Sakoontala | Page 8

young lion; the
search for the amulet, by which the King is proved to be his father; the
return of [S']akoontalá, and the happy reunion of the lovers;--all these
form a connected series of moving and interesting incidents. The
feelings of the audience are wrought up to a pitch of great intensity; and
whatever emotions of terror, grief, or pity may have been excited, are
properly tranquillized by the happy termination of the story.
Indeed, if a calamitous conclusion be necessary to constitute a tragedy,
the Hindú 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']akoontalá,' 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
Hindú 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']akoontalá, was Bharata, from whom India is still called by the
natives Bhárata-varsha. After him came Samvarana, Kuru, Sántanu,
Bhíshma, and Vyasa. The latter was the father of Dhritaráshtra and
Pándu, the quarrels of whose sons form the subject of the great Sanskrit
epic poem called Mahá-bhárata, 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']akoontalá is told in the
Mahá-bhárata. The pedigree of [S']akoontalá, 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']wámitra, a name associated with many remarkable circumstances
in Hindú mythology and history. His genealogy and the principal
events of his life are narrated in the Rámáyana, the first of the two epic
poems which were to the Hindús 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 Bráhman by the length and rigour of his
penance, he became the preceptor of Rámachandra, who was the hero
of the Rámáyana, 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 Hindú 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