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It is now more than a hundred years since Sir William Jones gave the Western world its first knowledge of the dramatic literature of the Hindus by the publication, in 1789, of a translation of the Śakuntalā of Kālidāsa. From that time on, the labors of Sanskritists have gradually made accessible most of the chief works of the Sanskrit drama, and a large number of editions, translations, and commentaries are now available for the general student of literature.

The earliest manifestations of a dramatic idea in India are to be found in the hymns of the Rig Veda. Certain of these hymns are in the form of dialogues between various personages of the Vedic pantheon, such as Yama and Yamī, Saramā and the Paṇis, while the myth of King Purūravas and the nymph Urvaśī is the foundation for one of the plays of India's greatest dramatist. The lack of accurate data precludes our knowing much about the origin of the drama in India, but it is probable that it had its beginning in a combination of these hymns in dramatic form and in the religious dances, in which certain pantomimic features came to be conventionalized and stereotyped in later times until we get the classical Sanskrit drama. This theory is borne out by the fact that in Sanskrit the words for play (nāṭaka) and actor (naṭa) are from the root naṭ which is the Prākrit form of the Sanskrit nṛt 'to dance.' The native Hindu account of the origin of the drama was that it came down from heaven as a fully developed art invented by the divine sage Bharata. This theory, however satisfying to the Hindu mind, cannot be accepted by modern scholarship, and we are forced to presuppose a development from the religious to the dramatic, as outlined above, which is not essentially different from that found in Greece. The earlier stages, which were