Note 74 — II POST-VEDIC LITERATURE AND THE ORIGIN OF THE DRAMA

Whatever judgement be passed on this view,74 and the matter must be left undecided in the absence of any effective evidence, it is wholly impossible to accept the argument of Professor Lüders which would take the Dūtān̄gada as the type of Chāyānāṭaka, and thence deduce that the Mahānāṭaka and the Haridūta are shadow-dramas. The one Chāyānāṭya which we know to have been a shadow-drama in fact is an ordinary play without kinship to the Dūtān̄gada, and the same remark applies to the other dramas known to us which are styled Chāyānāṭakas. There are, however, points of similarity between the Dūtān̄gada and the Mahānāṭaka; the prevalence of verse, often epic in character, over prose, the absence of Prākrit, the large number of characters, and the omission of the Vidūṣaka, which explain themselves easily in the latter case by the assumption that we have literary drama before us, a play never intended to be acted. The conviction is strengthened by the shameless plagiarisms of the plays from earlier Rāma dramas. In any case, however, we are dealing with the late developments of the Sanskrit drama, and it is clear that nothing can be gained from any assumption of a part played by the shadow-play in the evolution of the Sanskrit drama. Even on Professor Lüders’s own interpretation of the Mahābhāṣya, all that is requisite is dumb players, and this form of drama is attested for India in modern times.