and appro- ximate analogy. The Little Clay Cart is surveyed as an example of the prakarana, Riima's Later History, of the niitaka. The flight of the central chapters into the abstract will, then, be terminated by a landing on the firm surface of specific, material achievement, where the spirit and doctrine are made flesh and thus manifested in the art of a supremely poetic theatre.

Such is the program. Descriptions of scenes are occasionally repeated so that they may be viewed afresh from new angles and ground retraced to facilitate further advances. The succession of chapters each in a sense an essay in itself will, it is hoped, be found

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appropriate in introducing a subject so full of controversy, of theory, and, for some readers, perhaps, of news. Although the book as a whole aims at critical unity, the ideas constitute a system of compo- nent parts which in turn result in chapters measurably self- sufficient. Furthermore, if progress on little-travelled paths should offer some difficulties, these may be eased by the presence, as it were, of landing-places between the stairs.

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