Note 52 — III DRAMATIC THEORY XIII THE THEORY OF THE DRAMATIC ART

The heroine may occupy eight different relations to her lover.52 She may be his absolute mistress (svādhīnapatikā) and he her obedient slave; she may be awaiting him in full dress (vāsakasajjā); she may be distressed by his involuntary absence (virahotkaṇṭhitā), enraged (khaṇḍitā) at discovering him disfigured by the marks of her rival’s teeth and nails, or be severed from her beloved by a quarrel (kalahāntaritā) and suffer remorse, or be deceived (vipralabdhā) by a lover who fails to meet her at the rendezvous which she has named. Her lover may be absent abroad (proṣitapriyā), or she may have to seek him out or press him to come to her (abhisārikā), giving as meeting-place a ruined temple, a garden, the house of a go-between, a cemetery, the bank of a stream, or in general any dark place. The first two classes of heroine are bright and gay, the others are wearied, tearful, changing colour, sighing, and wear no ornaments as token of their dejection. A woman, who is subject to another, cannot stand in all these relations to a lover; she may be distressed at his absence, deceived, or driven to seek him out, but she cannot be enraged, for she is not the mistress of her lover, and thus the king’s courtesy to Mālavikā in Kālidāsa’s play is not to be treated as an effort to appease an enraged heroine.