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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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PRIN TED 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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KAPILA VATSYAYANA

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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. SWOONIN G 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

The Classical Drama of I ndia

not carried into their more advanced phases. The emotions implied are much more violent than in most European drama but in sym- pathetic production are intimated rather than naturalistically expressed, the aesthetic demand for form and control surpassing the indulgence given to direct projection of feeling. The basic theme of all Indian drama is spiritual equilibrium, poise between opposites, rest and fulfillment at the center of violent motion. Sanskrit drama is from the Western point of view that ultimate paradox, a successful contemplative drama. In the acute theoretical criticism of their dramatic art Indian actors are enjoined to stand above the emotions expressed, no matter how violent; both they and the audience are charged to maintain with a severe and spiritual discipline the con- templative view of life. This is a highly convincing aesthetic and the modern world has similarly discovered it to signify an ingra- tiating outlook in philosophy and religion. Sanskrit plays commence and conclude with prayers to the god of dancing and art, Siva, destroyer and creator. Surely, much is to be gained, whether in the theatre or in life itself, by propitiation of such a profoundly meditated divinity.

/ 5 anskrit Drama and the Modern 5 tage 4

A MOVEMENT in drama or any other art has two distinct values , namely, the absolute value, or pleasure, which its works afford in direct experience, and the relative value, or degree to which they stimulate fresh activity. Of course these two aspects of a classic as seen in perspective are far from being mutually exclusive. Whatever stirs and delights us must influence our own mental and possibly even our social activity. But at least in terms of analysis, the two aspects must always stand apart. A classic pleases us in itself and contributes to the forces that fashion our own creations. Whenever it is really alive to us, or, in other words, when it answers the de- finition of a classic, it performs both functions. It is remembered for having distinctive qualities that wo~ks of no other school pos- sess, whether reference is made to either time or locality, and yet at the same time it is endowed with the potency to enter into the circulation of our own blood .

Although the conclusion of earlier chapters has been that the best Sanskrit plays are capable at the present time of giving warm enjoyment, they have been considered rather in respect to them- selves and our own more general standards of value than in relation to specific movements or works of twentieth-century origin. More comparison has been made between Sanskrit works on the one hand and the Greek or Elizabethan on the other than between the Indian stage and specimens of current movements in the theatre. The contention has been that the Sanskrit masterpieces resemble planets circulating about a central sun; that they are present to stay; that they have the power to delight not only our own century but, in somewhat different terms, any civilization of which we can ourselves at the present time dream. We have been concerned with

The Classical Drama of India

their value indiscriminately in relation to time. But they have, of course, a particular relevance for our own time and, as it seems, a relevance of more than usual potency. Not only are they in a broad sense of the word timeless; they are especially timely in terms of recent trends of thought and taste. In grasping for a metaphor, one thinks of the view of Mount Fugi from various areas of Japan. The mountain is always there, at many times veiled or actually hidden, at certain hours with exceptional clearness in the atmos- phere becoming preternaturally vivid, approaching the spectator as though it has been violently dislodged. Our own times constitute one of the moments in cultural history when the Sanskrit drama looms in vivid proximity.

For a score of centuries, drama in the Western world has, even in advance of other art forms, favored an objective view of experience. It has in general depicted life in social terms and at times analyzed it in intelleGtual terms. Its address has been to the social consci- ousness or to the mind of the audience. It has not, except in cer- tain cases of the religious drama, addressed itself directly to the soul of the individual spectator. Its form has been narratory; it has favored direct projection of action and has emphasized the difference between persons, the contentions arising from these differences being found the very essence of drama itself. Western drama, in short, has depicted the clash of personalities, stressing the view that different men ' wear different masks. Its conception has been antithetical, for example, to the lyric of self-expression. Criticism has contended that each major playwright, to be sure, stamps his works with the mark of his own personality but maintained that their basic meaning is objective rather than autobiographical.

While the Western drama delights in surprises and looks outward, Sanskrit drama takes the opposite course. In content it is psycholo-

A 'cal and spiritual rather than social, ethical, or intellectual; it aims

to establish the felicity of eqUilibrium in the soul of each spectator. It stresses the likenesses, not the dissimilarities, of men, depicting them as different only insofar as the exigencies of its myths demand. Its final goal is to proclaim the unity within the universe itself and thus to r efute what might be called the multiverse assumed in the secular drama of the West. It depicts the soul in repose, not in action; its image is the seated Buddha, not the javelin-throwing Zeus, or at least the god Siva dancing within the circle of his own sovereignty, not the charioteer urging his horses through tempestu-

Sanskrit Drama and the Modern Stage

ous waves. Its ideal form is neither narratory, dynamic, nor centri- fugal but, metaphorically speaking, musical, plateresque, and magnetic. In its structure all lines lead inward as if to the center of a circle, to the navel of the body or the chalice of the flower. This form may at first seem to defy the very principles of drama themselves and indeed if drama be as Aristotle declared it, the most celebrated of Sanskrit playwrights are among the least of dramatic poets. But the modern mind is strongly tempted to pass beyond the Greeks. Clearly, within our own century much of the most admired dramatic poetry has moved with an ever increasing volume in the direction of the Sanskrit.

To begin with a view of British and American drama one may con- sider Dylan Thomas's remarkable poetic play, Under Milk Wood, conceived, to be sure, as a poem for radio recitation but more than once seen in versions more or less overtly theatrical. The work complies with almost all the characteristics outlined in preceding descriptions of Sanskrit drama except, possibly, in its extreme use of local color, which may well lead the spectator to feel, here lies a Welsh village, not the City of Man's Soul. The satirist intrudes upon the role of the idealist or dreamer. Much the same holds true for the plays of Samuel Beckett. Here the pessimism, to be sure, is extreme; but pessimism is by no means absent from oriental religious thought, though Sanskrit drama on the whole outwardly stresses a more cheerful view of existence. Waiting for Codot is not a play about an action . It is precisely a play about no action, as its title suggests. It ends as it begins. Its remarkably theatrical qualities lie in the style, not in the action; or, to express the thought differently, in the pantomime or "business," not in a story which simply does not exist .

Chiefly through music-drama and the irresistible tendency of man to unite music and the theatre a half-oriental form makes itself felt and all imperatives of the Aristotelian form are dismissed. The Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thompson, Four Saints in Three Acts illustrates this. It is more a pageant than a play and more a shifting of tableaux than a pageant. Above all it is a symphony made visible or a dance with elaborate music and spectacle. E ach act has its own mood (the Sanskrit " rasa", the European " movement"). In its inspired initial production this was widely recognized as providing a thoroughly gratifying theatrical experience. The new school of metaphysical poets has clearly contributed the most to

The Classical Drama of India

this departure from orthodox Western drama. In this category few writers are more typical than Conrad Aiken. His notable play, Dr. Arcularis. is, to be sure, in one of its phases merely a detective story, a type of art essentially melodramatic and overwhelmingly Western. Sherlock Holmes was no Bodhisattva. But insofar as the entire play is conceived as a dream or vision at the point of death as experienced by a fairly representative man and as symbolical meditation upon the cardinal conditions of human life, it resembles the meditative theatre of India. The heart of Aiken's play is spiritual and non-objective.

Aiken, to be sure. shows a penchant for autobiography and autobiography is a type of expression distinctly foreign to the impersonal impulses of the Sanskrit stage. The personal confession of both Catholic and Protestant, the one leading to verbal confession to a priest, the other, to written confession to edify a reading public, alike belong to a civilization built upon self-consciousness, antitheti- cal to the mystical cultures of the East aspiring to super-consci- ousness. Hence the leading dramatists of relatively modern times using the stage for autobiography at once approach and diverge from the oriental stage. Insofar as they become to a large degree non-objective, they approach the Oriental; insofar as they tend to magnify rather than to nullify individuality, they prove violently occidental. Strindberg is here the supreme case in point; his expres- sionist plays violently wrench Western drama from its traditional position. But one is never quite sure how far To Damascus and The Dream Play are intended as autobiography of a distressed Chris- tian or as outlines of universal man. These elusive plays might be collected under the ambiguous title, "Strindberg or Everyman". Both of Strindberg's two revolutionary tendencies in the theatre, one toward self-expression in the theatre and the other toward symbolism, announced a revolution. The first merely divorced his plays from the outlook of the Renaissance. The second pointed clearly in the direction of the East. His essentially poetic vision weaned him from the naturalistic theatre and cast his thoughts toward music. Avowedly he conceived many of his mature plays in relation to musical sentiment and form. Easter is a progression of scenes based upon the marvellous passion music of H aydn, The Ghost Sonata, a similar work indebted to Beethoven. In both cases inspiration moves also toward the Orient,

Another great European playwright moved, as he became in-

Sanskrit Drama and the Modern Stage

creasingly the poet of the theatre, in a similar direction. Pirandello was passionately devoted to music and for a considerable period in his life attempted to work out a film projection of the Beethoven symphonies. That this project in course of time passed largely into the unscrupulous hands of Hollywood, with Walt Disney and Stokowski as its servants, in no way diminishes its aesthetic importance. Pirandello's own last work, his incomplete Mountain Giants, is his own unfinished symphony. It calls for considerable musical accompaniment and betrays much of the oriental concern for "rasa". The acts are movements, each with its own emotional tone. This is not "straight" Western theatre. It is a theatre in- creasingly bent in an Easterly direction.

The preoccupation with a form capable of being abstracted and stated in more or less musical terms, as variations upon certain themes, is conspicuous in Eugene O'Neill's most revolutionary play, The Iceman Cometh. There is a sense in which here little or nothing happens. Or, to put it differently, the most ' dramatic changes lie in the lighting, not in the action. At the end all but two of the chief characters are seated on the stage just as at the beginning, though the illumination is dimmer than ever. The characters sit exactly as musicians in a chamber orchestra. One man, weaker, or possibly stronger than the rest, has committed suicide. Another has come and gone, distinguished from the rest chiefly by his superior power to personify their common predica- ment. He is the deus ex machina of a machine that from the humani- tarian point of view conspicuously fails to work. The movements (one cannot properly speak of the "action") are cyclical. There is no "intrigue" or "plot". Only O'Neill's violent pessimism, relieved, to be sure, by some finely humorous, cynical irony, conceals from even the most superficial glance the playwright's marked approxi- mation to the form and spirit of the Sanskrit stage.

Before entering upon the later and more definitive parts ' of this exposition, it will be well to remark that in the present chapter observations on the Sanskrit theatre itself made in earlier sections of this book, especially as to its thematic structure, will be assumed and attention turned chiefly toward revealing analogies in the theatre of the West. Yet it may be wise to re-examine at least briefly certain formal devices in construction of the typical act of the Sanskrit play which distinguish it from act-construction in Western drama. In a word, the act division has considerably

The Classical Drama of India

more significance in the East than in the West. That each act has its prevailing rasa, or mood, that it requires the use of special formulas for its introduction and only to a less degree for its conclu- sion, are conspicuous features. vEach act is required to develop certain themes belonging to the playas a whole, to recapitulate in its beginning what has already occurred on the stage, or, more often, what has occurred in an intermediate time off the stage. No Sanskrit play is. merely a sequence of one-act plays, although several of Bhasa's short works were quite possibly given as parts of a longer entertainment. But despite this articulation, the act in the typical play has all the completeness of an ideal movement in a musical composition. It may well be that 'Western music in the last three hundred years has achieved a sophistication in form comparable to that of the Sanskrit stage and that the Indian theatre itself in this regard actually forged ahead of Indian music. In any event, the Westerner seeking an intimacy with the Sanskrit theatre discovers that Western drama provides him with less fundamental aid than Western music. To look to Shakuntalii for what the West regards as basically musical qualities rather than essentially dramatic qualities is no poor strategy nor in the end a derogatory comment on Kalidasa as a playwright.

The Western dramatist and poet ,closest to the spirit of the Eastern art is, presumably, Federico Garcia-Lorca, especially if attention is focused on his longest play, If Five Years Pass. The emotional violence of his three tragedies on Andelusian women is indeed far from Eastern practice and more nearly approaches that most typical of Western dramatic forms , melodrama. An underlying primitivism in Spanish thought, whose most conspicuous out- cropping in recent years is in the art of Picasso, seems indeed far from the gentle sophistication of the Sanskrit nataka, although farce is much the same the world over, whether in Lorca's puppet-plays or in the bawdy trifles delighting popular audiences in ancient India. As the most highly conventionalized and impersonal type of theatre, the commedia dell' arte, which Lorca closely approaches in his light and witty entertainments, The Shoemaker'.) Prodigious Wife, and The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belisa in the Garden, the most nearly approximates the abstraction of the Indian stage. But it is not in this respect that the most revealing analogies are to be found. The plateresque quality of his form and its musical structure and spirit are the qualities chiefly apparent in If Five

Sanskrit Drama and the Modern Stage

Years Pass and are so firmly based on his thought and work as a whole that a few comments on his life and non-dramatic poems are useful as introduction to the analysis of his powerful "surrealist" play.

Lorca knew how to write plays of the most varied sorts and how to follow patterns developed on various stages of the Western drama. The narrative elements conspicuous in the "Andelusian" tragedies rest on the firmest basis of Western tradition. Influence of the golden age of Spanish drama, with Lope de Vega and Calderon at its head, appear in the relatively tame, early and derivative piece, Mariana Pineda. He was skilled in almost pure commedia dell'arte. Never, of course, does he stray into the fertile field of the comedy of manners nor into the stony area of the problem play in the accepted sense of those words. Nor does he write strictly neo- classical drama, though the choral elements in two of the Andelu- sian plays and the two levels of style reflected by the alternation of verse and prose suggest in turn the Greek and the Elizabethan manner. No matter how he writes, however, he is even within each individual work highly versatile and always the poet; thus in two very general respects comparable to the Sanskrit dramatists. His radical experiment with form in If Five Years Pass , where he boldly deserts orthodox European practice and turns toward the East, is most strongly revelatory of a mind steeped in the very essence of music.

Lorca was a gifted pianist, an amateur composer, a favorite pupil of Da Falla, a sponsor of musical performances and research, and equally devoted to popular and sacred music, to the music of the flamenco dance and of the Catholic mass. Whatever he wrote, showed the impact of music upon him, whether the essay, the short poem, the longer poem, or the play. He delighted in musical accompaniment for the reading of poetry, sharing with his country- men as a whole, a fondness for that best of accompanying instru- ments, the guitar. Though poetry, drama, and play-directing were his professions, he was in a sense a professional in nothing and an amateur in everything, during his brief life reaching considerable dexterity and skill in all the arts, including painting. Better than any other figure of his times he exemplifies the tendency of the age to a synthesis of the arts. He wrote in color and painted in caricature. His colors sing; he can write a narrative ballad inspired by the color green. White and black are passions to him. Whereas Michelangelo

The Classical Drama of India

declared that a single majesty inspires all the arts, Lorca takes a less platonic and a more pragmatic position. He finds practical relations between the arts and thus achieves the total theatre of movement, speech, color, form , dance . and music, both vocal and instrumental. No art as he employs it is ever out of sight of its sister arts. His conception of the theatre in these respects, he seems never to have formulated for print but its significance in terms of inter-continental culture remains clear. The Granada of his birth is historically the link between the European peninsula that is Spain and the African- Asian world symbolized by the Alhambra. Lorca idolized the Isla- mic tradition. In so doing he presumably never realized that he was also in his own terms effecting a passage to ancient India, where the synthesis of the arts, both in theory and in practice, was achieved more firmly than at any time in the West.

Music, then. was merely one, though presumably the chief, of the arts whose influence swayed the course of his writing and at least in his own eyes operated greatly to its advantage. He was wholly accustomed to think of such relationships and even to act upon them quite unconsciously, as part of his birthright. A large proportion of his minor poems have received musical settings; all his more popular plays have received operatic settings, a few of them several times over; successful dances have been composed on the inspira- tion of both his poems and plays. The latter have been the special delight of stagedesigners and producers . Like Kalidasa, Lorca thought in the most comprehensive of aesthetic terms. He thought also in terms of relatively intense and short-winded literary and dramatic units, in this regard again suggesting the influence of musical compositions. It is almost as though his strong lyrical sense tempted him to accept Poe's celebrated dictum on the impos- sibility of the long poem . Most of his poems are brief. His plays are also brief and sharply divided into acts. The chief of his non-dra- matic poems, his Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, is in strict sonata form, the first movement dominated by the harsh theme, "at five in the afternoon," the second, by the bitter theme, "I will not see it," the third, by the heavy oppression of allusions to stone, the last, by exhilarating themes of revival, announcing that the stone has been rolled away from the door of the sepulchre. That this is one of the most ·profundly musical of modern poems is obvi- ous to any sympathetic reader but the condition is still further manifest when, as on certain phonographic recordings, it is chanted

San skrit Drama and the Modern Stage

by a fine Spanish voice and with the accompaniment of an elegiac guitar.

If In Five Years proceeds from the same hand and mind that fashioned the great chant for the dead bullfighter, though the play is, of course, less essentially tragic and more bitterly ironic, never passing in its mood beyond the astringency of the poem's second movement. There is really no narrative. In the first of its three acts A loves B, while B is cold; in the third and last act B loves A, while A is cold. These are the two major figures . Both are sensitive beings caught in the trap of time. In Act Two a pair of vulgar and insensitive beings wear themselves out in their own animalistic passion, the girl meanwhile deserting A, hitherto her unrewarding lover. Every figure represents a new inflection of the unifying idea, the invidiousness of time, not so much because all things are time's victims through death-though this thought supplies a minor level for the action and a symbolical character or two-as because time decrees that there is no stability for either the human heart or mind. One character lives on memory, another on anti- cipation; another, a vulgar sensualist, on attempts to snatch the passing moment. Still another, the "Old Man," a slightly more sympathetic character than the rest, is un convincingly resigned to the luxuries of retrospection and the unrealized surprises of a future as yet unthinkable. The symbolic figures associated with death express time's ultimate irony. These are, in Act One, a dead cat and a dead child, in Act Three, a clown wearing a death's-head and a harlequin, who plays a "violin" with two strings while chant- ing repeatedly certain theme lines in verse. An imposing but brittle department-store mannikin that can neither live nor properly die supplies the secondary theme of supernaturalism in Act Two. The play is all a very conscious artifact yet by no means dry or concocted. Emotions are strong and tender. No character bears a personal name. All are treated as musical motifs. And all breathe the impassioned life of music itself. The form is scarcely known to Western literature outside the twentieth century. It approximates the most nearly to Western music and to the Sanskrit stage.

As already indicated, the treatment of the individual acts strongly supports the analogy to music, just as the treatment of the four parts in the great Lament. Act One is pensive and melancholy; Act Two, bitter and satirical; Act Three, supernatural and tragic. Gestures are repeated, always with a difference. Words and phrases

The Classical Drama of India

are echoed; at times the words are inverted, exchanged between different characters, or subtly turned around upon themselves. The first few lines of the play are a quiet crescendo, or montage, the last few lines, in a corresponding but inverse form , a quiet diminuendo. Every page and line of the dialogue is alive with musical sentiment, as all actions and gestures proceed with rigid but not too rigid musical precision to the swift conclusion.

This play, written largely, it appears, in 1929, seems in some ways to have been fifty years ahead of its times. Lorca himself withdrew it from rehearsal not on the ground that it required rewriting but that with the actors, facilities and means at his dispo- sal it could not be produced to his liking at the time. He also gravely doubted that it would be popularly applauded in aestheti- cally conservative Madrid. Moreover, he well knew that plays on Andelusian themes, with their strong coloration in terms of local folkways, would be warmly received. Subsequently he wrote three powerful plays less conspicuously inspired by music and less strong- ly symbolic, Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba, together with the patently musically inspired but far less elaborate Dona Rosita, the Spinster, or The Language of Flowers. Abruptly his life came to a violent end. The surrealist play was only posthumously published and has never received a truly analytic- al appreciation from its critics nor an adequate representation on the stage. Nevertheless it is perhaps the best of all fantastic dramas of our century, at least the equal in moving force and artistic ex- cellence of any expressionist play from the North of Europe or any surrealist play from the South. The most musically profound of all Lorca's plays, it is almost alone among them in not having received some successful transposition into a musical or choreogra- phic form. But such is the history of Federico Garcia-Lorca's works and no comment on comparative literature, aesthetics, or dramatic art. In its disillusioned tone the play differs greatly from Sanskrit drama and approaches O'Neill or the early T. S. Eliot. It is also clearly a tour de force, a prodigious effort of a somewhat isolated genius in Madrid working against the main current still flowing through his time and place of living. Yet it is conspicuously modern in the sense that European abstract art is modern, that expression- ism, impressionism, subjectivism, surrealism, and neo-metaphysical poetry, and the music of Stravinsky are modern. It seems still proEhetic of things to come. It, is also reactionary in that it har-

Sanskrit Drama and the Modern Stage

monizes with the fundamental qualities of Sanskrit drama as these were unfolded over a thousand years before and many thousand miles from Lorca's homeland. The play, like the character of its "Old Man," looks both forward and backward in time. It is both rear guard and avant-garde. Although the significance of this particular work has, owing to the fantastic inadequacy of criticism, never been widely recognized, it epitomizes I believe, better than any other both those tendencies in our artistic life rightly declared "modern" and those which look backward to a possibly still richer flowering in the gardens of the Sanskrit stage. It would be too tame a description to call it a passage to India. For the careful reader it affords a firm bridge.