The Hanūmannāṭaka, which is also called the Mahānāṭaka narrates the entire story of the Rāmāyaṇa. The play is famous more for its unique structure and less for its storyline. To understand the special nuances of the play, one must have a good understanding of the original epic.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that there are insurmountable impediments for saying anything conclusive about the author and period of composition of the play; there isn’t a reliable printed edition of the work; as though that isn’t sufficient trouble, the play has come down to us in two variant manuscript traditions; one is a ‘northern’ or a ‘Bengali’ edition complied (‘saṅkalita’) Madhusūdana; this has either nine or ten acts; the other is the Southern edition, also called the nāgarī edition, compiled by Damodara-miśra. The edition runs into fourteen acts. Thus, though there are only two major recensions of the play, none of the printed editions match each other. Sushilkumar De mentions that among the eight manuscripts he has been able to lay his hands on, he has come across one that is unique (and possibly the oldest). In the first act of the manuscript that he mentions, there are only twenty-four verses out of the fifty-nine which constitute the northern recension; it does not mention Hanūmān as the poet; it is not split into acts; there are no prose passages; Sushilkumar De supposes that the original ‘play’ might have resembled this. (IHQ, VII567)
Both the major recensions mentioned above note Hanūmān as the playwright; thus, the name Hanūmannāṭaka; we can’t be sure how it came to be called Mahānāṭaka; it is quite possible that the name is because of the size of the work, the grandeur of the plot, as well as the fact that the entire Rāmāyaṇa is captured in the play; it may also because of the large number of acts in the play and the greatness of its author.
There are quite a number of legends connected with Hanūmān being its playwright; it is said that Hanūmān had engraved the play on a rock; the version of the story was like the elixir of life, and Vālmīki was worried that his Rāmāyaṇa would be eclipsed by this beautiful play; the sage, therefore, threw the rock into the sea; Bhoja retrieved the rock from the ocean and popularised the segments he could recover. Some Western scholars, who try to discern some basis in reality for the story, think that the original play must have been inscribed on stone, and the two variant recensions were born out of such a source.
Just as it is hard to determine the original form of the play, we can’t say the period in which it was composed. The Śārṅgadhara-paddhati mentions a few verses as authored by Hanūmān. Thus, the two recensions available to us must have been older than this work, i.e., prior to 1363 CE. The original text was either completely or partially available during Bhoja’s time (11th Century CE). Nevertheless, it is clear that the two recensions have been growing with time. Thus, the total number of verses between the two recensions varies from 550 to 800. Among them, only about three hundred verses are common to both recensions. We can safely presume that the compilers of the ‘play’ kept adding beautiful verses from the works based on the Rāmāyaṇa that were popular during their time. The play contains numerous verses penned by poets such as Bhavabhūti, Murāri, Rājaśekhara, Jayadeva, and others; it is needless to say that there are also verses whose authorship has been lost over time. It is hard to say which of the two is older of the recensions. It is likely that the northern one is older.
A German scholar by the name Von A. Esteller, upon examining ten manuscripts of the ‘Madhusūdana recension’ and twenty-three manuscripts of the ‘Dāmodara recension’, had concluded that the latter is the older of the two; the Madhusūdana recension is born out of the Dāmodara recension; he says that the work was originally a collection of verses, and the word nāṭaka got added to it only later. (Die älteste Rezension des Mahanataka ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des indischen Buhmen – und Schatten spiel und der Rama Sage, Von A Esteller: also, J.R.A.S. 1940. P. 217).
The play of the northern recension hardly contains prose passages; it does not have stage directions like in the other plays; the sūtradhāra keeps coming on to the stage even after the prastāvana (he is replaced by pāripārśvaka later on); the verses that the sūtradhāra recites are in the form of narration of the story; the play does not have any segments in Prakrit, nor is there a vidūṣaka. The story leaps from one episode to another and is quite disjointed. (It is for this reason that it is assumed that only parts of the play have been discovered.) The Southern recension is different from this; it has a few prose passages; the sūtradhāra and pāripārśvaka do not appear later in the play; Rāma and Sītā engage in a nāṭya; there are quite a number of stage directions; in summary, this comes close to the structure of a nāṭaka.
The play, thus, poses quite a few questions, and it is hard to answer many of them convincingly; every scholar holds an opinion about it and provides reasons for its strange structure. For instance, they say,
- The Hanūmannāṭaka is a chāyā-nāṭaka
- The play was originally a purāṇa-kāvya
- It was meant as a compilation of the Ramāyaṇa and was used by the grānthikas
- The ‘play’ is mainly meant to be read; it is a śravya-kāvya which has the structure of a nāṭaka
To be continued ...
The current series of articles is an enlarged adaption of Prof. A. R. Krishnasastri's Kannada treatise Saṃskṛta-nāṭaka. They are presented along with additional information and footnotes by Arjun Bharadwaj.
