We have been able to lay our hands only on two acts of his other play called Bāla-bhārata or Pracaṇḍa-pāṇḍava; it is hard to say if the poet only wrote so much. Bāla-rāmāyaṇa, as explained earlier, captures the entire epic in the form of a play; similarly, it is quite possible that Rājaśekhara intended to condense the Mahābhārata in his Bāla-bhārata.
Just like Bhavabhūti, Rājaśekhara too begins his play on the Rāmayana by praying to the Vāg-devatā. In the ten acts of his play, he has covered the story of the first half of the Rāmayana starting from Viśvāmitra escorting Rāma. The following is its summary –
Bāla-rāmāyaṇa, Bāla-bhārata, Karpūra-mañjarī, Viddha-śāla-bhañjikā, and Kāvya-mīmāṃsā are the works of Rājaśekhara that are available to us today. We learn that he had also authored works such as Haravijaya – an epic poem, and Bhuvanakośa, a work on geography. Among the works listed here, the first four are plays; Kāvya-mīmāṃsā is a treatise he has penned in Kauṭilya’s style – it resembles the Arthaśāstra in some features and deals with literary aesthetics.
The Veṇī-sāṃhāra is, thus, a play that encompasses the story starting from Kṛṣṇa-sandhāna to Duryodhana-saṃhāra. The poet has displayed great skill in condensing this long story into a play –he has ensured that the story is engaging and that the characters are presented well. His creative talent, we may say, is on par with that of Bhāsa and Viśākhadatta in this sense – they have the skill of narrating a long tale in the form of a play. Though Bhaṭṭa-nārāyaṇa is similar to them in many cases, he is slightly inferior in certain ways.
It is hard to determine the period and place in which Bhaṭṭa-nārāyaṇa, the author of Veṇī-sāṃhāra lived. Vāmana (4, 3-28), and other aestheticians quote examples from his play. Vāmana lived in about 800 CE; therefore, it is safe to say that Bhaṭṭa-nārāyaṇa lived before this period.
Bhavabhūti has not included a vidūṣaka in any of his plays – the exclusion maybe because Bhavabhūti felt that he is not endowed with lively and sweet emotions, or probably because he felt that the plot of his plays did not demand the inclusion of such a character; he might have also felt that it was impossible to include a vidūṣaka for the communication of the philosophy he had in in mind. His plays lack hāsya even in instances where it could have been easily brought in.
Bhavabhūti appears to have been well-versed in various śāstras as well; he is likely to have read the poems and plays that were authored before his time and those that were popular in times contemporary to him. One can easily see the influence of Bhāsa, Kālidāsa, Śūdraka, Harṣa, and others in his works. He had not only absorbed the best aspects of the literary works of the poets and scholars who lived prior to him, but also probably harboured the idea that he had surpassed them in every way.
The play Mālatīmādhava belongs to the genre of prakaraṇa; the theme and plot of a prakaraṇa is kalpita, i.e., freshly created by the poet-playwright. Thus, the storyline of the current play under discussion must also have been created by the poet. Nevertheless, we can see from the play that the poet has used quite a number of well-established and ‘stock’ ideas and images in its construction.
The Mālatī-mādhava is a prakaraṇa in ten acts like the Mṛcchakaṭika. The following is the story –
The playwright has displayed his special calibre in compressing the events of an epic into a play, just as he has done in the Mahāvīracarita; in merely a single scene[1], he has effectively condensed all aspects of the first part of the epic of Rāmāyaṇa. The story of the rest of the play is suggested through the dialogue between the naṭa and the sūtradhāra.