LAST year, some of us formed a group to study and discuss Bhavabhuti’s Sanskrit play Uttara Rama Charitam (URC). Mentored by a senior scholar, we read the Sanskrit text closely, comparing it with four English and four Kannada translations that were available to us: the whole process was a rich learning experience. It also prompted me to do a fresh Kannada translation of the play, and eventually produce it for the students of Ninasam Theatre Institute in May 2018.

While working on the literary and theatrical texts of the play during this process, among many other things, one feature that kept fascinating me is how Bhavabhuti explores the capacity of theatre as an activity of reflection. Aided by a strong tradition of playwriting and dramaturgy (from Bhasa to Kalidasa in playwriting; and Natyasastra to its commentators in dramaturgy), he also invests into theatre a potential for peacemaking. The major tool he employs to achieve this unique feat is to have a play within a play, so that the activity of theatre making (and watching) and the act that is presented on stage, mirror each other to create infinite possibilities of reflections. Through this device, Bhavabhuti seems to illustrate that the act on stage is indistinguishably intertwined with the act that it represents and evokes, and the two realms of actions – the real and the represented – co-constitute one another.

Many scholars have already written elaborately on this ‘meta-theatrical’ feature of URC,¹ while my concern in this short essay is limited and tangential. I will briefly elucidate how the theme of performance is dramaturgically woven within Bhavabhuti’s play, and then attempt an inductive leap from that ancient text to make a somewhat personal reflection on the possibilities (or the lack of it) of using theatre performance as peacemaker in contemporary theatre practice in the specific context of Indian languages, within which my theatre work is situated.

 

Uttara Rama Charitam (URC), as the name itself suggests, takes up the Uttara-Ramayana narrative, with many new twists and turns introduced by the playwright. The play opens to a relaxed situation – the great battle of Lanka is over, Rama and Sita are back in Ayodhya. Rama is ruling the state comfortably, and the couple await the birth of their child. Then follows all the emotional ups and downs: Sita’s banishment, the birth of her sons under water, their growing up in Valmiki’s hermitage, and Rama’s sojourn into the forest as part of his ashwamedha sacrifice, and confronting his own sons there. The play ends with the reunion of the family: the climactic play within a play produced by Valmiki, depicting Rama’s own life, leads Rama to recognize his sons.

Though the actual employment of the play within the play (or Garbhanataka, as Sanskritists call it) happens only in the last and seventh act of URC, the dramatic structure of the play is designed as a series of ‘performances’ eventually culminating in a ‘meta-performance’, in which each act is independent while also being part of the meta-performance.

 

In Act One for example, Rama, Lakshmana and Sita watch a painted scroll that depicts events from their past life: from leaving Ayodhya to the slaying of Ravana (this episode where they ‘watch’ their life that has gone by, is an invention of the playwright, not in Valmiki’s text). More or less like a power-point presentation, it is playing out history, a performance of the past for Rama, Sita and Lakshmana. They annotate it with their comments, as spectators do. But soon, the spectatorship leads to the recollection of emotions and they start behaving like actors in that performance. They feel that the incidents of the past are taking place in the now, before their eyes, as in a performance. This new spectatorship of the past also elicits fresh responses, shaping the future.

For instance, watching the visuals of her previous visit to the forest, Sita is tempted now to go for a picnic into those lands, and Rama asks Lakshmana to make the arrangements. Ironically, this becomes the actual future, as Sita is soon banished to the forest, which the Ramayana literate audience foresee playing out in the background. Thus, the scroll-watching scene becomes a multilayered performance, where acts from the past, present and future converge into a theatrical present.²

 

The play then takes a narrative leap to Act Two, which happens after 12 long years: Lava and Kusha are now growing up in Valmiki’s hermitage, while the seer is busy composing the epic, Ramayana. At this point of time, Rama himself comes to the Dandaka forest (for the purpose of killing Shambuka, the Shudra ascetic), and incidentally encounters the actual physical locales where his past life with Sita had played out. This leads to another kind of performance, which is ‘site specific’. The painted scroll in the previous Act is replaced here by the actual mise en scene consisting of the Dandaka landscape, which becomes the artistic cause (Vibhava, as Natyashastra would term it) for the re-enactment of memories within Rama’s self.

These two ‘performances’ culminate into a grand enactment in Act Three, which is named Chayanka, The Shadow Act. Probably unparalleled in the history of world drama, this extraordinary dramaturgical construction presents yet another variety of performance that is partly real and partly virtual. In this Act, Rama accompanied by the forest deity, and Sita accompanied by the river deity meet each other, but with varying degrees of perceptive access. Due to a boon, Sita is invisible to Rama and his consort and they cannot hear her words, but she is accessible to Rama’s tactile sense as he can touch her. But Sita and her consort are able to see, hear and touch Rama, and hence have a better perceptive access.

In this exquisitely calibrated encounter, which is virtual for Rama and real for Sita, they recount the memories of their past acts, with doubly enhanced emotional tenor, as each action is connected to what they physically see in Dandaka at present. Meanwhile, Rama’s consort, the forest deity Vasanthi, throws sharp critical questions at him on the ethical validity of abandoning Sita, which pierces not only the mind of Rama, but evokes Sita’s sympathy for Rama. In the process, Rama swoons twice and Sita is compelled to bring him back to life through her touch. And through such selective sensory communication – sometimes just by hearing words, sometimes by the evocation of memories, or Sita looking at the grief-stricken Rama, and Rama rejuvenated by the soothing touch of Sita – the husband and wife reinvent the trajectory of their relationship to eventually reach a point of reconciliation with each other emotionally.

 

The physical reality of their separation, however, does not alter and their grief remains painfully intact as it was, with one crucial shift: their pain is now felt differently, almost like a relished emotion. The well known verse that comes here celebrates the emergence of the pathetic sentiment (karuna rasa), emerging from pathos (shoka). Bhavabhuti exclaims that this is a fundamental sentiment, while all other emotions such as the sringara, the erotic, veera, the heroic, are just variants of it, just the way water is the basic constituent of all its manifestations such as a stream, a whirl or bubbles.

At this point of the play, we may pause and enquire what Bhavabhuti wants to achieve through this unique dramaturgy. He is not concerned much in communicating the plotline, as most of the storytelling has been handled by minor characters through indirect references. Or is it left to the informed audience to fill in the gaps, since the Ramayana is known to them? Bhavabhuti’s focus is not on the emotional moments either, because the situations that he elaborates are not at all incidents from the plot, but ‘inventions’, ‘contrived’ constructions such as scroll watching of a bygone journey, a hallucination arising out of the changed landscape and a fantasy resulting from supernatural circumstances.³

 

What then is Bhavabhuti doing here dramaturgically? The only way to answer this question, I would argue, is that he is exploring the essential possibility of theatre itself; he treats it like a laboratory;⁴ and by pushing his characters to pass through his carefully calibrated experiments, makes it a therapeutic act. It is a strategy in which the bhavas, the emotions, are not just explored and expressed, but are converted into the rasa experience, which is ultimately a peacemaking activity.

In a way, the play URC could have ended with Act Three, because what Bhavabhuti is aiming for, which is the theatrical process of recollection, reflection, that culminates into an act of peacemaking, is by now accomplished for his principal characters, Rama and Sita. But, there is an important task that remains to be done, as G.K. Bhat aptly points out: ‘The problem of Sita’s abandonment is a complicated one. It is not merely an issue of separation and the reunion of two lovers. In abandoning his wife the positive course of action that Rama had chosen involved a personal responsibility… but the responsibility of Rama had a public aspect too. How far was Rama right in judging the weight and importance of public opinion? And would he be able to satisfy all the persons, at least intellectually, on the correctness of his decision?’⁵

 

This becomes the agenda for the second part – Acts Four to Seven. The kind of prayoga (which in Kannada and many other desi languages denotes both performance and experiment) that Rama and Sita are made to go through in the first three acts is extended to more characters in the second part. In Act Four, for example, Sita’s father Janaka and Rama’s mother Kausalya, are made to meet each other and reconcile their own conflicting views on the banishment of Sita and the ensuing grief. This is also facilitated by the introduction of Lava, Rama’s son, but not yet known to anyone except Valmiki. He draws the attention of his grandparents, reminding them of an offspring of their family, and thus sowing the seed for a family reunion.

In Act Five, Lava is made to confront Chandraketu, Lakshmana’s son in combat, and there again a process of recognition begins to emerge. Act Six is special as it introduces yet another kind of performance. In this act, Rama goes from Dandaka towards the Valmiki abode, when informed that his sacrificial horse has been obstructed by a band of ascetic youngsters. Again, departing from the Valmiki narrative, Bhavabhuti creates a dramatic invention: Chandraketu introduces Lava to Rama as a promising young man whom he has encountered at combat, but strangely befriended by him. Attracted by the demeanors of this boy, and also feeling a strange affinity to him,⁶ Rama inquiries about Lava’s parentage, to learn that the boy looks upon Valmiki as his father and has a brother, Kusha.

 

Soon Kusha enters and the twins encounter their father, both unaware of their relationship. At this point Bhavabhuti reverts to a situation from the Valmiki text, not from the Uttara Ramayana, but from the Balakanda. Lava and Kusha sing and perform from Ramayana and Rama is emotionally touched. Bhavabhuti introduces this performance with such precision that it serves two purposes: one, by making the sons recite verses referring to the intimacy of Rama and Sita, Rama s oftens further and is prepared for the reunion. Two, this short performance serves like a ‘teaser’ for the main play within the play that happens in the final act.

After a variety of performance modes – painted, embedded, envisioned as a dream, recognized, sung and recited – we finally come to the actual theatrical performance of Ramayana in front of Rama in Act Seven. This performance accomplishes many goals: at the level of the plot it ties up the missing links, it integrates multiple realities experienced by the characters, while helping everyone to reach their own moments of mental equilibrium.

Most crucially, it also involves the audience assembled to watch this play within the play. They are ‘subjects from towns and districts, Brahmans and Kshatriyas, Gods and demons, apes and other animals, the serpent lords with their retinue, the whole assemblage of beings, movable and immovable’⁷ as witnesses to the act. It is after all the same ‘public’ that was responsible for Sita’s banishment. At the end of this performance, Rama’s family preceptor Arundhati comes forward to the audience, seeking their acceptance and approval, and gets a positive applause. That becomes the point where the play within the play merges back into the main play rendering the finishing touches to his master project: turning theatre into a peacemaker.

David Shulman has succinctly summed it up: ‘It is thus no wonder that Bhavabhuti’s text will end with a play within a play, in which the boundary between play and some external reality or between playtime and present time, will ultimately vanish. The great English psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, once claimed that Hamlet’s true misfortune was that he could not go to watch Hamlet: "Shakespeare had the clue [to Hamlet’s distress], but Hamlet could not go to Shakespeare’s play." Rama, by way of contrast, must always, or ever again, watch himself be re-enacted in one form or another of the Ramayana.’⁸

 

The dramaturgical structure outlined above might be inadequate for a comprehensive reading of URC, but I hope that it gives a picture of how theatre as an idea is employed in that text. What I argue in the rest of this essay stands in marked contrast to what we, as dramatists and theatre practitioners, imagine as the role of theatre in our context today. Presented in a formulaic manner, my proposal is as follows: prompted by the vastly changed historical circumstances, contemporary theatre in Kannada and as far as I know in other Indian languages, has predominantly shunned the role of being a peacemaker, but has instead taken up an agitational and interventionist mode. This is clearly evident in various kinds of activist and didactic theatre practices around us today. But even when theatre is employed as entertainment or communitarian engagement, or as an artistic endeavour, it is agitational and predominantly interventionist; it is rarely employed in the role of a peacemaker.

 

As an exercise to explore and see if my proposal prima facie has validity, let me take a few random examples of plays from my own times. From the plays that I have either lovingly directed, or worked passionately with theatre students in my theatre career so far, from the so-called ‘modernist’ period in Indian drama and theatre. I shall begin with Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq (1964), often referred to as the paradigmatic example of modernist drama in India.

Dramaturgically, Tughlaq is an inverted version of URC. The idealist Sultan Tughlaq enthusiastically attempts at creating his own idiosyncratic vision of good governance, a ‘Rama Rajya’ one could even say. But the ideas and strategies that he employs fail miserably one after the other through the play, and in the last scene he lies alone as an emotional wreck, a living corpse. Or, take the example of a different kind of a play, Mohan Rakesh’s Ashad Ka Ek Din (1959), which constructs the career of an imaginary relationship of protagonist poet Kalidasa, with his beloved Mallika in the village of his birth. In Act One, we see Kalidasa leaving the village, almost cutting his umbilical cord that connects him to his geographical and emotional context. He is lured by the possibilities of getting the patronage of the capital Ujjain, and his work recognized. In Act Two, Kalidasa returns to the village, now a renowned poet married to a princess, but does not visit Mallika, who is heartbroken and alone.

 

In the final Act, we have Kalidasa back in the village, disillusioned by the stately life in the capital, renouncing the governorship of Kashmir. The play ends with the final encounter between him and Mallika, who is now married to a Viloma, the ‘other’ of Kalidasa in the village, marking the collapse of a relationship which was the primary source of inspiration for the poet. In its theme and poetic dramaturgy, the play resonates with the structure of Shakuntala and URC, but eventually suggests that if those themes and structures are played out in the contemporary world, they would lead to the exact opposite of what the classical texts attempted to accomplish.

Or take another well known example, Vijay Tendulakar’s Shantata Court Chalu Ahe (1963), which incidentally has a strange dramaturgical affinity with the play within the play structure that URC employs. A non-professional theatre group in Maharashtra joins to rehearse a play, and because one of the cast members is missing, they ask a junior member to substitute. To make the new entrant understand the court procedures, they improvize a mock accusation, in which one of the cast members, Miss Benare, is implicated of infanticide. However, the mock play takes a serious turn when it is revealed that Miss Benare is in fact carrying a child, from an extramarital relationship with the missing member of the group. The play ends with a piercing monologue cum rebuttal by Benare, and the group is flabbergasted by its own improvization.

In its dramaturgical mode, this play comes closest to URC, not just in employing the technique of a play within the play, but also in creating that device as a reflective tool. The result is almost a mirror image of URC. The communitarian bonhomie of a rehearsal turns here into a theatre of conflict, ending with a powerful subversive stroke, making not just the characters in the play, but also the audience who watch the performance, shed their complacent sense of peace. This is the classic example of a peacebreaker, illustrating the crucial dramaturgical reversal that has happened in contemporary theatre.

 

Another set of plays that also come to mind from the following decades of Marathi playwriting are Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Wada Trilogy: Wada Chirebandi (1985), Magna Talyakathi (1994) and Yugant (1994). This trilogy begins to trace the decline of a family of landed gentry in the Vidarbha region, and the first play ends with the sounds of a bulldozer demolishing a part of the mansion. The second play shows how more macabre realities have entered the rural landscape, and how the process can never be reversed. And, the final play Yugant is apocalyptic, in which the entire landscape turns into a desert, with only monologues delivered by the characters, suggesting that a comprehensive discourse with the world at large is impossible. The dramaturgical ‘distance’⁹ between an Elkunchwar and a Bhavabhuti could not have been greater.

Can we, therefore, generalize that we have completely abandoned the Bhavabhuti mode in our contemporary dramaturgical imagination and embraced a theatre of agitation and intervention? My answer is an emphatic ‘no’, as I know at least one play in Kannada that is closer to URC, in its dramaturgical thrust and peacemaking spirit – Gunamukha (1993), by P. Lankesh, a prominent writer from the navya school in Kannada. The play focuses on the persona of Nadir Shah, the 18th century Persian ruler who invaded Mughal India. Succeeding in his conquest, Nadir Shah ruled India, but as a deeply troubled person.

 

The play opens by dramatically depicting a sick sultan, coughing and wheezing, with an undetectable illness that no doctor from the land has been able to cure. The first part of the play depicts Nadir Shah’s frustration of not finding a cure, and that triggers more anger and unbridled violence towards most of his subjects and deputies. This part of the play is similar in the characterization of its protagonist to Tughlaq as portrayed by Karnad decades earlier. But the second part takes a U-turn, completely changing its dramaturgical mode, with a mysterious and mystical hakim named Alavi Khan entering the play. Nadir is impatient to try this new doctor while the hakim is in no hurry to impress the emperor. He treats him like an ordinary patient, which infuriates Nadir. But his fury confronted by a cool and caring doctor, leads to the realization that he is getting a different kind of therapy.

Nadir, the unsurpassed emperor, is undressed not only physically, but also made to shed his ego – the tyrannical sultan is humanized moving beyond the façade of his hubris. By the end of the play, Nadir is treated like a newborn, having to learn life afresh and the play concludes on the note that the patient is moving ‘towards cure’ (Gunamukha in Kannada). I would argue that it is a rare specimen of a play (or at least belongs to a minority set of such plays¹⁰) in the Kannada dramatic tradition that employs the peacemaking dramaturgy in its contemporary version. I also see it as an exceptional work not only in Kannada but also in other Indian languages from our times, where the predominant type of plays are agitational and interventionist.

 

Or, this may not be that exceptional, if we are prepared to expand our notions of the ‘contemporary’ in the term contemporary theatre. Let me explain: though the word contemporary simply qualifies works that belong to the present times, this is often employed as an implicit antonym for words such as ‘traditional’ and ‘folk’. For instance, if we randomly pick up an essay in Kannada on ‘contemporary theatre’, it will invariably include the urbanized middle class activities in drama and theatre, but will exclude all ‘folk/traditional’ works, even though they are also happening along with the former, here and now.

In other words, knowingly or unknowingly, we do not treat the present work in forms such as Yakshagana, Talamaddale and Sri Krishna Parijatha as contemporary. However, if we look at rough statistics of the number of performances and audiences that go to see those forms today,¹¹ it is often more than that of the so-called ‘contemporary theatre’. I bring this asymmetry of perception especially in this context, because the dramaturgy employed in that ‘other-contemporary-theatre’ is different from the ones that we see in contemporary theatre developed from the modernist lineage. And the dramaturgy here is predominantly non-interventionist and anti-agitational, which is also the reason why it is labelled as traditional or folk, and therefore, the accounts kept separate.

 

Restricting myself to a couple of examples let me quickly look at Sri Krishna Parijatha and Talamaddale, the forms that are viewed by a community of contemporary audiences in specific areas of Karnataka. Both these ‘traditional’ forms play stories from the mythology, but the characters they portray are completely human, and the conflict that is presented in those forms are also from the world of the spectators, located in the immediate. However, the crucial difference is the ‘realism’ that they employ, which is different from that of ‘contemporary’ theatre, and of the kind that Bhavabhuti employs in URC.

In the Sri Krishna Parijatha play, the quarrel of Rukmini and Satyabhama, the two wives of Krishna, is a good example of this. The conflict begins with Narada bringing the Parijata and the dramaturgy then focuses on the jealousy between Rukmini and Satyabhama in all its worldly details. The form makes it possible for us to view the story in two different ways. We could place the story in the physical realm and see it as a fight between two wives and the hapless man caught between them, almost as a comic situation with entertainment at its core. Contrarily, it can be seen as a story with deep, philosophical meanings where Rukmini and Satyabhama become embodiments of the inner and outer disposition of Krishna, suggesting a conflict between the two. The free spirit and the plural nature of a form like Sri Krishna Parijata is so extraordinary that it can, at once, offer two kinds of drama, the conflict oriented as well as the peacemaking type.

The well known story of Vali’s killing by Rama, from the Ramayana, is played in a similar mixed dramaturgical structure in the plot Vali Moksha in the Talamaddale form.¹² The interesting part of the episode begins with Rama hitting a fatal arrow at Vali, and then Vali begins his long interrogation of Rama. He argues with textual evidence how each act of Rama that has eventually led to the murder of Vali is unethical. Rama almost loses the verbal battle, though he has already won in physical combat. But the final part of the episode takes a U-turn in which Rama reminds Vali that the divine reason for his birth is to be killed by Rama, as part of the larger battle against Ravana, and Vali instantly turns into a devotee of Rama, and accepts his deliverance.

 

I conclude by coming back to the question why I ventured into this reflection: something that was initiated by URC, which extended into contemporary dramaturgy. I will also try and suggest what according to me, are the lessons for a contemporary theatre practitioner that have emerged from this exercise. Let me first hasten to add a caveat: I am not making this comparison as someone fondly looking at an exotic model from a bygone era, bemoaning its demise; nor do I intend to evaluate the relative merits of the two kinds of dramaturgies. My purpose is different: I am attempting to understand the nature and the implication of a profound shift in our dramaturgical imagination,¹³ as exemplified by the contrast between URC and the illustrations that I have given from contemporary plays.

I will restrict myself to one key question: what exactly is the nature of this dramaturgical shift? Just because the ‘classical’ Sanskrit plays begin with an invocation (Nandi) and conclude with a benedictory epilogue (Bharatavakya), can we infer from the ‘happy ending’ that there is proof of conflict resolution? Also, is the lack of it in contemporary theatre an opposite trait? This, according to me, is only a superficial half-truth. URC, as I have pointed out earlier, does not resolve any conflict. Instead, Bhavabhuti takes a different dramaturgical route: he keeps the conflict as it is even at the end of the play, one could argue. He only ‘performs’ the possibility of conflict resolution for the characters in the play as well as its spectators.¹⁴

 

This is what I mean to suggest by the phrase – ‘the dramaturgy of peacemaking’. It must also be stressed here that this ‘peacemaking’ is a ‘mental’ process, which is evoked in the mind of the spectators, and it need not happen between the characters or within the play. It is this kind of a peacemaking potential that I find largely absent in contemporary theatre.

We have seen that the deployment of the play within the play in URC becomes the crucial devise that accomplishes peacemaking. To illustrate this with an analogy, if URC is a ‘reflection’ of Ramayana, the play within the play is a ‘reflection within a reflection’, and we as spectators of the play as well as the play within the play, are led to experience multiple manifestations of the real/unreal, prompting us to connect all of it in an intuitive way with our own real life. This I feel, makes the audience realize that after all, what we are treating as real life is not that real, and therefore a meta-meta-performance of another kind.¹⁵

Therefore, the takeaway for a spectator is that she will know ‘how Rama would solve that problem’ even though the Rama in the play may not solve it that way! In contrast, the agenda of contemporary dramaturgy is different: here, the aim is more about educating people about conflict and therefore contemporary practitioners focus on ‘understanding’ (for example, the causes of oppression). While the aim of contemporary dramaturgy is to analyse the conflict, the URC mode is one of an empathetic state of mind (the Natyashastra term is rasa) that internalizes the conflict. Bhavabhuti also seems to imply that such a capacity is unique to theatre as performance: while the text of the play might give a cognitive understanding, the empathy, which a performance produces, is what is special to it.

 

Therefore, living in times when even the understanding of a conflict seems only to consolidate the conflict, or the process of understanding the conflict itself enhances the problem, the lesson from URC for a contemporary theatre practitioner could probably be this: we need not (and cannot) attempt a revival of a Bhavabhuti dramaturgy today, but we may try and explore the contemporary possibilities of peacemaking through the capacities of performance. For that, we need not abandon the ‘tradition’ of our post-Independence drama, but probably could reinvent it as new performances of peacemaking.

 

*I am indebted to Sundar Sarukkai and Rustom Bharucha for their responses to an earlier draft, which I have not been able to address adequately yet, as this is still a ‘thought-in-progress’. I am grateful to Deepa Ganesh for her comments and editorial help.

Footnotes:

1. Among many, I cite two such writings that have especially enriched my readings of this play: the simple but insightful introduction by G.K. Bhat in his bilingual edition of Uttara-Rama-Charita (Popular Book Store, Surat, 1953); and David Shulman’s evocative essay, ‘Bhavabhuti on Cruelty and Compassion’ (in The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit, OUP, Delhi, 2001).

2. Prompted by this reading, I translated the title of the play in Kannada as Andina Ramana Mundina Kathe (Akshara Prakashana, Heggodu, 2018), roughly meaning ‘The Future of Rama’s Past’. This translation, I feel, is justified literally in the Sanskrit title too as it sandwiches Rama between his ‘uttara’ and ‘charita’.

3. None of which is sourced either from the Valmiki Ramayana, or any other text that is known.

4. I am indebted to Pu.Ti. Narasimhachar, a major Kannada poet and writer, for this idea of theatre becoming a laboratory for ideas, wonderfully expressed in his Kannada essay: ‘Rangabhumi Mattu Prayogashale’. For excerpts from the English translation of this essay see: Akshara K.V. (ed.), Kannada Theatre History 1850-1950: A Sourcebook. Manipal Universal Press, Manipal, 2018, pp. 143-149.

5. G.K. Bhat, op. cit., fn. 1, p. 24.

6. Or to be precise, there is a process of re-cognition happening here too, akin to the phenomenon that is discussed as Pratyabhi-jnana in Indian philosophical literature. This is another fascinating theme that runs all through Bhavabhuti’s play, and Kirtinatha Kurtakoti has written elaborately in Kannada on this theme (Pratyabhijnana, Manohara Granthamala, Dharawada, 1998). For the purpose of the present essay, I have not picked up this line of reading.

7. As mentioned in the opening lines of Lakshmana, to Act 7.

8. David Shulman, op. cit., fn. 1, p. 271.

9. I use this word with a purpose: if we are to accept V.V. Mirashi’s conjecture (Bhavabhuti: His Date, Life and Works, Motilal Banarasidas, Delhi, 1974) that Bhavabhuti’s place of birth is a village close to the Vidarbha region, then the two playwrights are almost neighbours!

10. If we take into account the pre-1950 period in Kannada drama, there are more plays that are neither agitational nor interventionist, as is also the case with other Indian languages.

11. In case of Talamaddale, a recent estimate indicates that around 5,00,000 people watch its 4,000 performances every year, mostly in the coastal regions of Karnataka.

12. Talamaddale is a unique theatre form in which argument becomes the main theatrical tool to develop drama. It is a stripped down version of the well known Yakshagana form, where only the songs and dialogues of actors are present, with no dance and costumes.

13. I am also not looking into the sociocultural reasons for such a shift here, which I feel is beyond the scope of an essay like this.

14. This is also true about many other Sanskrit plays of that period, including Abhijana Shakuntalam. Kalidasa does not suggest that Dushyanta and Shakuntala happily lived ever after; the play only ‘performs’ the possibility of achieving a mental equilibrium.

15. This points us towards the Budhdhist/Advaita metaphysical stand that the real itself is a reflection. Bhavabhuti’s position is close to that stand as expressed in many places in the play. Two explicit examples from the oft quoted verses: the ‘advaita of Sukha and Dukha’ (1.39); or whirls and bubbles as ‘vivarta’ of water (3.47).