Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/75

70 Candragupta, the Maurya, some four and a half centuries earlier established the reservoir which he had repaired, and this term occurs in the Çakuntalā and the Mṛcchakaṭikā in the sense of brother-in-law of the king, the sense given to it in the Amarakosa, the earliest Sanskrit lexicon of established authority. To these considerations may be added that Ujjayinī, the capital of the Western Kṣatrapas of Mālava, is a centre, round which as a fan radiate the three great literary Prākrits of the drama, Çaurasenī, Māgadhī, and Māhārāṣṭrī, thus accounting for their use, which else would be difficult to explain.

Lévi's suggestion, which was accompanied by an admission that the Mṛcchakaṭikā or its source was older than he had formerly argued, and that the possibility of Greek influence was thus increased, has been accepted by Professor Konow with the important modification that in face of the fact that the oldest dramas known to us, the fragments of Açvaghoṣa and those of Bhāsa, ignore Māhārāṣṭrī and that Çaurasenī is the normal prose tongue, he accepts Mathurā as the home of the drama, and ascribes it to about the middle of the first century A.D. This view he supports by the fact that the rulers of Mathurā were also Çaka Kṣatrapas, or Satraps, whose control extends back at least to the beginning of the first century A.D.

It may be feared that neither theory will stand critical investigation, however tempting it may be to obtain an exact date for the Sanskrit drama. The discovery of Açvaghoṣa's fragments shows that the drama has already attained a very definite and complete form, and we really cannot with any probability assume that the creation of drama preceded this by no more than a century. Even a century, however, brings us further back than the middle of the first century A.D., for Konow's date of Kaniṣka, about A.D. 150, is probably considerably too late, and should be placed fifty years earlier at least. We are thus separated from Rudradāman by a period of 150 years, probably more, and the theory that the Western Kṣatrapas introduced Sanskrit into the drama falls hopelessly to the ground on chronological considerations alone.

The argument from the use of technical terms is clearly untenable. That Rāṣṭriya in Rudradāman's inscription has the sense