Description
Bhasa is perhaps the only poet in the history of our
literature, who did not go into the oblivion inspire of his
works being lost to the readers for centuries together. The
literary world was suddenly taken by surprise with the
announcement made by Mahamahopadhyaya T. Ganapati
Sastri, the first curator of the manuscript library of
Thiruvananthapuram that twelve plays of Bhasa and
thirteenth one in an incomplete form had been discovered
by his from amongst the manuscripts he was handling.
There was great jubilation over this epoch making
discovery combined with an element of doubt and disbelief
in certain quarter. It be a superfluous attempt to bring all
his plays under the prescribed definitions of the ten types
of Rupakas since he himself has never tried to be true to a
type.
The first volume of Bhasa’s plays starts with Balacaritam
which has got Krisnavatara as its theme and deals with the
boyish adventures of Krisna ending with the slaying of Kansa.
The remaining six plays have drawn on different episodes of
Mahabharata for their themes and could be generally classified
as the Mahabharata Plays. Though the episodes have been taken
from Vyasa’s great epic or the Puranas dealing with
Krisnavatara there have been deviations in their presentation
and, in the case of the Mahabharata plays, the characters are not
always true to the type and depicted by Vyasa. Apart from this,
there are some episodes that do not find any place in the epic and
should be considered as inventions of the great dramatist for
fulfilling his own objective.
The first volume second part of Bhasa plays deals with some
of the important episodes of Ramayana starting with the disturbed
coronation in the first play of ‘Pratima’ and ending with the
;consecration of Rama along with Sita in both cases. Though
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