audience, and the elaborate use of conventional signs must have been enough to aid many of the audience in following roughly the nature of the proceedings.
When such dramatic exhibitions became rare we do not know; it is certain that in the eleventh century in Kashmir they were not uncommon; Kṣemendra advised aspirants to poetic fame to improve their taste by the study of such representations.[1] Doubtless the Mahomedan conquest seriously affected the vogue of the classical drama, which was obnoxious to Mahomedan fanaticism as being closely identified both with the national religion and the national spirit of India. The kings, who had been the main support of the actors and poets alike, disappeared from their thrones or suffered grave reverses in fortune. The tradition of dramatic performances gradually vanished. Other causes contributed to this end; the divorce between the language of the stage and that of the people steadily increasing with the passage of time made the Sanskrit drama more and more remote to the public, and the Mahomedans made it lose its position as the expression of the official and court life of the highest circles.[2]
- ↑ Kavikaṇṭhābharaṇa, p. 15.
- ↑ A certain revival of displays occurred in the nineteenth century; e. g. the Citrayajña of Vaidyanātha Vācaspati Bhaṭṭācārya, written for the festival of Govinda by request of the Rājā of Nadiyā about A.D. 1820. The Cakkyars of Malabar still act Çaktibhadra's Āçcaryamañjarī and Kulaçekharavarman's plays, as well as Act III of the Pratijñāyaugandharāyana, under the style of Mantrān̄kanāṭaka, and the Nāgānanda; JRAS. 1910, p. 637; Pratimānāṭaka (ed. TSS.), p. xl; A. K. and V. R. Pisharoti, Bulletin of School of Oriental Studies, III. i. 107 ff., who maintain the impossible view that Bhāsa's plays are compilations or adaptations of the eighth century, or later, holding that the Cārudatta is an adaptation of the Mṛcchakaṭikā (contrast p. 131), the Pratimānāṭaka is later than Kālidāsa, and the Avimāraka than Daṇḍin. The genealogy of Rāma in the Pratimā (iv. 9 f.) is that of Kālidāsa, but is also Purāṇic, and Daṇḍin, of course, is not the inventor of the Kathā. Barnett (Bulletin, III. i. 35) accepts Pisharoti's views, holding the Nyāyaçāstra of Medhātithi (Pratimā, v. 8/9) to be the Manubhāṣya (tenth century), but this is wholly against the context, and Barnett's view is surely incompatible with the priority of the Cārudatta to the Mṛcchakaṭikā which he admits, and the absence of Māhārāṣṭṛī. Cf. also p. 341.
