The play Cārudatta (also called Daridra-cārudatta) is based on stories popular in the folk tradition. The play has a significant place in the history of Sanskrit drama for various reasons. The story of the play is not based on the purāṇas. It is a social play and deals with the lives of the common men. It is not the story of a king or a youth. Cārudatta depicts the life of a person who was economically poor but rich in his character; the protagonist after whom the play is named, is a dāna-vīra – Cārudatta never thought twice before helping someone in need and thus, gets classified as dāna-vīra. The nāyikā goes in search of the nāyaka. Scholars are of the opinion that Cārudatta constitutes the seed of the popular play called Mṛcchakaṭika authored by Śūdraka.
The play Cārudatta poses unique problems because of its source and the manner in which various Prakrits are used in the text.
Only four acts of the play are available to us today; these acts correspond to the four acts of Mṛcchakaṭika.
Vasantasenā, a famous courtesan of Ujjayinī is pursued by Saṃsthānaka, the rāja-śyālaka[1]; in order to escape from him, she seeks refuge in Cārudatta’s place and leaves her ornaments with him for safekeeping. Sajjalaka, a thief, steals the jewellery and tries to use it to set free his beloved Madanikā, the servant of Vasantasenā. Pleased with their love, Vasantasenā liberates Madanikā from her servitude and gets her united with Sajjalaka. In the meantime, Cārudatta’s wife finds out that Vasantasenā’s ornaments are missing from her residence; as a replacement, she sends her pearl necklace which was a gift from her mother’s house. Vidūṣaka takes the pearl necklace to Vasantasenā and tells her that Cārudatta lost her ornaments in a gamble. However, Vasantasenā, who had already gotten her ornaments back, immediately comes to know that this is false; she understands that Cārudatta had cooked up this reason to safeguard his reputation. She is happy with his stance and sets out to meet him.
This is the summary of the story of the four acts.
Some scholars are of the opinion that the play Cārudatta attributed to Bhāsa is a condensation of the play Mṛcchakaṭika. Upon reading the Mṛcchakaṭika, however, one will see that Śūdraka has portrayed the episodes of Vasantasenā’s flight, gambling, and theft in a great amount of detail; he also provides an elaborate description of Vasantasenā’s house. Therefore, the reader might feel that some segments of the play are pedantic and disproportionately long; thus, some parts are boring and might also make the reader feel some rasābhāsa. Bhāsa is never pedantic and does not unnecessarily elongate segments. It may not be too farfetched to conclude that Mṛcchakaṭika is inspired by Cārudatta and is an expanded adaptation of the same;[2] thus, it would not be right to say that Cārudatta is a condensed version of the Mṛcchakaṭika. There is another major difference between the two plays – in the Mṛcchakaṭika, along with the love story of Cārudatta and Vasantasenā, the political backdrop of the kingship of Ārya and Pālaka is seen in some amount of detail. This political dimension is completely missing in Cārudatta. In the Mṛcchakaṭika, however, this bigger dimension is suggested right at the beginning of the play and is detailed from the middle of the fourth act. The episode of the clay cart, which gives the play its name, occurs in the middle of the sixth act and this, in fact, is the middle of the play. It is hard to say if the play Cārudatta would have included these dimensions if it had further grown in the path laid by Bhāsa.
The current series of articles is an enlarged adaption of Prof. A. R. Krishnasastri's Kannada treatise Saṃskṛta-nāṭaka. They are presented along with additional information and footnotes by Arjun Bharadwaj.
[1] The brother-in-law of the king; in the current case, as the king was corrupt, the brother-in-law had gone down the sordid path as well.
[2] The play Cārudatta contains about fifty-five verses spread across four acts; the corresponding acts of Mṛcchakaṭika contain hundred and twenty-nine verses.
