Sakoontala | Page 8

been excited, are properly tranquillized by the happy termination of the story.
Indeed, if a calamitous conclusion be necessary to constitute a tragedy, the Hind�� dramas are never tragedies. They are mixed compositions, in which joy and sorrow, happiness and misery, are woven in a mingled web--tragi-comic representations, in which good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, are allowed to blend in confusion during the first Acts of the drama. But, in the last Act, harmony is always restored, order succeeds to disorder, tranquillity to agitation; and the mind of the spectator, no longer perplexed by the apparent ascendency of evil, is soothed, and purified, and made to acquiesce in the moral lesson deducible from the plot.
The play of '[S']akoontal��,' as Sir W. Jones observes, must have been very popular when it was first performed. The Indian empire was then in its palmy days, and the vanity of the natives would be flattered by the introduction of those kings and heroes who were supposed to have laid the foundation of its greatness and magnificence, and whose were connected with all that was sacred and holy in their religion, Dushyanta, the hero of the drama, according to Indian legends, was one of the descendants of the Moon, or in other words, belonged to the Lunar dynasty of Indian princes; and, if any dependence may be placed on Hind�� chronology, he must have lived in the twenty-first or twenty-second generation after the Flood. Puru, his most celebrated ancestor, was the sixth in descent from the Moon's son Budha, who married a daughter of the good King Satya-vrata, preserved by Vishnu in the Ark at the time of the Deluge. The son of Dushyanta, by [S']akoontal��, was Bharata, from whom India is still called by the natives Bh��rata-varsha. After him came Samvarana, Kuru, S��ntanu, Bh��shma, and Vyasa. The latter was the father of Dhritar��shtra and P��ndu, the quarrels of whose sons form the subject of the great Sanskrit epic poem called Mah��-bh��rata, a poem with parts of which the audience would be familiar, and in which they would feel the greatest pride. Indeed the whole story of [S']akoontal�� is told in the Mah��-bh��rata. The pedigree of [S']akoontal��, the heroine of the drama, was no less interesting, and calculated to awaken the religious sympathies of Indian spectators. She was the daughter of the celebrated Vi[s']w��mitra, a name associated with many remarkable circumstances in Hind�� mythology and history. His genealogy and the principal events of his life are narrated in the R��m��yana, the first of the two epic poems which were to the Hind��s what the Iliad and the Odyssey were to the Greeks. He was originally of the regal caste; and, having raised himself to the rank of a Br��hman by the length and rigour of his penance, he became the preceptor of R��machandra, who was the hero of the R��m��yana, and one of the incarnations of the god Vishnu. With such an antecedent interest in the particulars of the story, the audience could not fail to bring a sharpened appetite, and a self-satisfied frame of mind, to the performance of the play.
Although in the following translation it has been thought expedient to conform to modern usage, by indicating at the head of each Act the scene in which it is laid, yet it is proper to apprise the English reader that in scenery and scenic apparatus the Hind�� drama, must have been very defective. No directions as to changes of scene are given in the original text of the play. This is the more curious, as there are numerous stage directions, which prove that in respect of dresses and decorations the resources of the Indian theatre were sufficiently ample.
It is probable that a curtain suspended across the stage, and divided in the centre, answered all the purposes of scenes. Behind the curtain was the space or room called nepathya, where the decorations were kept, where the actors attired themselves, and remained in readiness before entering the stage, and whither they withdrew on leaving it. When an actor was to enter hurriedly, he was directed to do so 'with a toss of the curtain.'
The machinery and paraphernalia of the Indian theatre were also very limited, contrasting in this respect unfavourably with the ancient Greek theatre, which appears to have comprehended nearly all that modern ingenuity has devised. Nevertheless, seats, thrones, weapons, and chariots, were certainly introduced, and as the intercourse between the inhabitants of heaven and earth was very frequent, it is not improbable that there may have been a?rial contrivances to represent the chariots of celestial beings, as on the Greek stage. It is plain, however, from the frequent occurrence of the word _n��tayitw��_, 'gesticulating,' 'acting,' that much had to be supplied by the imagination of the spectator, assisted by the gesticulations