Part II. The Author in Context
1. Literary Connections
The Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa
KONOW (1914:67) remarks that Viśākhadatta beyond doubt imitated Bhāsa,1 par-ticularly his Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa. This play, like the Mudrārākṣasa, is one of the very few political dramas known in Sanskrit literature, but lighter in tone. As its title suggests, it is about the vows of minister Yaugandharāyaṇa: one (made in the first act) to free King Udayana, who has been captured by his enemy King Pradyota, and another (made in the third act) to obtain Pradyota’s daughter (with whom the captive Udayana has fallen in love) as wife for his king.2 Though Udayana and his lady, interestingly, never appear on stage and their story is known only from reports, the romantic subplot is definitely a key component of this play, unlike the Mudrārākṣasa which has no room whatsoever for such frivolities.
The Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa is one of the Trivandrum plays and is generally con-sidered to be (or at least to be closely based on) a genuine work of Bhāsa.3 The features that KONOW (1914:67) sees as common with the Mudrārākṣasa are mostly generic plot ele-ments, such as a solemn vow,4 the featuring of spies and disguised agents and the use of coded messages.5 He mentions one particular similarity, “the comparison of dependents without affection to a wife.” The Pratijñā says that King Pradyota’s army, though huge, is
1 BYRSKI (1986:651) phrased the same opinion more cautiously: “there can be but a very little doubt about the great influence which the dramas ascribed to Bhāsa exerted upon Viśākhadatta.”
2 See WOOLNER &SARUP 1930:1–4 for a plot summary.
3 The thirteen Trivandrum plays were discovered in 1910 by T. Gaṇapati Śāstrī. Some or all of them may originally have been written by Bhāsa, but all are probably later adaptations geared for Keralan theatrical performances. There is no failsafe reason to assume that all thirteen are by the same original author.
According to DASGUPTA (1947:101–109) the Svapnavāsavadatta is generally accepted as Bhāsa’s, because several Sanskrit poetical works refer to it as such (though note that none of the stanzas cited in such works from Bhāsa’s Svapnavāsavadatta is found in the Trivandrum version). The Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa is also considered to be Bhāsa’s, partly because the 7th-century poetician Bhāmaha criticises Bhāsa for a particular scene, and the PY includes a scene that fits Bhāmaha’s description. The fragmentary Cārudatta is also held by several scholars to be genuine, while the remaining ten plays—all significantly shorter and deemed poorer in literary merit—are of more dubious origin. UNNI (2001:119) considers the Cārudatta to be a later abridgement of the Mṛcchakaṭika and accepts only the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa and the Svapnavāsavadatta as probably Bhāsa’s (ibid. 350).
4 Yaugandharāyaṇa’s vows are the keystone of the PY and have no similarity whatsoever to Cāṇakya’s vow, which is only alluded to but not represented on stage in the Mudrārākṣasa (see page 145 for more about Cāṇakya’s vow).
5 In the third act of the PY Yaugandharāyaṇa disguises himself as a madman and through seemingly nonsensical ranting informs his associates of the latest developments and instructs them. In the Mudrā-rākṣasa, one of Rākṣasa’s agents is refused entry to the minister’s house so he asks the doorkeeper to convey a poem to Rākṣasa, from which the latter (but not the doorman) learns that a spy has arrived to make his report. The two scenes have nothing in common except “the curious use of a kind of argot in order to convey a hidden meaning” (KONOW 1914:67).
useless because it lacks devotion to the king and is therefore but a wife,6 that is, presuma-bly, a dependent who needs looking after but cannot be relied on.7 The same idea does indeed occur in the Mudrārākṣasa,8 where Cāṇakya explains that Rākṣasa must willingly accept a ministerial post under Candragupta, for a bhṛtya9 is only useful to his lord if he possesses all three of intelligence, bravery and devotion—otherwise he is a wife. There is a small but basic difference between the two (aside from the fact that one is about armies and the other about ministers): the Mudrārākṣasa also explicitly says that a devoted, but stupid and timid bhṛtya is included among those who are in fact wives. More important, however, is the fact that this sententious classification smacks of a proverb, and its use in the Mudrārākṣasa may not be altogether original to Viśākhadatta (see page 193).
TIEKEN (1993) turned the table on the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa and argued that this play in its present form is a pastiche cobbled together around the turn of the 8th century, incorporating elements borrowed from the Mattavilāsa and the Mudrārākṣasa (ibid. 18, 24).
He pointed out in particular the rivalry of the ministers Yaugandharāyaṇa and Bharatarohaka in the Pratijñā as paralleling the competition of Rākṣasa and Cāṇakya (ibid.
18). He did, however, note (ibid. 18) that the “influence” of the Mudrārākṣasa “is signifi-cantly better integrated in the play than was the case with the Mattavilāsa-scene,” and so
“it may already have been part of the earlier play … if such an earlier play indeed existed.”
AHLBORN (2007:158–163) reviews the arguments in favour of the Pratijñā being a patchwork composition and considers them insufficient, concluding that the drama is coherent as it stands. Whether or not the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa as we know it was written by Bhāsa, there is a strong possibility that there was a very early drama about this story, with which Viśākhadatta was familiar and from which he drew inspiration. Nonetheless, I do not think that there are direct textual connections between the two plays, nor would I call either an
“imitation” of the other. Both plays feature the paraphernalia of cloak-and-dagger in-trigue simply because that is their theme.10
The Mṛcchakaṭika
The Mṛcchakaṭika, ascribed to King Śūdraka, was probably reworked extensively sometime in the 5th century or later.11 An incomplete version of it is found, with the title
6 PY 1.4, sarvaṃ hi sainyam anurāgam ṛte kalatram.
7 It is rather queer that the criterion based on which one qualifies as a wife is the lack of love, but note on the one hand that kalatra (a neuter noun) is a rather abstract term meaning the “office” of a wife (as something every husband must have) rather than her person, and on the other hand that political correctness was not really in vogue in ancient India.
8 MR 1.14, prajñāvikramabhaktayaḥ samuditā yeṣāṃ guṇā bhūtaye| te bhṛtyā nṛpateḥ kalatram itare saṃpatsu cāpatsu ca||
9 I.e. in this context, a minister; see note 79 on page 45.
10 Thus, calling Viśākhadatta an imitator of Bhāsa would be like, say, calling Agatha Christie an imitator of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because she too wrote novels featuring cunning murderers and even more cunning detectives.
11 See ACHARYA 2009:xx–xxvi for an up-to-date overview of the theories about the history of the Mṛcchakaṭika.
Cārudatta, among the Trivandrum plays ascribed to Bhāsa.12 This is most likely not a part of the ur-text that became redacted into the Mṛcchakaṭika, but rather another later adap-tation, possibly of that ur-text, to a Keralan stage. The age of the original version remains uncertain, but a 3rd-century dating is widely accepted.
There is a conspicuous parallelism in the prologues of the Mṛcchakaṭika and the Mudrārākṣasa. In the former the sūtradhāra introduces the play and the legendary author, then complains of being exhausted and hungry and returns home to see if there is any food:
Hm! Oh! With the music going on so long every part of my body has withered like dry lotus stalks. So I’m going home to find out if my wife has prepared any food or not. (He walks about and glances around.) […] Strange! What an odd state the house is in! […] Maybe some treasure of our ancestors has surfaced? Or perhaps it’s me deluded by this hunger, seeing the whole world full of food? Probably there’s no breakfast in our house, and it’s the hunger that is killing me. Everything seems different here. One of the girls is mixing makeup; the other is stringing garlands.
(He reflects.) What’s all this? OK, I’ll call my wife and learn the truth.13
It eventually turns out that the wife has heard from someone that today is a spe-cial day, and she is keeping a fast and organising a feast for brāhmaṇs, supposedly to make sure that she will have the same husband in her next birth. Mollified, the sūtradhāra goes off in search of a brāhmaṇ to invite and meets Maitreya, the vidūṣaka of the play and friend of the hero Cārudatta. He invites the brāhmaṇ, but the latter refuses saying that he has other engagements. The sūtradhāra goes off to continue his search, while Maitreya remains on the stage to commence the play in earnest.
Compare this scene with the slightly simpler overture of the Mudrārākṣasa, where too the sūtradhāra, returning home after announcing the show, finds the place topsy-turvy with festive preparations. He decides to call his wife and ask her, learning that she has invited brāhmaṇs for a feast. Subsequently the stage is taken over by Cāṇakya. Particularly interesting is the detail about mixing makeup and stringing garlands, mentioned briefly in the Mṛcchakaṭika but elaborated into light verse in the Mudrārākṣasa and followed promptly in both by the decision to summon the wife.14 This bit is missing in the Cārudatta, though the basic elements—the sūtradhāra’s hunger, the sight of festive preparations, the thought that he may be seeing things, and the summoning of his wife—are all present.15 This implies that the two prologues may have interacted repeatedly, with an archaic
12 See note 3 above.
13 ACHARYA 2009:9–11.
14 Mṛcchakaṭika after 1.8, ekkā vaṇṇaaṃ pīsedi, avarā sumaṇāo gumphedi. (vicintya) kiṃ ṇedaṃ? bhodu, kudumbiṇiṃ saddāvia paramatthaṃ jāṇissam. Compare MR 1.4 and after, vahati jalam iyaṃ pinaṣṭi gandhān iyam iyam udgrathate srajo vicitrāḥ| musalam idam iyaṃ ca pātakāle muhur anuyāti kalena huṃkṛtena|| bhavatu. kuṭumbinīm āhūya pṛcchāmi.
15 Cārudatta before 1.1, kiṇ ṇu khu saṃvidhā vihidā? ādu bubhukkhāe odaṇamaaṃ via jīvaḷoaṃ pekkhāmi? jāva ayyaṃ saddāvemi.
Cārudatta play lacking this detail, followed by the Mudrārākṣasa’s tweaked and elaborated prologue. Finally, the extant Mṛcchakaṭika perhaps borrowed this detail back from the Mudrārākṣasa and further elaborated the archaic prologue in a different manner, accentu-ating the sūtradhāra’s dilemma that he is perhaps having delusions because of his hunger.
Actually, the tableau of maids grinding pigments and threading garlands is a bit out of tune with “seeing the whole world full of food”—perhaps another indication that the maids have crept over into the Mṛcchakaṭika from the Mudrārākṣasa where the verse de-scribing them is seamlessly connected to its context.
As the Mudrārākṣasa approaches its dénouement, parallelisms with the Mṛc-chakaṭika16 become apparent once again. A ramshackle park (jīrṇodyāna) is featured in both as a turning point. In the Mṛcchakaṭika this is where Cārudatta is to have a date with the heroine Vasantasenā, and where the villainous śakāra Saṃsthānaka strangles the lady, subsequently to accuse Cārudatta of murdering her. In the Mudrārākṣasa the decrepit gar-den is where Rākṣasa learns of the impending execution of Candanadāsa and decides to save him by offering himself in exchange. Both Cārudatta (after being framed and sen-tenced for murder17) and Candanadāsa are conducted to the execution grounds by a pair of cāṇḍāla executioners who shout at the crowd of sympathetic onlookers to get out of the way. Both wear a special garland as the mark of a man to be executed.18 Both take a tearful farewell of their young son, and both are eventually saved from death by the unexpected arrival of another person: Vasantasenā (who has miraculously survived Saṃsthānaka’s at-tack) and Rākṣasa.
ANTANI (1922:50) claims that Viśākhadatta “set the Mṛichchhakaṭika as a model be-fore him in arranging his plot” without citing any particular reason why he thinks so. In a rather acerbic reply, CHARPENTIER (1923:591) briefly mentions the similarities described above, noting that if Viśākhadatta did imitate anything, it was more likely an earlier ver-sion of the Cārudatta play than the Mṛcchakaṭika, and concluding that he saw no “any ur-gent necessity for assuming here an imitation on one side or the other.” While I agree that the term “imitation,” with its judgmental overtones, should not be applied here, I am con-vinced that Viśākhadatta knew some form of this play, was inspired by it, and consciously utilised some features it, presenting them with a twist of his own. The premeditated use of intertextuality is particularly noteworthy at the beginning of the Mudrārākṣasa, where Viśākhadatta clearly employs the allusion to whatever Cārudatta play he and his audience knew to play a little joke on the spectators. He lulls them into anticipating a romantic
16 The incompletely preserved Cārudatta ends before this point.
17 DEVASTHALI (1948:144n21) also observes that the scene of Cārudatta’s trial (in Act 9 of the Mṛcchakaṭika) is similar to the confrontation of Malayaketu and Rākṣasa (in Act 5 of the Mudrārākṣasa). Indeed, in both cases an innocent man is judged guilty after the presentation several items of fabricated evidence including some jewellery, but the resemblance is in my opinion too vague to qualify as an instance of intertextuality.
18 In the Mṛcchakaṭika (e.g. ) this garland is called vadhyamālā and is said to be made of karavīra (oleander) flowers; in the Mudrārākṣasa the term is vadhyasraj. I know of no other occurrence of these terms (or a further synonym).
comedy along the lines of that play, then unexpectedly disrupts the developing mood with harsh yelling offstage and the terrifying entry of the sternly looming figure of Cāṇakya instead of a bumbling vidūṣaka.
Kālidāsa and the Raghuvaṃśa
It is my impression19 that Viśākhadatta must have been familiar with the works of Kālidāsa. The way in which certain moments of the Mudrārākṣasa remind the reader of Kālidāsa is best illustrated by a verse of the Mudrārākṣasa, where Malayaketu, full of heroic zeal, announces the command to begin the siege of Pāṭaliputra:
gauḍīnāṃ lodhradhūlīparimaladhavalān dhūmrayantaḥ kapolān kliśnantaḥ kṛṣṇimānaṃ bhramarakulanibhaṃ kuñcitasyālakasya|
pāṃśustambhā balānāṃ turagakhurapuṭakṣodalabdhātmalābhāḥ śatrūṇām uttamāṅge gajamadasalilacchinnamūlāḥ patantu||20 The cheeks of eastern belles, bright with lodhra powder —
let them be darkened,
the glossy blackness of their curly tresses, like a swarm of bees—
let it be clouded,
as the crushing hooves of the horses of my troops bring into being pillars of dust
which, cut at the root by the ichor streaming from my elephants, shall fall on my enemies’ heads.
The image in the second half of the verse—pillars of dust raised into the sky by the army, but cut at the roots by the rut fluid streaming from the maddened elephants—is quite unusual, yet (as pointed out by CHARPENTIER 1923:592) very similar to one in the Raghuvaṃśa:
sa cchinnamūlaḥ kṣatajena reṇus tasyopariṣṭāt pavanāvadhūtaḥ|
aṅgāraśeṣasya hutāśanasya pūrvotthito dhūma ivābabhāse||21
That dust, cut at the root by blood and whisked by the wind above, seemed like smoke that had risen from a fire reduced to embers.
Here it is blood (squirting from wounds in a battle) that cuts the root of the dust cloud, which in turn is likened to a plume of smoke. The simile is more complex (with the red blood near the ground comparable to the embers of a dying fire), whereas the Mudrā-rākṣasa uses a simpler metaphor for the dust itself, but this is just part of a much more
19 Along with DHRUVA 1930:xviii—as well as probably a number of other scholars who did not express this in so many words.
20 MR 5.23(131).
21 Raghuvaṃśa 7.43.
complex picture in which the pillars of dust, their bases removed, topple down as if to crush the enemy. In the first half of the verse, the simile of a swarm of bees for tresses of hair is commonplace in Sanskrit poetry, and the use of lodhra22 powder to whiten the com-plexion of ladies was probably a widespread practice.23 But there is another motif in this verse that is common with the Raghuvaṃśa: there too the dust of an army (not the one that was cut at the root) is likened to powder in the hair of ladies (presumably lighter and duller in colour than the hair itself).24
On a more generic level, Rākṣasa’s lyrical description of the ramshackle garden (MR 6.11–13) is rather reminiscent of the way Canto 16 of the Raghuvaṃśa describes the town of Ayodhyā, abandoned, dilapidated and in mourning for its departed ruler. In par-ticular the latter’s description25 of pillars carved in the likeness of women, which have lost their coats of paint and are dressed only in the sloughs of snakes rubbed off on them, is comparable with a very similar image in the Mudrārākṣasa that is turned into a metaphor of compassion rather than merely desolation: snakes sigh as they bind the wounds of trees with strips of their sloughed-off skins.26
A third point of contact between the Mudrārākṣasa and the Raghuvaṃśa has been mentioned by several scholars,27 though none of them claim that Viśākhadatta is copying Kālidāsa in this case. Indeed, the idea that a victorious king should be compared to the Varāha avatāra of Viṣṇu is certainly a product of zeitgeist,28 and even though it appears in both the Mudrārākṣasa29 and the Raghuvaṃśa,30 there is no reason to believe that the author of the former borrowed it from the latter.31 It is therefore wise to keep in mind Charpen-tier’s cautionary words: „One might fain believe that the same time begets with different authors the same ideas.”32 However, even though explicit cases of intertextuality between
22 Symplocos racemosa, a tree the bark of which is ground into a light-coloured powder and applied as a paste to skin (PANDANUS s. v. lodhra)
23 There may be another reference to in Raghuvaṃśa 3.2, śarīrasādād asamagrabhūṣaṇā mukhena sālakṣyata lodhrapāṇḍunā| tanuprakāśena viceyatārakā prabhātakalpā śaśineva śarvarī|| (So only in Mallinātha’s text; the verse is quite different in Vallabhadeva where her face is ketakapattrapāṇḍu, pale as a kewra leaf. Since the lady is having a difficult pregnancy, a pale face is perhaps more appropriate than a powdered one, though Mallinātha’s text could also be interpreted to mean “pale as if with lodhra [powder]”.) Another literary occurrence (among, probably, many) is in Śiśupālavadha 4.8, vilambinīlotpalakarṇapūrā kapolabhittīr iva lodhragaurīḥ.
24 Raghuvaṃśa 4.48, bhayotsṛṣṭavibhūṣāṇāṃ tena keralayoṣitām| alakeṣu camūreṇuś cūrṇapratinidhīkṛtaḥ||
25 Raghuvaṃśa 16.17 stambheṣu yoṣitpratiyātanānām utkrāntavarṇakramadhūsarāṇām| stanottarīyāṇi bhavanti saṅgān nirmokapaṭṭāḥ phaṇibhir vimuktāḥ||
26 MR 6.12(144), kṣatāṅgīnāṃ … svanirmokacchedaiḥ paricitaparikleśakṛpayā śvasantaḥ śākhānāṃ vraṇam iva nibadhnanti phaṇinaḥ||
27 CHARPENTIER 1923:589; DE 1947:263n; DEVASTHALI 1948:12.
28 See also page 46.
29 In the concluding verse of the play, see page 38.
30 Raghuvaṃśa 7.56, rathī niṣaṅgī kavacī dhanuṣmān dṛptaḥ sa rājanyakam ekavīraḥ | nivārayām āsa mahāvarāhaḥ kalpakṣayodvṛttam ivārṇavāmbhaḥ||
31 Similarly, the partial agreement of Viśākhadatta’s barbarian tribes with the peoples of the north-western marches described in the Raghuvaṃśa (see page 50ff.), definitely has more to do with the objective world surrounding the two poets than with intertextuality.
32 CHARPENTIER 1923:589; recall that he believed both Kālidāsa and Viśākhadatta to have been active in late
Viśākhadatta’s and Kālidāsa’s works are few and not very conspicuous, I feel that Kālidāsa must have been there among the elders whose work Viśākhadatta had studied and drawn inspiration from.33 It is probably also no accident that the Mudrārākṣasa, like all three known plays of Kālidāsa, features a pair of panegyrists who recite verses in praise of the king from behind the scenes (never actually appearing on stage). However, in a typically Viśākhadattan twist, one of the minstrels in his play is in fact an agent planted by Rākṣasa in Candragupta’s court.
The Kaumudīmahotsava
There is an interesting Sanskrit drama called the Kaumudīmahotsava, which has a number of parallels with the Mudrārākṣasa on various levels. Unfortunately, practically nothing is known for certain about this play, preserved in a single southern palm leaf man-uscript no older than the 18th century (SASTRI 1952:4) and published in two editions.34 Even the title is uncertain, assigned to the play on the basis of the colophon of its manuscript but not mentioned within the text itself.
The hero of this play is a prince named Kalyāṇavarman, the late-born son of King Sundaravarman of the Magadhakula, “the Magadhan dynasty” in Kusumapura.35 Before his birth, the king had adopted a boy named Caṇḍasena, who lost his status as heir to the kingdom upon the birth of Kalyāṇavarman. Caṇḍasena married a Licchavi princess, and with the aid of a Licchavi army conquered the capital and seized the throne. The young prince Kalyāṇavarman was spirited away to a forest hermitage and raised there.
Sundaravarman’s minister Mantragupta and his general Kuñjaraka remained behind in the capital, professing fealty to Caṇḍasena but secretly endeavouring to restore Kalyāṇa-varman to the throne. This is where the action of the play begins. When KalyāṇaKalyāṇa-varman comes of age, Kuñjaraka foments a barbarian uprising, so Caṇḍasena must leave the capital to quell the rebels. Meanwhile, Mantragupta secretly tells the town council that Kalyāṇa-varman lives and persuades them to support his claim. He also arranges an alliance with the king of the Yādavas, whose daughter Kalyāṇavarman had met in the ashram, falling in love with her. Finally, the prince is summoned back to take the throne and is married to the princess; the play, according to its prologue, is presented at the Moonlight Festival celebrating his coronation and marriage.
imperial Gupta times, see page 34. The observation holds even if the two authors were not quite
contemporaneous. Another remark by CHARPENTIER (ibid. 592) is also very relevant in my opinion: “But who could tell whether Kālidāsa or Viśākhadatta is here the imitator or the imitated? Still, one might probably feel inclined to ascribe the priority to the greater poet of the two.”
33 See also page 181 for more parallel details.
34 The earlier one was published by Rāmakrishṇa Kavi and S. K. Rāmnāth Shāstri in 1929; I have had access only to the later edition (SASTRI 1952), which WARDER (1983:427) describes as “a very sloppy piece of work.”
35 I.e. Pāṭaliputra, see note 190 on page 67.
The background to the plot seems like a strange version—or more accurately, in-version—of the background of the Mudrārākṣasa. Candragupta, the hero of the Mudrā-rākṣasa, is very much like Caṇḍasena, the villain of the Kaumudīmahotsava: both are sons-and-yet-not-sons of the old king who allies with mountain-dwelling barbarians to conquer the capital. Both dramas have a prince who flees the capital where his life is in danger: the hero Kalyāṇavarman in the Kaumudīmahotsava and Malayaketu in the Mudrārākṣasa. Both have a faithful minister of the old king, who remains in the capital as a partisan: Mantra-gupta, the advisor of the ultimately victorious hero in the former and Rākṣasa, the cham-pion of a lost cause in the latter. There are also a few similarities between the two dramas on the basic level of the text itself, but before discussing these, we must examine the issue of chronology.
The date of this drama is extremely vague. JAYASWAL (1931:50–52) opines, mainly on the basis of its simple style, that it was a very early play, though “nearer Kālidāsa’s time than that of Bhāsa.” PIRES (1934:25–35) accepts Jayaswal’s ideas and holds the play to be an important source on the early history of the Maukhari dynasty, the kings of which origi-nated from Magadha and had names ending with varman. No known Maukhari ruler was called either Sundaravarman or Kalyāṇavarman, but Pires theorises that the former could have reigned around the turn of the fourth century. The main basis for this is the idea put forth originally by JAYASWAL (1931:54) that Caṇḍasena in the play is in fact Candragupta I (of the Gupta dynasty; reign ca. 319–350), whose name sounds similar enough and who certainly married a Licchavi princess and was consolidated in his power with the aid of that clan.
WINTERNITZ (1936:360) considers the play to be “probably later” than the Mudrā-rākṣasa. CHATTOPADHYAYA (1938:582–582) agrees with Winternitz and reiterates that the plot of the Kaumudīmahotsava was influenced by the Mudrārākṣasa.36 More convincing than vague resemblances is his observation (ibid. 591–593) that the opening verse of the play, an invocation to Śiva, describes the god as “spreading, as it were, … the knowledge that cuts the knot of duality” and “solidly grounded in the exposition of brahman.”37 This could hardly be anything but a reference to the founder of monist Vedānta philosophy and the most famous commentator on the Brahmasūtra: Śaṅkarācārya, whose widest age bracket Chattopadhyaya gives as 650 to 800 CE. He concludes that the Kaumudīmahotsava cannot be earlier than 700 CE. GUPTA (1974:134–135) accepts Chattopadhyaya’s dating and points out that the author need not have based it on contemporary events. He does not offer an
36 As well as by a number of other literary works, resemblances to which had been pointed out earlier by Dasharatha Sharma and D. R. Mankad; for references see CHATTOPADHYAYA 1938:593.
37 Kaumudīmahotsava 1.1, nānātva-granthi-bhettrīṃ dhiyam iva vikiran dantakānticchalena brahmavyākhyāna-niṣṭhas tava bhavatu tamaḥkṛttaye kṛttivāsāḥ|| The first of the two translated phrases is adopted from Chattopadhyaya, who also attempts to find śliṣṭa meanings applicable to Śaṇkarācārya in the first half of the verse, not cited here.
opinion on which, if any, historical persons were behind it, and altogether dismisses the Kaumudīmahotsava as a historical source.
The question of the date is intertwined with the similarly problematic question of the identity of the author, who is named in the prologue of the play. However, the locus is unfortunately damaged in the single known manuscript.38 The author seems to have been a woman, possibly Vijjikā or Vijjakā,39 stanzas ascribed to whom are preserved in sev-eral anthologies.40 This Vijjakā in turn may have been identical to Vijayabhaṭṭārikā, wife of Candrāditya, the eldest son of Pulakeśin II (r. 609–642) of the Bādāmi Cālukya dynasty.41 On the basis of this identification, Sakuntala Rao Sastri42 conjectures that she may have originated from the north and perhaps composed the play there before her marriage. She attempts to identify the Varmans of the play as predecessors of a certain Sūryavarman of Magadha,43 and Caṇḍasena as Ādityasena of the later Gupta dynasty.44 On the other hand, WARDER (1983:428–429) rejects the idea that the author of the verses ascribed to Vijjakā could be identical to that of the Kaumudīmahotsava, which (on stylistic grounds) he consid-ers very early.
I believe that Chattopadhyaya’s argument based on Śaṇkarācārya is irrefutable. I should also note that Śaṅkara would probably not have been equated so directly with Śiva in the play if he had been alive or recently deceased at the time of its composition.45 It is therefore quite safe to conclude that the Kaumudīmahotsava is considerably later than the Mudrārākṣasa (whatever the exact date of each), and any notable resemblances between the two can be attributed to the author’s familiarity with Viśākhadatta’s play.46 The global similarity of the two plot backgrounds may be a consequence of this, but given that such scenarios are likely to have occurred time and again in history, the story of the
38 Kaumudīmahotsava after 1.3, asyaiva rājñaḥ samatītaṃ caritam adhikṛtya ××kayā nibaddhaṃ nāṭakam …
39 JAYASWAL 1931:50n, on the contrary, sees the clue to the author’s name in Kaumudīmahotsava 1.3, kṛṣṇaśārāṃ kaṭākṣeṇa kṛṣīvalakiśorikā| karoty eṣā karāgreṇa karṇe kalamamañjarīm|| and interprets this to mean that the play was composed by Kiśorikā daughter of Kṛṣīvala.
40 See WARDER 1983:421–427.
41 See SASTRI 1952:10–12 for details. Sastri is sadly negligent in giving credit to scholars whose opinions she cites. The identification may have been first proposed by KANE 1923:xli.
42 SASTRI 1952:12–16.
43 This ruler is mentioned in the Sirpur stone inscription of the time of Mahāśivagupta and is supposed to have lived “around the 8th century A.D.” (LAL 1912:185); PIRES (1934:86) says he cannot be identical to the one Sūryavarman known in the Maukhari dynasty, but may have been a later member of that dynasty not known from other sources.
44 Known to have ruled around 666 CE; his granddaughter was given in marriage to a Licchavi ruler (SASTRI 1952:14–15). The word caṇḍa, “fierce,” also means “Sun,” one of the most common meanings of āditya.
45 The possibility remains, of course, that the body of the play itself is much older and the opening verse is an extraneous nāndī added at a later time.
46 Also, though this is a subjective opinion, the Mudrārākṣasa is unquestionably a masterpiece and esteemed as such by Indian audiences through the ages, whereas the Kaumudīmahotsava appears to be a mediocre play which has sunk into deserved obscurity. Even if the latter were truly early, as WARDER (1983:428–429) claims it must be, the scenario in which it serves as a source of inspiration and information for Viśākha-datta is much less plausible than its converse.