The Lady of the Jewel Necklace & The Lady who Shows her Love. Harsha
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plays Vasava·datta. And the epilogue sends us off with a reminder that the joyous conclusion of the play will bring joy to us, too, beyond the fourth wall.
Finally, there is the fact of the doubling of the plays, mirroring the doubling of the characters in them. Many stanzas, and many elements of the plot, appear in both plays, but then the essential differences skew the mirror images. One might see an overarching paronomasia of the two dramas, each one referring simultaneously to itself and to the other. One could read them as an exploration of a fork in the road, two possible ways in which the same situation could be resolved, as in Peter Howitt’s film ‘Sliding Doors’ (1998), which follows the two very different plots that result when a woman either catches or misses a departing subway train. I ________
can imagine a performance of both plays in one evening, or of both played simultaneously, like the comedy and tragedy played simultaneously in Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos, or, as I once saw ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Rosenkranz and Guildenstern are Dead’ performed, first back to back and then, on the next night, interleaved.2 How very modern these plays are.
‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’
as an Exemplary Play
And they are also very much to ancient Indian tastes. ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ in particular, is frequently cited by the later textbooks on literature and drama, such as the Dasa/rupa and the Sahitya/darpana, as the exemplar of various literary forms. (The earliest of these textbooks, the Natya/sastra, was written before the time of Harsha). Is it that Harsha was writing by the book, as it were, or, rather that the book (that is, the textbooks on playwriting) was written about Harsha, like the archer who displayed targets where he had always hit the bulls-eye—by drawing a target around his arrow after he had shot it? Sylvain Levi, whose book on the Indian theatre remains the standard work on the subject, suggests that ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ is quoted so profusely in the Dasa/rupa and the Sahitya/darpana in part because it is true to type, in both plot and stock characters, the classical example of the small heroic comedy (natika). In any case, Levi himself cites ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ and Kali·dasa’s ‘Shakuntala’ (Abhijnana/sakuntala) as his main examples.________
Here is a summary of just the beginning of Levi’s explication of Indian dramatic theory, using examples from ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ in all but a few cases. This summary will demonstrate not only how closely ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ (Ratnavali, here cited as R) either follows or inspires the categories of the Indian analysis, but how closely the plot is developed along traditional lines.
Levi begins, as the tradition begins, with the five elements, or moral situations, of the drama:
1.The enterprise: Yaugandharayana wants to conceal Ratnavali’s identity and introduce her as a lady-in-waiting in the harem. [R 1.27].
2.The effort: Sagarika: “As long as no one comes here, I’ll gaze at a painting of the man I love, and do what I want.” [R 2.13].
3.The possibility of success: The king finds Sagarika and says, “My friend, this comes like a bolt out of the blue.” Jester: “Yes indeed, unless Queen Vasava·datta comes to play the part of an untimely hurricane.” [R 3.137–138].
4.The certainty of success: The king to the jester: “My friend, I see no way of doing this but appeasing the queen.” [R 3.122].
5.Success: The king gets, from the hand of the queen, Ratnavali, who has been passing as Sagarika, and achieves by that marriage universal sovereignty [R 4.248 (verse 21)] (Sylvain Levi 1963: 32–4).
The theory then goes into far more detail, explaining the articulation of the limbs of the plot, starting with the 12 limbs of the beginning of the articulation of the action:________
1.The sowing of the seed of the plot: Yaugandharayana first reveals his plan: “I, too, did the right thing when I placed her in the queen’s hands, showing her great respect.” [R 1.28].
2.The ripening of the seed of the plot: Yaugandharayana: “Or else, how could this happen? First, because of my confidence in a seer’s prediction, we asked the king of Simhala (‘another continent’) for the hand of his daughter in marriage. In the ocean (‘from the middle of the ocean’) she was shipwrecked and fell into the water, but found a board and climbed up onto it. And then a merchant from Kaushambi who was returning from Simhala met her while she was still in that condition, recognized her from the sign of her jewel necklace, and brought her here! (‘what we want’).” [R 1.28].
3.Fixing the seed firmly in the ground: Yaugandharaya- na:
“This undertaking will bring prosperity to my
master,
and since it depends upon the helping hand that
fate has given,
success cannot elude us. All this is true. And yet,
because I have acted of my own accord,
I am rather afraid of my master.” [R 1.29 (verse 7)].
4.Praise of the hero or heroine: The herald compares the king to the rising moon. [R 1.128 (verse 23)].
5.The conception of a plan: Yaugandharayana: “And I have heard that Babhravya too, the chamberlain, together with Vasu·bhuti, the minister of the king of Simhala, somehow or other crossed the ocean and ________
joined up with Rumanvat, who was going to depose the king of Kosala. And so my master’s enterprise is almost accomplished.” [R 1.28].
6.Winning happiness: “Why, this is the king, Udayana, to whom my father gave me! (sighing deeply) Though I thought my life was blighted because I was sent to someone else, now the sight of him has made it precious to me.” [R 1.229].
7.The arrival of the seed: from Vasava·datta: “Then bring me the things I need for the ritual,” to Sagarika: “I’ll watch unobserved.” [R 1.98–101].
8.The production of pain or pleasure. [No example from R.]
9.The surprise: Sagarika: “Why, the god of flower-weapons himself, in the flesh, is receiving this worship! In the women’s quarters in my father’s palace, we worshipped him just in the form of an image. So I, too, will stay here and worship with these flowers the god of flower-weapons.” [R 1.123].
10.Penetrating a secret: Sagarika: “Why, this is the king, Udayana, to whom my father gave me!” [R 1.129].
11.Encouragement, excitement. [No example from R.]
12.The beginning of the actual action in question: Sagarika: “Honor to you, lord of the flower-weapons. My vision of you and yours of me now will not be in vain. (bowing). I have seen what I had to see. So I will go away before anyone sees me.” [R 1.123]. Levi remarks: “This is the beginning of the action which will take place in the second act, in which the lovers will see one another without obstacles” (1963: 44–57).
And that is just the first articulation. Levi goes on and on, through the secondary articulation of the action, and the third, fourth, fifth, and final articulations, all of them citing examples from ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ and, sometimes, ‘Shakuntala.’
To my mind, ‘Shakuntala’ is not nearly as interesting a play as either ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ or ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ but it became far more famous in Europe, from the nineteenth century on, in part because Goethe went mad for it (Figueira 1991) and in part because it suited European tastes in the age of Romanticism. (As I have argued above, I believe that for us, in the post-Pirandello age, Harsha is a much better fit.) ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ is quite well known in India. Yet, because the two Harsha plays were not appreciated outside of India, they were not translated so early, so often, or so well as ‘Shakuntala,’ and because they’re not easily available, they’re not appreciated. This is an all-too-familiar vicious circle that the present volume hopes to break open.
The Harsha plays were not translated at all until 1858, while Sir William Jones translated ‘Shakuntala’ in 1789 and several authors