Person · Sanskrit dramatist
Bhasa
Also known as Bhāsa, Mahakavi Bhāsa
Bhasa is one of the earliest known Sanskrit playwrights, praised by name by Kalidasa, whom he preceded. For centuries he was only a name, until T. Ganapati Sastri found a palm-leaf codex of anonymous plays in a village near Trivandrum and assigned them to him; thirteen plays are now attributed to him. Drawn from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Udayana legends, they break Natya Shastra rules, showing violence on stage, and several survived in the repertoire of Kerala's Kutiyattam.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
Worth knowing
A decade after Shanta Gandhi's Hindi revival of Madhyamavyayoga in 1966, Kavalam Narayana Panikkar and Ratan Thiyam staged Karnabhara in 1976 using Manipuri dance and the martial art Thang-Ta.
His floruit is estimated anywhere from the fourth century BCE to the fourth century CE, though the plays are commonly dated to the first or second century CE. Their attribution rests on Ganapati Sastri's reading of internal evidence, and Wikipedia articles give different years for the find (1910 in the Bhasa article, 1912 in the Svapnavasavadattam article).
Connections (5)
- TransmissionKutiyattam
Bhasa's plays were lost to written Sanskrit literature for centuries but not to Kerala's temple stage. The plays traditionally performed in Kutiyattam include several attributed to him, among them the Abhisheka and the Pratima, and the codex Ganapati Sastri identified came from a village near Trivandrum. A 1962 photograph shows Mani Madhava Chakyar's troupe performing Thoranayudham, part of Bhasa's Abhisheka Nataka, which shows how the plays lived on in performance.
- PrecursorKalidasa
In the prologue to his first play, Malavikagnimitram, Kalidasa asks whether audiences should neglect illustrious authors such as Bhasa, Saumilla and Kaviputra in favour of a modern poet. The passage kept Bhasa's name alive while his texts were lost, and it fixes the order of the two: Bhasa was already an established classic before Kalidasa wrote in the fourth or fifth century, and his language is judged closer to Kalidasa's than to Ashvaghosha's.
- TransmissionMahabharata
Six of the thirteen plays take their plots from the Mahabharata — Dutavakya, Karnabhara, Dutaghatotkacha, Urubhanga, Madhyama-vyayoga and Pancharatra — and Bhasa bends the epic to give its losers dignity. Urubhanga makes the dying Duryodhana its hero and shows him repenting, which the epic never does, and Karnabhara closes on premonitions of Karna's death. These two are the only known tragic Sanskrit plays of ancient India, against the Natya Shastra's dislike of sad endings.
- Ramayana traditionRamayana
Three plays draw on the Ramayana — the Pratima-nataka, the Abhisheka-nataka and the Yajnaphala — and the Pratima-nataka shows the same sympathy for an epic's culprits as the Mahabharata plays. Its Kaikeyi, who sets the tragedy in motion by having Rama exiled, is shown enduring everyone's blame so that a nobler end can be reached. The Abhisheka is among the plays traditionally performed in Kutiyattam, in which form it reached the twentieth century.
- Legend set atKaushambi
Bhasa's best-known plays, Pratijna-Yaugandharayana and its sequel Svapnavasavadatta, are built on the legends of Udayana, king of Kaushambi, probably a contemporary of the Buddha. In the Svapnavasavadatta a usurper takes Kaushambi and Udayana is pushed to a border camp at Lavanaka, from which his minister Yaugandharayana engineers a marriage with Padmavati, sister of the Magadha king, to win the kingdom back. The setting is legendary, not documentary.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Bhāsa"; "T. Ganapati Sastri"; "Koodiyattam"; "Svapnavasavadattam". A. D. Pusalker, Bhasa – a study (1968); V. Venkatachalam, Bhasa (Sahitya Akademi, 1986).
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