महावीरचरितम् (महाकवि भवभूति - वीररस-प्रधान रामकथा नाटक सम्पूर्ण ७ अङ्क सटीक)

xlvii] History of the Rāma-story 1887–91, p. xxxv) which does not occur in any of his three extant plays. By Jalhaṇa’s own showing, therefore, Bhavabhūti presumably wrote some other work or works; and that is the main point.—Furthermore, compare § 38 below. The anthologies together have preserved for us about a dozen stanzas. As is to be expected, they are not consistent in the ascription of a particular stanza to a particular author, and a stanza ascribed by one anthology to Bhavabhūti is not infrequently given anonymously in another. All that we can do then is merely to put the various stanzas together (see Appendix 2). Almost all of them are of such a colourless nature that from them we cannot make any inference regarding the nature of the original work or works, now lost to us, from which they were extracted. 16. Bhavabhūti’s extant works.—Only three plays belonging to Bhavabhūti have come down to us: 1. Mahāvīra-charita, which deals with the early history and adventures of Rāma down to the battle of Laṅkā and Rāma’s coronation; 2. Mālatī-Mādhava, a love-story of the romantic type, the plot of which was probably the poet’s own invention; 3. the present play called Uttara-Rāma-charita, which continues the history of Rāma from his coronation to the banishment of his wife and their final reunion. Seeing that in two of his plays Bhavabhūti has thus dramatized the entire Rāma-story, it will be useful at this point to make a digression and survey this story in the various forms in which it existed before and after the celebrated epic of Vālmīki.

Excursus: History of the Rāma-story

17. Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa: its present form.—Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa has come down to us in three or four distinct recensions:¹ 1. The Northern recension or the recension of the commentators; 2. the Bengali recension; 3. the so-called West-Indian recension; and 4. the recently (1905) published South-Indian recension. These recensions agree in essential particulars, but each gives a number of stanzas peculiar to itself, and the sequence of cantos varies. We are not yet in a position to say which of these recensions is the oldest. Moreover, whatever recension we follow, we meet therein a number of repetitions and inconsistencies and peculiarities of diction and metre, which go to prove that the epic has been submitted to a process of enlargement by more than one hand; so that it is almost impossible to say what parts of the epic are Vālmīki’s own and what are later interpola- tions, although in most cases the interpolators have been so simple or so honest as to leave traces of their working more or less clearly visible. ¹ We ignore here the forms of the Rāmāyaṇa that are known to exist outside India.