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

lxiii] Early Plays: Mahāvīra-Charita substance a huge discursive treatise on the Vedānta philosophy. Adhyātma- Rāmāyaṇa, vii. 5, is popularly known as Rāma-gītā, and is in fact a condensed statement of the Vedānta doctrine after the fashion of the Bhagavad-gītā. And there are any number of lesser treatises exhibiting a tendency to philosophize in and out of season. 26, F. Invention and poetic embellishment.—Finally, single episodes from the Rāmāyaṇa, such as the marriage of Sītā, or the embassy of Aṅgada to Rāvaṇa just before the commencement of the battle, came to be embellished and enlarged, while a few other episodes not actually in the Rāmāyaṇa were invented and treated with much poetic feeling. The number of writers who have in these and various other ways treated the story of the Rāmāyaṇa can be easily counted by hundreds, among them some exceptionally gifted female authors; and their works are even to the present day read by hundreds of thousands of people throughout India; and those who cannot read, go to hear other people— the Kathakas or the Purāṇikas—read and explain them. The Rāmāyaṇa in India is not—and never will be, let us hope—a dead mythology. It is full of the noblest examples of virtue and truth, of devotion and self- sacrifice. Its characters have been for centuries, and still are, living forces moulding the actions and aspirations of the men and women of India.

Bhavabhūti's early plays: Mahāvīra-charita,

Mālatī-Mādhava

27. The Mahāvīra-charita.—Such was the Rāma-story, with a past so glorious and a future so vast and promising, that fascinated our poet and was in fact his first love (M. V. C. i. 7). In the Mahāvīra-charita Bhava- bhūti dramatizes the early history of Rāma, beginning shortly before his marriage and taking up the story of his exile and the abduction of his wife and her recovery, and ending with the return from Laṅkā and the coronation. Now here Bhavabhūti's most immediate problem was to give dramatic unity to a vast number of actions and incidents which extended over a period of fourteen years or more, and which had no intrinsic unity except in so far as they all concerned one person, Rāma. The poet might have introduced the various characters which figure in this part of Rāma's history,—Paraśurāma, Mantharā, Śūrpaṇakhā, Khara and the army of the fourteen thousand, Mārīcha, Jaṭāyus, Sugrīva, Vālin, Hanūmant, Śramaṇā, Vibhīshaṇa, Kumbhakarṇa, Rāvaṇa, and so on,—like a series of moving