नाट्यशास्त्रम् (प्रथम भाग - अभिनवभारती एवं हिन्दी टीका सहित)

LXXXIII

(v) Besides these, Kālidāsa has written elaborate Prologues to his plays, though the Nāṭyaśāstra does not recognize anything of this kind as a part of the play proper. These as well as the departures from the rules in Bhāsa's play, may be taken as great dramatists' innovations which as creative geniuses they were fully entitled to.

(b) Besides these there seems to be other facts which probably go to show that Kālidāsa knew the present Nāṭyaśāstra. They are as follows :

(i) Kālidāsa uses the following technical terms of the Nāṭyaśāstra : aṅgahāra, vṛtti, sandhi, prayoga, (Kumāra, VII. 91), aṅga-sattva-vacanāśrayaṁ nṛttam (Raghu, XIX. 36), pātra, prāśnika, sauṣṭhava, apadeśa, upavahana, śākhā, vastu, māyurī mārjanā (Mālavi.)

(ii) Kālidāsa mentions the mythical Bharata as the director of the celestical theatre (Vikram, III).

(iii) According to Kāṭayavema, Kālidāsa in his Mālāvi. (I. 4.0 ; 21.0) refers to particular passages in the Nāṭyaśāstra (I. 16-19 ; NŚ (C.) XXX, 92ff.)

3. The Mythological Data

In the paper mentioned in the beginning of this chapter the present writer was mistaken in his interpretation of the word mahāgrāmaṇī which does not mean Gaṇapati as Abhinava the reputed commentator of the Nāṭyaśāstra opines (see notes on III.1-8.). The absence from the Nāṭyaśāstra of this deity who does not appear in literature before the fourth century speaks indeed for the great antiquity of this work.

4. The Ethnological Data

The Nāṭyaśāstra in one passage (XXIII. 99) names Kirātās, Barbaras and Pulindas together with Andhras, Dramilas, Kāśīs and Kosalas who were brown (asita, lit. not white), and in another passage (XVIII. 44) names Andhras and Dramilas together with Barbaras and Kirātas. Āpastamba the author of the Dharmaśūtra who lived at the latest in the 300 B.C. belonged to the Andhra land (Jolly, Hindu Law and Custom, p. 6 and also P.V. Kane, Hist. of the Dharmaśāstra. Vol. I. p, 45). Hence it may be assumed on the basis of these names that the Nāṭyaśāstra was in all likelihood composed at a time when a section at least of the Andhras and the Dramilas (forefathers of the modern Tamils) were still not looked upon as thoroughly civilized. Such a time may not have been much after the beginning of the Christian era.

5. The Epigraphical Data

Sylvain Lévi has discovered parallelism between the Nāṭyaśāstra and the inscriptions of the Indo-Scythian Ksatrapas like Chastana who are referred to therein as svāmi a term applicable, according to the Śāstra to