The Lady of the Jewel Necklace & The Lady who Shows her Love. Harsha

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СКАЧАТЬ Makaranda to find her. Resting under a tree at night, he overheard a parrot tell his mate that Vasava·datta, daughter of king Shringara·shekhara of Kusuma· pura, had dreamt of a young man so handsome that she would not choose any of the several princes who had come to her marriage-choice ceremony. Kandarpa·ketu found Vasava·datta and they eloped secretly. But on their way, an angry sage cursed Vasava·datta to become a lifeless statue until she felt the touch of her lover Kandarpa·ketu. Kandarpa·ketu searched for her until he happened upon the statue and, moved by its likeness to Vasava·datta, embraced it, thus bringing Vasava·datta back to life.

      The theme of mutual dreaming comes from the story literature that the ‘Ocean of Story’ shares with the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ but the overheard bird is a touch that Harsha will employ, and the woman mistaken for a statue made from a woman introduces yet another artform into our list:

      Text

      Genre

      What

      conceals

      What

      reveals

      Who is

      disguised

      7. ‘Vasava·datta’

      narrative

      curse

      queen

      sculpture/

      embrace

      Thus desire and the embrace is assimilated to the themes of the magic curse and artistic creation as forces that reveal true love.

      Harsha’s Dramas

      We do not know which of the two plays Harsha wrote first. The fact that the speech describing the Spring festival is appropriate to ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ but is repeated verbatim in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ where it is inappropriate, suggests that Harsha wrote ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ first and modified it to produce ‘The Lady who Shows her Love.’ ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ is also considerably longer than ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ almost half again as long, and has far more poetry. On the other hand, the puns on priya (“dear” or “what is wanted”) in the final conversation that is duplicated in both plays make far better sense in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ and therefore may have been composed for that play and later transferred to the other. As for the plot itself, the action in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’ takes place earlier than that of ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ for its first act, set a year or so before the rest of the play, tells us how Udayana first met and married Vasava·datta, an event which is regarded as quite recent (so that Vasava·datta is often referred to as a princess, as well as a queen), whereas in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ it is never described and is presumably more distant in time. Yet Priya·darshika, but not Ratnavali, mentions Padmavati, the affair with whom took place after Udayana had married Vasava·datta.

      We will begin with ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ which Indian tradition regards as the more important play.

      The Lady of the Jewel Necklace

      Vasava·datta tried to keep the king from seeing Sagarika, but Sagarika saw him and fell in love with him. She painted a portrait of the king as Kama, the god of love, and her friend painted in, beside him, a portrait of Sagarika as Rati, Kama’s wife. The king then found the portrait that Sagarika had made of him and declared his passionate love for the unknown maiden who had painted his portrait and hers. Vasava·datta saw the portrait and became suspicious; she bribed Sagarika’s friend, by giving her some of her own clothes, to get her to guard Sagarika. This woman, however, dressed Sagarika in the queen’s clothes and arranged for the king to meet Sagarika when Sagarika was disguised as Vasava·datta. But Vasava·datta’s friend overheard Sagarika’s friend talking about it, and the queen went to the place of assignation, the portrait-gallery.

      The king mistook her for Sagarika and made love to her with words, addressing her as Sagarika. But when the king attempted to kiss Vasava·datta-as-Sagarika, the queen threw off her veil, in fury. The king begged her to forgive him, but the queen went away. Then Sagarika-as-Vasava·datta started to hang herself with a creeper, in shame that her secret love had been found out. The king, thinking that she was Vasava·datta trying to commit suicide because he had made love to another woman, embraced her. Sagarika, thinking that he knew that she was Sagarika, rejoiced, but then the king realized, with joy, that it was Sagarika, ________

      and embraced her again. Just then the queen came back to forgive her husband and accept his apologies. She heard his voice and decided to sneak up on him from behind and put her arms around his neck. But then she overheard the other two and realized that they were in love. The king fell at her feet, but the queen had Sagarika imprisoned—until she was identified (through the necklace) as the princess Ratnavali. Then Vasava·datta adorned Ratnavali with her own ornaments, took her hand, and joined it with the king’s.

      Here is the plot of:

      The Lady who Shows her Love

      King Udayana, married to Queen Vasava·datta, was supposed to take as his second wife the princess Priya·darshika, but before the wedding could take place, Priya·darshika’s father (Vasava·datta’s uncle) had been deposed, and in the ensuing chaos Priya·darshika went into hiding under the name of Aranyika (“The Lady of the Jungle”). Vasava·datta, not knowing who Aranyika was, took her into her service, but the king fell in love with her. The queen, worried that she had lost the king’s affections, decided to stage a play about herself and king Udayana.

      Aranyika was to play the queen, while their friend Mano·rama was to play the king. But Mano·rama, without Aranyika’s knowledge, colluded with the jester so that the king took Mano·rama’s place and Aranyika and the king could make love right under the queen’s eyes. Vasava·datta gave Aranyika the ornaments from her body, and she gave Mano·rama the ornaments that Vasava·datta’s father had given the king at their marriage. The king met Mano·rama, ________

      who was dressed like him. She gave him his/her ornaments and he acted in the play.

      Vasava·datta walked away and found the jester asleep at the door of the picture gallery. From him she learned that it had been the king playing the part of the king. She imprisoned Aranyika but set her free when she discovered that Aranyika was Priya·darshika. She joined the hands of Aranyika and the king.

      Harsha’s Treatment of the

      Conventions of the Narrative

      Harsha’s ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ takes up the story after the events known from the versions of the story that we have seen (the prediction that Udayana must marry Ratnavali, the rumor of Vasava·datta’s death by fire) and a few more. While Ratnavali, the daughter of the king of Simhala, was sailing to Kaushambi, the ship was wrecked and Ratnavali was rescued from the water by a merchant and given to the minister, who recognized her by the jewel necklace that she always wore. He put her in Vasava·datta’s service as a handmaid named Sagarika (“the Lady of the Ocean”). And Priya·darshika has an even more complex prehistory, involving not only Priya·darshika’s father’s and stepfather’s military disasters, as well as her own marital disasters and exile, but the parallel case of Vasava·datta, whom Udayana has not yet married at the start of the play and whose father had captured Udayana. Thus here, in contrast with ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ the two women are on an equal footing at the start: though Priya·darshika has actually ________

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