Arts

In sum, the subject matter of the play is Advaita-vedānta; the play also has passing references to the other darśanas as well; avaidika matas such as Jaina and Bauddha are the kiñkaras of Mahāmoha; the vaidika matas such as Nyāya, Yoga, and Mīmāṃsā are Viveka’s friends; the poet has included the bhakti tradition with this as well. In another sense, viṣṇu-bhakti, i.e., devotion to Bhagavān Viṣṇu predominates; it appears as an undercurrent throughout the play.

Kṛṣṇamiśra
(11^th Century CE)

The story of Hariścandra is quite old, and it dates back to the Vedic times; as it won the hearts of the people at large, it gathered more substance with time; a few recensions of the Mahābhārata also contain the tale, and are likely to be an interpolation; the tale, nevertheless, appears to have grown to large proportions. We cannot deny that the version of the story that occurs in such recensions of the epic is filled with exaggerations and elements that border on anaucitya. It is unlikely that Kṣemīśvara had that tale as the basis of his play.

Kṣemīśvara, also called Kṣemendra, is the author of a play called Caṇḍa-kauśika. The introductory segments of his play reveal to us his place and period to some extent. Kṣemīśvara was the great-grandson of Vijaya-prakoṣṭha; he penned the play upon the request of King Mahī-pāladeva. It is said that Mahī-pāladeva was Candra-gupta (Maurya) in his previous life and was responsible for the elimination of the Nanda dynasty. The Nandas of the past were now the kings of Karnataka, and it was important to eliminate them; Mahī-pāladeva was born for this purpose.

The king finally marries not one, but two women of his antaḥpura with the help of his queen. One of them, as narrated before, was in the disguise of a man and proves to be a minor obstacle to the smooth flow of events. The poet might have the impression of having spiced up his story by the inclusion of this element; however, these segments make the play less natural. It is hard to believe that the queen’s maternal uncle’s daughter, her cousin, grew up in the royal quarters disguised as a man, without causing any suspicion to anyone around and not even to the queen.

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.