MONEY, MORALITY, AND MASCULINITY: STAGING THE POLITICS OF POVERTY IN

SANSKRIT THEATER
Author(s): Jesse Ross Knutson
Source: Philosophy East and West , JANUARY 2016, Vol. 66, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE:
THEATRE AND CHARACTER CULTIVATION IN THREE GREAT PHILOSOPHICAL
CULTURES (JANUARY 2016), pp. 92-103
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press

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 MONEY, MORALITY, AND MASCULINITY: STAGING THE
POLITICS OF POVERTY IN SANSKRIT THEATER

Jesse Ross Knutson

Department of Indo-Racific Languages and Literatures,
University of Hawaii
j knutson @ hawai i .edu

It is well known that the concept of play (līlā) is employed on a cosm

explanatory device in certain quarters of classical Indian metaphysics
well known is that in the theory of drama, which explicitly appeals
elemenť in the human imagination, the tension and play between diff
ing rasas (aesthetic flavors) is made a requirement of good theater: na
kãvyam kimcid asti - "from one rasa alone, no artwork can be," says
other words, there can be no play without contradiction. What is ev
known is that one of the most frequently staged and widely com
Sanskrit plays, Sūdraka's Little Clay Cart (Mrcchakatika), combines unc
of political intrigue and antagonism, the mutual constitution of povert
power - even approximating a kind of social realism - with the other
rasas of erotic love and heroism, fear, and pity. The Sanskrit word ar
both money and meaning - in the Mrcchakatika the two coincide and
other. To begin to explore the role of money, power, and play in the
in a classical Sanskrit play is, therefore, to begin to discover a new -
unspiritual - perspective on Indian theories of art and life.
The Mrcchakatika (The little clay cart) of rāja Šūdraka is a socially a
fraught play, and may be in this respect the most dramatic of all San
As D. D. Kosambi said: "No other Sanskrit drama makes so great a
everyday life, just as none other deals with a historical in preference
episode" (Kosambi 2002, p. 6). His first assertion can be more or less
the second is only half true.3 One could rephrase Kosambi that "ther
deeply historical drama, and no more overtly demythologizing one,"
that the play is not simply about history, but about how history wo
meditation on historical process with an implicit determination of caus
In this essay, I explore a series of rhetorico-narrative linkages that the
lishes, a set of associations we can identify to function as the Mrcchak
conceptual structure. At the close, I attempt to link these connections
concept - whose outlines have already been hinted at - and extrapolat
world of the Mrcchakatika' s concepts to its concepts of its world.
The Mrcchakatika unfolds its story with a lurking revolution or c
the air. A cowherd's son (named Ãryaka) is prophesied to become the
wicked reigning king (Pālaka) has imprisoned him in an attempt to e
'Revolution' might be a very wrong and anachronistic word, since ther
tion that Ãryaka by becoming king would inaugurate any kind of radi

92 Philosophy East & West Volume 66, Number 1 January 2016 92-103
© 201 6 by University of Hawai'i Press

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order, but I put it in quotes with all its modern associations because of the economic
status of this figure as a poor pastoralist, and the startling political figuration of the
economic that the play presents more broadly. This figuration of the economic is
probably what Kosambi ultimately meant (from the vantage point of his own times)
by 'everyday life.' In other words, there are indications that something like the 'class
character' of the state is at stake. The economically marginal characters as well, es-
pecially the hero Cārudatta, evince a natural solidarity with Ãryaka, and aid him in
his escape from jail, with the shackle still dangling from his leg (at the end of Act 6
and the beginning of Act 7). The fortunes of the poor and marginal are organically
intertwined in the context of an unjust, oligarchic, and oppressive order, where the
king's sociopathic brother-in-law (Šakāra) is free to murder at will, while the righ-
teous pauper Cārudatta is guilty until proven innocent.
To make a long story short, Ãryaka kills Pālaka and becomes king in the final act.
This is where the play ends, its outer horizon. Within this horizon, certain persistent
tensions are structured by the horizon's outer limits. The political intrigue functions
as a 'primary contradiction'5 in terms of which and according to which all other an-
tagonisms are overdetermined. In this way the drama presents a picture of a social
quasi-total ity, taking a snapshot, in a way, of an entire mode of production. Another
way of rephrasing Kosambi, and tying together his two statements, might then be that
"there is no more sociohistorical Sanskrit drama," in the sense that no other Sanskrit
drama deals in such an analytical way with the dynamics and divagations of social
life, tracing the way the social folds into the economic and political in a historically
specific and definite way.
This plot's complex cocktail of determinations is mirrored in the constituent
aesthetic flavors (rasa), where a play of defiantly powerful minor rasas such as the
comic (hãsya) and heroic (vīra) undergirds an almost detached erotic mood (śrńgara).6
In this sense, the play's aesthetic structure is in some way at odds with itself, main-
taining contradiction and tension within an overall harmonization. This would per-
haps be a more emic way of outlining the play's dynamism.
Since the Mrcchakatika is an early work, and has generally been considered one
of the most ancient of extant Sanskrit dramas (as indicated not least by certain inter-
nal evidence, such as the apparently flourishing condition of Buddhism it depicts
in north-central India,7 its chaste style, and the variety and antiquity of its Prakrit
dialects,8 as well as the play's likely forming the basis for the Cārudatta ascribed to
Bhāsa), we might understand the historical questions it addresses as in some way
'real' historical questions that pertain to a fairly early period.

Cārudatta: Wealth, Poverty, Virtue, and Crime

The plot of the Mrcchakatika revolves around the fortunes of Cārudatta, a destitute
Brahmin merchant. His poverty is the result of his boundless generosity toward
needy friends. The editor and translator M. R. Kale explains his name cāru dattam
danam yasya, 'he whose gift is nicely given' (Sūdraka 1 972, p. lx). His excess of vir-
tue (guņa) has led to his utter lack of resources for its expression; in a dystopia of

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 chronic abjection, being and seeming are condemned never to coincide. His finan-
cial circumstances are thus bitterly ironic, and form the starting point for an extended
discourse, articulated by the detached verses (subhāsita) - mostly spoken as lugu-
brious laments by the hero - on the nature of wealth and poverty, and the relation of
these two terms to guna, 'virtue/
On the one hand, poverty is a vicious void:

Empty is a house without a son. Deeply empty are things for him who has no good friend.
For a fool, the horizons are empty. For a poor man, everything is empty. (1 .8)9

Cārudatta sees poverty as a fate worse than death:

Between poverty and death, I like death, not poverty. Death is a little pain, poverty is
unending misery. (1 .1 0)10

These subhāsitas have an exceedingly simple - one could call it bleak or

impoverished - figuration. They employ excessive repetition,11 which conveys a kind
of numbness to the equivalence of words being reiterated. Life seems drained of dis-
tinction and significance. The second verse has a slight dismal pun at the end, where
poverty is said to be anantakam duhkham, 'unending misery/ At the same time it is
a misery 'without antaka ,' that is, 'without death/ The pun is artfully uncharming in
its simplicity and redundancy, but again it compounds the bleakness, the poverty of
the poetry. Here there is a dialectic of content and form: in the context of evoking
poverty's lack of charm, the lack of charm becomes a charm.
At the same time, true virtue (guņa) is coextensive with poverty in the world of
the Mrcchakatika. This facet is not thematized by the subhāsita verses in the same
way, yet it becomes clear that the virtuous characters all have in common a certain
social vulnerability conditioned by their exclusion from the political-economic oli-
garchy presided over by the bad-guy king Pālaka. A verse in the Cārudatta ascribed
to Bhāsa captures the wealth of righteousness underlying Cārudatta's self-imposed
indigence:

My wealth has been exhausted in acts of giving to my loved ones. I do not remember
having insulted anyone. My consciousness of having given in good faith, o friend, will
never die. (1 .4)12

The short play Cārudatta (probably several centuries later than Šūdraka's), ascribed
to Bhāsa, follows the first four acts of the Mrcchakatika almost exactly, but with
substantial differences in wording throughout (See Tieken, 1993). It seems to have
abstracted one aspect of the play - the love story of Cārudatta and Vasantasenā - and
adapted it for popular performance. The Mrcchakatika is both poetically and concep-
tually more elaborate: There is a political and judicial intrigue into which the chal-
lenged romance is woven. In so many ways it becomes almost impossible to talk
about the Mrcchakatika without making it sound modern: this weaving of the
interpersonal into the world-historical is characteristic of some of the great modern-
ist novels. Likewise, the figure of the righteous poor reminds us distinctly of the
social-realist-inflected Hindi cinema from the early part of the twentieth century. A

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further parallel with early Hindi cinema is the challenged romance that manages, in
this fraught world, to blossom like a lotus from amidst the muck and grime. The play's
scenes of ancient urban life thus magically anticipate central concerns of what for it
were worlds to come. What is most eerily modern about the Mrcchakatika, however,
is the notion of the absolute determination of social life by the economic, expressed
at length across many subhāsita verses.
Poverty poisons interpersonal relationships:

Truly I have no care for my fortune's destruction. According to luck, wealth comes and
goes. But it burns me that people shrink even from friendship with someone whose
foundation of wealth is destroyed. (1 .1 3)13

Cārudatta says: "Friend, I am not dejected about my wealth. But behold":

It burns me that guests avoid our house thinking it is destitute. They are like bees who
after buzzing around the rich lines of rut fluid which have dried up, abandon the ele-
phant's cheek when the season is over. (1 .1 2)14

He adds later:

When a man attains a state arranged by Fate, in which the destruction of fortune brings
affliction, then even his friends become enemies and the dearly beloved become averse.
(1.53)15

On the other hand, Cārudatta's poverty overdetermines and shields his status as
a good man, because there is nothing bad in his life that has resulted from anything
else. He is overwhelmed and contained by social forces, fixed in a melancholic pas-
sivity. This contributes to a sense of his refinement and delicacy, but the darker side
of this is the specter of castration and the hint of a kind of male penis envy.16 Robert
Goodwin, in his introduction to A. L. Basham's English version of the Mrcchakatika,
points out that Cārudatta "For all the ideality of his character ... is not really free of
the idea that wealth and virtue are closely related" (Šūdraka 1 994, p. 8). He develops
the idea that for the hero poverty is a form of impotence: "we emerge with the por-
trait of a man who sees generosity as a sort of sexual potency and a claim on the
general admiration of society" (p. 9). Seen this way, Cārudatta covets money for the
influence and sympathy it can cultivate in his fellow human beings. He wants money
to convert immediately into social currency.
His poverty has a more directly sexual significance as well. Though the hero is
never described at length as pining for the heroine, in the first act there is an indica-
tion of a powerful erotic feeling for her, whose expression was abruptly smothered by
poverty:

(To himself) Hey! Here's Vasantasenā, who generated my desire - which upon the
destruction of the whole extent of my wealth - sinks into my limbs like the anger of a
weakling. (1 .55)' 7

His money-phallus involutes. He is unable to approach her, because, by virtue of her

wealth, she is his social superior. He is literally impotent. The hero is unheroic, and

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 in the play's typically inverted manner, the heroine is made to pursue him as a lover.
Cārudatta remarks in a different context in the third act:

My wealth was destroyed by ill fortune and I am pitied by a woman's wealth. According
to wealth a man becomes a woman; according to wealth a woman becomes a man.
(3.27)18

The play never shies away from sexuality and this kind of figuration of sexuality's
relationship to psychosocial life. The villain Šakāra, who tries to murder the heroine
Vasantasenā because she refuses his advances, presents perhaps the first sexual sadist
psychopath in literary history, where the act of murder functions as a sex act in itself.
The villain's psychopathology is explored in greater depth across a broad spectrum
of symptoms. There is a linguistic side to it as well: he cannot express himself except
with great redundancy, erroneous mythological references, extremely unhappy sim-
iles, and other tortured uses of rhetoric. Moreover, he speaks an uncommon lan-
guage, his own unique idiolect of Prakrit, in which all dental sibilants get sucked into
the back of the mouth (s becomes ś, sh), presumably mimicking an eastern (Bengali)
pronunciation. Throughout its many characterizations, the play presents the same
density of psychic and social structure intrinsic to its hero, Cārudatta.
For Cārudatta, wealth is necessary to maintain the structure of his gender and
master some kind of internal ambivalence. Without it, he is both castrated and
self-loathing. Thus, in the ninth act when he is tried for the murder of Vasantasenā -
he has been wrongfully accused, and she is not dead, only unconscious, after being
attacked by the villain Sakāra - he says virtually nothing in his defense. He collabo-
rates with the authority of his oppressors and silently allows himself to be sentenced
to death.
Though he has lost his elite status, he is unable to mourn it. He incorporates it
into his ego and rages against it/himself in a classically Freudian manner:

The melancholic displays ... an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impover-

ishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor
and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. (Freud 1961, p. 246)

Cārudatta's death sentence is thus an attempted suicide of sorts. His castration was
an insufficient punishment, which prefigured his embrace of death. In this sense,
however, the excessive generosity with which all the trouble began contained the
germ of this grand negation, which ultimately negates itself and indicts the entire
society and polity depicted by the play. Cārudatta's auto-castration and attempted
suicide were actually an attempted Oedipal attack on the king, a deflected patricide
which gets recuperated and fulfilled by the subaltern king Âryaka.
Cārudatta's poverty, after all, had already been figured as a type of wealth. His
virtue as appreciated by other disempowered characters - by Âryaka, even by the
Cāņdālas, who are about to execute him - becomes the basis for a conception of
nobility based only on pure virtue, untainted by wealth. At the end of a verse in praise
of Cārudatta's virtues, one of Vasantasenā's attendants exclaims: "He alone is praise-
worthy who lives according to the highest virtue; others are as if merely breathing."19

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 Cuņa, 'virtue,' is the only true wealth. Poverty emerges in this drama as an
obstacle to justice, as simultaneously the prerequisite for virtue and the prerequisite
for its punishment, yet wealth appears fickle, unstable, and illusory. Sarnvāhaka, the
'masseur' or 'shampooer/ another of the low-class characters naturally allied to
Cārudatta, remarks: "Good people are those whose wealth is honorable conduct. For
whom does wealth not become unsteady?"20
Cārudatta is thus rich in terms of guņa, though financially poor. He is rich in
terms of negativity; his generosity contains the germ of the negation of his world. The
two terms 'wealth' and 'virtue' are thus in a paradoxical fashion both inherently
connected and mutually exclusive. Poverty distorts virtue, makes it appear as crime,
though virtue inheres almost exclusively in the poor, marginal characters. Wealth is
almost universally reflective of corruption and vice, though potency, legitimacy, and
power come only with wealth. Wealth is the only voice of guņa, which it never
accompanies. At the same time, wealth is an unstable term in the world of the
Mrcchakatika, where theft and gambling constantly send it tumbling. The contra-
dictions inherent to Cārudatta, and the terms that surround him - wealth, poverty,
virtue, and crime - point to fundamental antagonisms in the society depicted by the
play.
The literary magic here is the way the highest level of this antagonism is reflected
and extended so distinctly by its lower reaches. Injustice and the spirit of a society
crashing against itself and falling under its own weight become aspects of the char-
acters' most intimate subjectivity. Instability, illegitimacy, and contradiction are the
only languages the characters have for talking even to themselves.
The world Cārudatta inhabits is criticized by his combination of virtue and mel-
ancholic castration. The bind in which he is caught becomes a criticism of the terms
provided for his articulation by the world he inhabits. He is a paragon not only of
virtue but of collective abjection. This inconsistency and dislocation of representa-
tion and reality are evoked by the haunting subhāsita verses of the play, which come
to function like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, while an omnipotent Fate and catharsis
unravel. The play's penultimate verse reflects more abstractly on social life via the
figure of Fate21 and metaphors of filling up and emptying:

Some it diminishes, others it fills up[ - ]

It leads some up, and it casts others down;
Still others it keeps stuck:
Teaching that the order of the world is mutual antagonism
Fate plays at acting like the buckets on a water wheel.22

Conclusion: The Deep Surface of the Literary

If we were to search for something concrete, at once internal and external to the
Mrcchakafika, to identify with this all-determining Fate as an absolute power experi-
enced by humans, it would first be monarchical state power and then, secondarily,
a chorus of determining economic and social factors that, in ancient South Asian
thought-worlds, tended to flow directly from the character of this monarchical

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 power. This concept of monarchy as all-determining is an ancient one,23 and the
Mrcchakatika presents an instantiation of hoary ideas spelled out in Manu's Dhar-
mašāstra, the Rãmâyana24 and Mahābhārata, and elsewhere, which it cannot be
credited with inventing. Yet, on the other hand, a more fleeting and immediate in-
sight into history is offered, to which Kosambi was sensitive, a glimpse of an intimate
moment in the early evolution of state society in northern India: The play analyzes
discrete aspects of the experience of ancient despotism - the contradictions it held in
place, the absurd life-narratives it presided over, and the tremendous suffering and
lust for liberation it nurtured, which over later centuries would stoke ecstatic reli-
gious traditions.25 Most historically significant here, however, are the imagination's
outer limits: The only answer to a bad monarchy is a good one, whereas monarchy
itself cannot be questioned.
The play's final refrain is both demythologizing and mythological. It accepts only
one possibility for justice/injustice: the seizure of state power. It acknowledges only
one possible mode of production: some form of ancient despotism. The play's narra-
tive closure in its outer frame seals off and suffocates the embryonic revolutionary
grasp of totality found earlier in the experience of the socially marginal characters.
The play is ultimately and predictably innocent of any concept of revolution in pre-
senting its blueprint for a best possible world.
This blueprint stops short of anything truly Utopian, and the Mrcchakatika's
meditation on the determination of social life by the economic pertains only to
dystopian conditions; thus, it is only in picturing urban dystopia that it subtly, psychi-
cally anticipates evolution into the homo economicus and all the dystopian and
Utopian potentials of modern times. It represents political mythology grinding itself
into a truly prescient political concept, which is then in turn paradoxically stifled by
a further political mythology: the apotheosis of monarchy. It may have been the poets
and dramatists in ancient South Asia who reflected on the meanings of monarchy in
the greatest nuance, but even they could imagine only one very modest negation.
If the Mrcchakatika is relatively unique, a work of premodern social realism, it
also provides a unique perspective on Sanskrit drama as a whole that may extend to
create a perspective on drama and art in general as we know it. The play creates a
world in order to destroy it. The instrument of this destruction - the life breath of
the play's realism - is the intimate contradiction, and the coalescence of disparate
aesthetic effects. As alluded at the outset, no Sanskrit play can be entirely without
contradiction and dissonance. It is through this internal conflict - the collapse of
relatively autonomous spheres of aesthetic power - that a kind of realism emerges,
along with an entire inchoate theory of social life in terms of antagonistic contradic-
tion. Yet we can see that no Sanskrit drama is entirely free of this imperative. There-
fore no Sanskrit drama is entirely without realist potential, however slight. Social
drama in general - not just Sanskrit - may always use contradictions in this way
to craft reality effects, effects of perspective, and Sanskrit drama may always have
been somewhat social through its admixture of aesthetic affects (rasa). Yet the
Mrcchakatika represents a special moment in Indian history when the entire social
system could be evoked and indicted in a unified and yet manifold artistic vision. A

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new theory of social life and experience could emerge in art, via narrative rather
than argumentation. In later Indian aesthetics true art experience was conceived to
prefigure the spiritual experience of the absolute; the tasting of rasa was brahmāsvā-
dasahodara, 'akin to the tasting of brahma/26 Yet this spiritual absolute may only
have been attained by traversing material, social life, and there may be a lot more to
say - even if the history is somewhat buried - about art experience in early India
prior to the advent of this grand spiritualization.

Notes

1 - Nâtyasâstra VIL1 19 (Bharatamuni 1956, vol. 1, p. 379).

2 - If one were really looking for the 'Shakespeare of India/ in terms of the blood-
curdling intrigue of a tragedy like Othello or Titus Andronicus, one might start
here, rather than with that master of serenity, Kālidāsa.

3 - There are indeed other plays such as Visākhadatta's Mudrārāksasa (Rāksasa's

Signet, sixth to tenth centuries c.e.?), with elaborate historical episodes (see
Visākhadatta 1976), and since this latter deals with intrigues of real ancient
dynasties, which may have a basis in fact, it is at least as historical as the work
of Šūdraka.

4 - In light of some of Roland Barthes' reflections on mythologizing and demy-

thologizing in language it may not be immediately decidable whether being
'abouť something is more conducive to mythologizing or demythologizing.
Barthes had a peculiar take on what constitutes political and demythologized
speech:
If myth is depoliticized speech, there is at least one type of speech which is the opposite
of myth: that which remains political. Here we must go back to the distinction between
language-object and metalanguage. . . . Compared to the real language of the wood-
cutter, the language I create is a second-order language, a metalanguage in which
I shall henceforth not 'act the things' but 'act their names/ and which is to the primary
language what the gesture is to the act. This second-order language is not entirely myth-
ical, but it is the very locus where myth settles; for myth can work only on objects which
have already received the mediation of a first language. (Barthes 1 972, p. 1 59)

The notion of the woodcutter's unmediated relationship to his craft is problem-

atic to say the least. I think the opposite presupposition might be more produc-
tive, that the language of greater immediacy is the more insidiously ideological,
since it occludes and disavows its mediations, whereas metalanguage is more
open to contestation by opposing metalanguages.
5 - Mao 1 968. See also Althusser, " Contradiction et surdétermination," in Althusser
1965.

6 - The Kashmiri literary theorists Ānandavardhana (ninth century) and Ksemendr

(eleventh century) both emphasized that minor rasas should not be overdevel-

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 oped so as to compete with the dominant rasa (Ānandavardhana 2009, Kse-
mendra 1964). The important point for these theorists was not the minor rasa's
contradiction or harmony vis-à-vis the dominant rasa, but rather whether or not
it was being overdeveloped and possibly competing for dominance. Ānanda-
vardhana writes: "Whether it contradicts or does not, the minor rasa should not
be fully nourished in regard to the main rasa. In this way it will not contradict"
(Dhvanyãloka 3.24, in Ānandavardhana 2009). Also see the Aucutyvicãracarcã
on the fittingness of rasas (rasaucitya) in Ksemendra 1964.

7 - See Kale's introduction (Šūdraka 1972, pp. 13 ff.).

8 - Gawroński dates the Prakrit to the third or fourth century c.e. (cited in Diwakar
Acharya's introduction to his translation; see Sūdraka 2009, p. xxiv).

9 - sûnyam aputrasya grharn cirasûnyam nāsti yasya sanmitram/

mürkhasya diśah sûnyàh sarvarn sûnyam daridrasya//
( - spoken by the Sūtradhāra, or 'stage manager')

1 0 - daridryan marañad vã maraņam mama rocate na dãridryam/

alpakleśam maraņam dãridryam anantakam duhkham/Á

1 1 - Punarukti or 'repetition/redundancy' is considered one of the most basic faults

(dosa) in Sanskrit poetry from the time of the earliest writings on poetics. The
eighth-century literary theorist Udbhata makes a case for redundancy under the
heading of the figure 'Gujarati Alliteration' (lātānuprāsa) where it is acceptable
to repeat words as long as they are used in totally distinct senses ( tãtparyab -
heda) (that may not seem so distinct to begin with) (Kãvyalankãrasãrasangraha
1.13). See Udhata 1982.

1 2 - ksīņā mamārthāh pranayakriyâsu

vimānitam naiva param smarami/
etat tu me pratyayadattamülyam
sattvam sakhe na ksayam abhyupaiti//

1 3 - satyam na me vibhavanāšakrtāsti cinta

bhägyakramena hi dhanāni bhavanti yãnti/
etat tu mām dahati nastadhanäsrayasya
yat sauhrdād api janāh sithilībhavanti//

14 - vayasya/ na mamārthān prati dainyam/ paśya

etat tu mām dahati yadgrham asmadJyam
ksīņārtham ity athitayah parivarjayanti/
samsuskasāndramadalekham iva bhramantah
kā lā ty ay e madhukarāh kariņah kapolam//

1 5 - yada tu bhâgyaksayapîditam dasām narah krtāntopahitām prapadyate/

tadãsya mitrãny api yãnty amitratām cirānurakto 'pi virajyate janah//

16 - On male penis envy, see Persons, "The Omni Available Woman and Lesbian
Sex," in Persons 1999.

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17- aye iyam vasantasenā
yayâ me janitah kāmah ksīņe vibhavavistare/
krodhah kupurusasyeva svagātresveva sJdat¡//(' .55)

1 8 - ãtmabhâgyakçatadravyah stridravyenänukampitah/
arthatah puruso nãri yã nari sārthatah pumān//

19-... hyekah slãghyah sa jîvaty adhikagunatayã cocchvasanfíva cãnye//

20 - . . . satkāradhanah khalu sajjanah kasya na bhavati calācalam dhanam// (2 . 1 5)

21 - We find the figuration of politics as daiva/niyati, 'Fate/ explored at length in the

drama Mudrārāksasa as well; c.f. acts 5 and 6.

22 - kāmšcit tucchayati prapürayati vā kāmšcin nayaty unnatim

kāmšcit pātavidhau karoti ca punah kāmšcin nayaty ākulān/
anyonyam pratipaksasamhatim imām lokasthitim bodhayann
esa krîçlati kûpayantraghatikânyâyaprasakto vidhih//

23 - A certain notion of divine kingship from within the subcontinent, observable in

the epics and Manu, seems to have come into synergy with the notion that the
Kūsāņas brought with them shortly after the turn of the millennium. The latter
referred to themselves as devaputra, 'son of god.' See B. N. Mukherjee's com-
mentary in Raychauduri (1923) 2006, pp. 730 ff.

24 - Sarga 61 of Ayodhyãkãnda, the second book of the Râmâyana, contains a re-

peated refrain, "in a land without a king," listing all imaginable natural and
social dysfunctions that arise in the absence of a monarch: "In a land without
a king, a fistful of grain is not sown. In a land without a king, neither the son
obeys the father, nor the wife the husband."

nārājake janapade bijamuętib prakiryate/

nārājake pituh putro bhãryã vã varíate vase//
(Râmâyana, Ayodhyãkãnda , 61 .9)

25 - This is essentially what Raymond Williams called a "structure of feeling":

"social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized
as social but taken to be private idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which
in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its . . . specific hierarchies" (Williams
1977, p. 132).
26 - The formulation is that of the fourteenth-century theorist Višvanāthakavirāja
(Sähityadarpana, 3.2, in Višvanāthakaviraja 1922).

References

Althusser, Louis. 1965. Pour Marx. Paris: Maspero.

Anandavardhana. 2009. Dhvanyãloka. With Locanā and Bãlapriyã commentaries.

Varanasi: Chaukhambha.

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 Barthes, Roland. 1972. "Myth Today." In Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers.
New York: Hill and Wang.

Bharatamuni. 1956. Nãtyaiãstra of Bharatamuni with the Commentary Abhinav-

abhāratī by Abhinavaguptãcãrya. Vol. 1. Edited by M. Ramakrishna Kavi. Gaek-
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bined Methods in Indology and Other Writings. Edited by Brajadulal Chattopadh-
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Mao Zedong. 1968. On Contradiction. Peking [Beijing]: Foreign Languages Press.

Persons, Ethel. 1999. The Sexual Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Raychauduri, Hemachandra. (1923) 2006. Political History of Ancient India. Com-

mentary by B. N. Mukherjee. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Šūdraka. 2009. The Little Clay Cart. Translated by Diwakar Acharya. Clay Sanskrit
Library, 44. New York: New York University Press.

Tieken, Herman. 1993. "The So-calledTrivandrum Plays Attributed to Bhāsa." Wiener

Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens 37.

Udhata. 1982. Kāvyālankārasārasamgraha. Nārāyaņa Dāso Banhatti. Edited by

Kāvyālarņkāra-Sāra-Samgraha of Udbhata with the Commentary, the Laghuvrtti
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Visakhadatta. 1976. Mudrarakęasa. Edited with translation by M. R. Kale. Delhi:

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Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
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Additional Sources

Bloch, Ernst. 1977. "Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics." Trans-
lated by Mark Ritter. New German Critique, no. 1 1 (Spring): 22-38.

Bhāsa. Cãrudatta. 1914. Edited by T. Ganapati Shastri. Trivandrum: Travancore

Government Press.

Vernant, Jean Pierre. 1 988. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet
Lloyd. New York: Zone Books.

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