The SVAPNAVASAVADATTA IS one of a highly inter-Testing group of Sanskrit dramas discovered a little over a decade ago [i.e. in 1912] in the course of a search for Sanskrit manuscripts conducted under the distinguished patronage of His Highness the Maharaja of Travancore. The authorship of these plays is still under discussion; but several well-known critics, men whose researches in Sanskrit literature entitle them to speak with authority, agree in attributing them to the celebrated playwright BHASA, one of the earliest of the great Sanskrit dramatists. They have made out a strong prima facie case, and, to our mind, the attribution of the plays to BHASA has not been satisfactorily disproved. Never-theless we wish to make clear that, in publishing a trans-lation of the Svapnavasavadatta as a drama attributed to Bhasa, we have only tentatively accepted the theory of his authorship.
There are thirteen dramas in this group, several of which deserve, in our estimation, to rank as chefs-d'œuvre of Hindu dramatic genius. If they are as old as some critics think, they will undoubtedly prove of high importance for the study, not merely of Hindu drama, but of drama in general. They are rough-hewn and un-polished, with the impress of the embryonic stage of an art, yet one strong and virile; and they afford us, we believe, a peep into the workshop of the Hindu dramatist. His art we find fully developed in the plays of Kali-dasa: they are the finished product. A happy feature of the Travancore plays is their simplicity and vigour. This will be of special appeal to students of the Sanskrit drama. Much of the late drama, in its period of decline, is characterised by a predominance of descriptive and narrative elements, and the laboured and excessively ornate style of that late drama is a disfigurement. ""Rhetorical embellishment"" is assigned a place proper to itself in the scheme of composition of the Travan-core plays: the main appeal is direct and vitally human. Further, the plays shed light incidentally on much-discussed literary-historical problems, such as the inter-relation of the Hindu drama and the Hindu epic; but these are questions of a technical character, and must not detain us here.
The interest of the plays, whatever be their signi-ficance in the eyes of the philologist, extends beyond the narrow circle of savants. A play like the Svapna-vasavadatta, it may be said without fear of contradiction, is the glorious heritage of the whole civilised world. The eternal lesson of the reward of devotion and love, taught by our author in simple language and with penetrating directness, is one of universal application. All that is best in human nature here finds noble expression. This estimate of the merits of the drama is vindicated by the feelings of genuine interest which it has evoked among the literati of Europe. Independent translations have already appeared in German, French and Italian.
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