The word abhinaya means to take things closer[1]. The word can also mean good character and making things one’s own. Abhinaya can be divided into four kinds, namely āṅgika, āhārya, vācika, and sāttvika. As the very name suggests, āṅgikābhinaya is to do with the movement of the major and minor parts of the body including hands, legs, waist, neck and head.
Human nature is composed of the triad of guṇas – sattva, rajas, and tamas. It is true of the universe also. A man’s inner nature influences his outward behaviour and vice-versa. The essence of graha-atigraha mentioned in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad is this mutual impulse.
tattvavit-tu mahābāho guṇa-karma-vibhāgayoḥ ।
guṇā guṇeṣu vartanta iti mattvā na sajjate ॥ (BG 3.28)
After introducing the major characters, Śūdraka has gone on to describe the nucleus of his story in all its complex shades. Keeping this in mind, let us try to understand the extent of scope that a social play offers to various rasas. According to Indian dramaturgy, a prakaraṇa involving commonfolk is not the best type of play to delineate the heroic mood, vīra-rasa. Vīra is typically the forte of nāṭaka, the ‘prototype play’ that involves deities and humans.
Early next morning, the three men began their journey. After travelling for several hours, they came by a pond and rested there until the sun went down. At night, as the stars began to dot the night sky, they climbed up a tree on the shore and sat down on one of the branches. After a little while, they witnessed something miraculous. From the depths of the pond arose a man. From his mouth, he pulled out a woman and then a bed. As the three men perched atop the tree watched incredulously, the strange man went to sleep with his woman on that bed.
Lockwood and Bhat in their introduction (page 10) use this conversation where Parivrājaka punishes Śāṇḍilya as an example to prove that Parivrājaka himself isn’t on par with the standards he had set earlier. And this alone would prove that Parivrājaka isn’t a true ascetic. They also say that by such an assumption, the play becomes more entertaining since everything Parivrājaka utters would be hypocritical. While there seems to be a contradiction in the behaviour of the Parivrājaka here, this alone isn’t sufficient to say that he is a quack!
Just to illustrate with an example, let us take his paper titled, ‘A Note on the Date of Śaṃkara,’ which was published in The Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society.[1] The thesis is that Śaṅkara lived in the latter half of the sixth century and the former half of the seventh century CE, long before the destruction of Pāṭalīputra and Srughna.