Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/247

 XI

THE DECLINE OF THE SANSKRIT DRAMA

1. The Decadence of the Drama

We have seen already in Murāri and Rājaçekhara the process which was depriving the drama of real dramatic quality. The older poets were, indeed, under the influence of the epic; they lived in the atmosphere of the poetry of the court and their dramatic instincts had always to fight against the tendency to introduce epic and lyric verses into their works, heedless of the ruin thus wrought on the drama. Had the stage been a more popular one, this defect might have been counteracted, but the audience for whose approval a poet looked was essentially one of men of learning, who were intent on discerning poetic beauties or defects, and who, as the theory proves, had singularly little idea of what a drama really means.

Other factors doubtless helped the decline of the drama. The invasion of the Mahomedans into northern India, which began in earnest with the opening of the eleventh century, was a slow process, and it could not immediately affect the progress of the dramatic art. But gradually, by substituting Mahomedan rulers – men who disliked and feared the influence of the national religion, which was closely bound up with the drama – for Hindu princes, the generous and accomplished patrons of the dramatists, it must have exercised a depressing effect on the cultivation of this literary form. The drama doubtless took refuge in those parts of India where Moslem power was slowest to extend, but even there Mahomedan potentates gained authority, and drama can have been seldom worth performing or composing, until the Hindu revival asserted the Indian national spirit, and gave an encouragement to the renewal of an ancient national glory.

Yet a further and most important consideration must have lain in the ever-widening breach between the languages of the