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Bhāsa is one of the earliest and most celebrated Indian playwrights in Sanskrit. However, very little is known about him.
Kālidāsa in the introduction to his first play Malavikagnimitram writes - Shall we neglect the works of such illustrious authors as Bhāsa, Saumilla, and Kaviputra? Can the audience feel any respect for the work of a modern poet, a Kālidāsa?
So we know he lived before Kālidāsa and generally the gap is not considered to be more than a couple of centuries. As the general date for Kālidāsa accepted generally is the 4th century CE, Bhāsa is placed in the 2nd century CE. The plays of Bhāsa had been lost for centuries. He fame was known only from mention in other works like the famous text on poetics Kavyamimamsa written during 880-920 AD by Rajashekhara a famous poet, dramatist and critic. In the Kavyamimamsa, he attributes the play Svapna-vasavadatta to Bhāsa.
Discovery of his plays
In 1912, the late Mahamahopadhyaya Ganapati Sastri came upon 13 Sanskrit plays in Trivandrum that were used in the Koodiyattam plays. Unlike other classical plays, none of them mentioned the author, but one was the Svapna-vasavadatta. Comparing the style of writing and techniques employed in these plays and based on the knowledge that Svapna-vasavadatta was Bhāsa's work, all of them were credited to him. Some scholars have disputed Bhāsa's authorship of all the plays but over the years the plays have generally come to be ascribed to Bhāsa.
The plays of Bhāsa
Bhāsa does not follow all the dictates of the Natya Shastra. This has been taken as a proof of their antiquity as post-Kālidāsa, no play that did not adhere to the Natya Shastra's rules has been found. Bhāsa allows scenes that contain signs of physical violence to be shown on stage in plays like Uru-Bhanga.This is strictly frowned upon by Natya Shastra.
The Uru-Bhanga and Karna-bhara are the only tragic Sanskrit plays in India till modern times. In Uru-Bhanga, Duryodhana the villain of the Mahabharata is shown repenting his past as he lies with his thighs crushed awaiting death. His relations with his family are shown with great pathos. The epic contains no reference to such repentance. The Karna-bhara ends with the premonitions of the sad end of Karna, another epic character. Pre-modern plays in India, inspired by Natya Shastra, strictly considered sad endings inappropriate.
The plays are generally short compared to later playwrights and most of them draw the theme from the Hindu epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana.Though he is firmly on the side of the heroes of the epic, Bhāsa treats their opponents with great sympathy. He takes a lot of liberties with the story to achieve this. In the Pratima-nataka, Kaikeyi who is responsible for the tragic events in the Ramayana is shown as enduring the calumny of all so that a far noble end is achieved.
The plays based on Ramayana are
Pratima-nataka: The statues
Abhisheka-natka: The coronation
Six plays are based on the Mahabharata:
Panch-ratra: The five-nights
Madhyama-vyayoga: The middle one
Duta-Ghattotkacha: Ghattotkacha as envoy
Duta-Vakya : The envoy's message
Uru-bhanga: The broken thigh
Karna-bhara: Karna's burden
Harivamsa or Bala-charitra: Hari's dynasty or the tale of Childhood
The Duta-Vakya and Bala-charitra are perhaps the only Sanskrit by a famous playwright with Krishna as the central character.
His other plays are not epic based. Avimaraka is a fairy tale. The unfinished Daridra-Charudatta (Charudatta in poverty) tells the story the courtesan Vasantasena and is interesting for the same story was developed by Shudraka into the more famous Mricha-kataika.
His most famous play Swapna-vasavadatta(Vasavadatta in the dream) and Pratijna-Yaugandharayana (the vow of Yaugandharayana) are based on the legends that had grown around the King Udayana, a contemporary of the Buddha. The first tells the story of how the king lost his kingdom and regained it with the help of his loyal minister Yaugandharayana and the latter of how he married the princess Vasavadatta.
Though his plays were discovered only in the 20th century, two of them Uru-Bhanga and Karna-bhara, have become popular due to their appeal to modern tastes and performed in translation and Sanskrit.
Many of Bhasa's plays are staged in Koodiyattams now also, like parts of Pratijna-Yaugandharayana,Abhisheka-natka etc. The legendary Mani Madhava Chakyar choreographed and started to perform Swapnavāsadatta' and Pancharātra'' for the first time in the history of Koodiyattam.
References
- Thirteen Trivandrum plays ascribed to Bhāsa( 2 Vols), translated by H.C.Woolner, Lakshman Sarup, 1930
"Bhāsa"