Even the greatest Sanskrit playwrights went to secular sources for their stories and not just to Hindu myths and epics: Arshia Sattar

Cover of 'Vasanta: Stories from Sanskrit Plays' retold by Arshia Sattar; and Raja Ravi Varma's 'Shakuntala'. (Images via Juggernaut and Wikimedia Commons)

"Literature is not just a backdrop to history; it is an important part of history. The voices of ancient poets and writers that have survived across the centuries are precious expressions of imaginative creativity, evocations of a time long gone. Some of the stories, and they ways in which they are told, continue to enchant and enthral, even after centuries, even if we read them in translation, even if we may read different meanings into them today," Upinder Singh, professor of history at Ashoka University, writes in the introduction to 'Vasanta: Stories from Sanskrit Plays' retold by Arshia Sattar.

The book comprises stories nine stories, each of them adapted from a Sanskrit play. In an email interview, Sattar explained that the first criterion for selecting these plays - by playwrights like Kalidasa, Harsha, Bhavabhuti and Vishakhadutta, among others - was ensuring "that the great playwrights of the classical period were represented". Edited excerpts from the interview:

Tell us why you translate – does it feel like thankless or rewarding work on most days? Would you say that there seems to be a more concerted effort to do translation work in India, and outside the universities/university press universe in the last decade or so?

The plays in the volume are not translations, they are retellings. There is a huge difference between the two. Because they’re retellings, I’ve been able to foreground the narratives and the plots and highlight the stories.

Translation is always rewarding, it’s one of my most favourite things to do, even when the texts are complex and difficult. Universities and their translation programs are making it possible for the world literature to be represented and for readers to enjoy works from outside their own languages and cultures. At the moment, universities are doing more to support the translation ecosystem than commercial publishers. Universities are also ensuring high-quality work and well-edited books.

You write in the book that 'no story in the subcontinent is ever lost or completely forgotten, the labyrinthine intertextuality of our storytelling never fails to boggle the mind'. Could you expand on this?

Simply that we tell the same stories over and over again, in different texts, in different genres and with different intents. Look at how many Ramayanas there are, each one with the same basic story of the exiled prince and the abducted princess and the super monkeys. Yet, each is a little different, each responds to its own physical, emotional and religious environment. The same myths occur in so many Puranas. And often, when we tell the stories again, we refer to other versions and other places where they might have occurred before –the texts know each other and speak to each other across time and place. I think this is marvellous, a great gift to readers and writers. Readers can enjoy their favourites many times over and writers are free to borrow plots and characters and episodes from what they’ve encountered before.

In the introduction, you also write about Harsha and Mahendravarman – the playwright-kings. What’s your read on the social and political trends their plays capture? Why did you pick ‘Nagananda’, ‘The Lady with the Garland of Jewels’ and ‘The Holy Man and the Courtesan’ to represent their work?

I don’t think we can talk about ‘trends’ when we speak of history and things from the past. We can notice movements and the prevalence of cultural and political events and phenomena, but we cannot speak of these as ‘trends.’

I chose these plays because I like them and because they are written by playwrights who sit at the very heart of the Sanskrit drama canon. Also, I think they challenge the idea that we have of Sanskrit plays as coming from and existing solely in a mainstream Hindu universe. Buddhists and Jains were present and influential in the classical period, their ideas also appear in literature. We need to recognise that and acknowledge the diversity of our past, Upinder Singh’s Introduction does a superb job of presenting this pluralism and supporting her arguments with historical texts and artefacts. You’ll see that 'Nagananda' lives and dies for the values of a bodhisattva, the monk’s student pushes his teacher to answer more and more complex questions about Hindu philosophy as he seeks a spiritual path for himself from the many that are available. As for 'Lady with the Garland', it’s joyous and funny and easy about the fact that even ‘good people’ have sexual desire. It fully exploits what theatre can give us – mistaken identities, switched clothes, romantic trysts, a buffoon. It's a wonderful counterpoint to more serious plays like 'Urubhangam' and 'Uttara Rama Charita'. The plays in this volume also show us that Sanskrit playwrights, even the greatest of them all, went to secular sources for their stories and not just to Hindu myths and epics.

The plays in this book cover a millennium, and some of the best-known Sanskrit writers today, from Kalidasa to Bhavabhuti. Could you tell us how you selected these nine plays? Were there some criteria they had to meet? Also tell us about one play that didn’t make the cut but which you considered quite seriously for this book?

I wanted to be sure that the great playwrights of the classical period were represented, so that was the first criterion for choosing the plays. Then, as I just said, I wanted to represent the pluralism and diversity of our classical period. It was an exciting time of cultural and intellectual debate. Which is why it produced the great works that it did – in literature, in philosophy, in the sciences, in medicine. It was not a time when a single idea or religion or way of thinking was dominant.

The one play that I thought about including was Bhavabhuti’s magnificent 'Uttara Rama Charita', possibly the greatest Sanskrit play of them all. But its scenes and its story are very complicated, full of flashbacks and dreams and things felt rather than actual events. It’s most definitely a play for a sahridaya, the ideal audience person, with its allusions and evocations. I felt that if I ironed out the narrative and made it linear, all its beauty and Bhavabhuti’s extraordinary talent would be lost and the play would come across as flat and unexciting.

Could you tell us about your chosen form in this book: turning the plays into stories. Often, the stories collapse dialogue that might have taken up multiple paras in a play into a single paragraph. Like in The Holy Man and the Courtesan, often Birdie, Shandilya, Courtesan, Courtesan’s mother, mendicant, snakebite doctor, Yama’s messenger, speak in the same para – creating this sense of breathless activity, bordering on confusion. Was this the intended effect, or just a side-effect of turning plays into stories (and perhaps minding the number of pages that the book runs into)?

This was an editorial decision, but I think it’s worked for most of the plays.

Would you say that some Sanskrit plays made a mark internationally – and through the ages – in the way that, say, Homer's 'The Odyssey' and 'The Iliad' have? Ancient India had a massive economic and cultural impact in regions as far away as Rome to the west and Cambodia to the east when most of these plays were penned?

Let’s be very careful when we talk about ‘international impact’ and speak of Indian culture’s influence on Rome and Cambodia in the same breath. Homer also did not have an ‘international impact’ until Europeans decided after the Enlightenment (that) classical Greece provided the foundations of western culture and presented Homer's work to the world during the colonial period as the best epics ever. Remember, also, that Homer’s work travelled in translation, as did Sanskrit plays. Sanskrit plays reached Europe in the 19th century through the translations of Orientalist scholars – Kalidasa’s 'Shakuntala' was the first among these. German Romanticism was deeply influenced by Sanskrit literature and philosophy. The Bhagavad Gita was another text that was admired in Europe. Eastwards, stories, and not plays per se, travelled with merchants and pilgrims and scholars and missionaries. They appeared in art forms and performances that were created in the new locations where they landed, enriched by local religious, cultural and performance practices. The stories, even religious ones, were retold to suit that environment they came to, not the one that they came from.