Page:Vāsavadattā (a Sanskrit romance by Subandhu).djvu/21



Title. The title of the Vdsavadattd of Subandhu, the oldest romantic novel in India, seems to be derived from that of a long lost drama by Bhasa,^ the Svapnavdsavadattd^ or ' Dream-Vasa- vadatta ' (for compounds of this type cf. Wackernagel, Altindische Grammatik, %. i. 244-245, 250-253, Gottingen, 1905). The dream as a novelistic device in India first occurs in Subandhu (see below, p. 28) ; though in the drama it is found in the first act of the Viddhasdlabhanjikd and the third of the Karpurama- njari (both written by Rajasekhara, who was acquainted with Bhasa's work), as well as in the first of Visvanathabhatta's Srngdravdtikd {Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office, 7, 161 8, London, 1904). In the fifth act of Bhasa's Svapnavdsavadattd the hero, King Vatsaraja, sleeping, dreams of his love Vasavadatta, who enters, disguised as an attendant of the queen, but who, he thinks, has been burned to death at Lavanaka (cf, svapnavdsavadattasya ddhako, cited in the Suktimuktdvali (see Peterson and Durgaprasada, Subhdsitdvali of Vallabhadeva^ Introd., p. 81, Bombay, 1886)], and Bhasa's epithet jalanamitta, ' friend of fire,' in Gaiidavaha, v. 800), this being employed both in the famous fire-scene in the fourth act of the Ratndvall (first half of the seventh century) and in the Tdpasavatsardja (before the second half of the ninth century ; see the analysis by Hultzsch, in Nachrichten von der koniglichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Gottingeiz, 1886, pp. 224-241). Not only was the fire-scene thus borrowed from Bhasa by later dramatists, but from him, it may be conjectured, came, at least in literary form, the entire story of Vasavadatta and Udayana, or Vatsaraja, as given in the Ratndvall^ Priya-
 * the conflagration of the " Dream-Vasavadatta " ' [Rajasekhara,

m/^ASBe. 28. 28-29; Levi, Tkiatre inaien, i. 157-160, 2. 31-32, Paris, 1890.
 * On Bhasa, see, in general, Hall, * Fragments of Three Early Hindu Dramatists,'