In Bengaluru, an ancient play finds new voice in the world's oldest living dramatic tradition

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A celebrated courtesan is being chased across the streets of Ujjayini by the king's boorish brother-in-law and his thugs. She takes shelter in the home of a noble, impoverished and much-married Brahmin she is smitten with. To ensure another rendezvous she leaves her jewellery behind in his son's toy cart. But her attendant's lover steals this bundle and the Brahmin is falsely implicated.
Several hairy twists later, there is a happy ending for all the good people. Along the way, the inept king is overthrown in a coup by a herdsman, the courtesan is murdered but revealed to be alive, and her beloved is saved from the noose at the last moment. For good measure, there are stormy nights and elephant fights.
For over 2,000 years, Shudraka's action-packed Sanskrit play Mrchhakatika (the little clay cart) – and its plot woven with love, intrigue, crime, satire, caste and class inequities, politics, and human follies – has enthralled readers and theatre lovers. Noted for combining the grand sweep of Shakespeare with the fine irony of Moliere, the play maintains a perennial appeal despite its vintage.
This is not your usual Sanskrit classic dealing with gods, damsels, apsaras, myths and nobility – it is peopled by gamblers, rascals, philanderers, drunks, avaricious rulers, scheming lovers, bhikshus and priests. It is set not in a forest, palace or celestial realm but in a bustling Indian city in ancient times. And, in a realistic portrayal of the time, all but five elite characters – who speak Sanskrit – slip into the subaltern languages of the time, such as Prakrit.
There are neither black nor white characters in Mrchhakatika. As Sanskrit scholar William Ryder points out in the introduction to his 1905 translation of the play, what you find in Shudraka's works are cosmopolitan characters who are 'citizens of the world'.
Ever since the Orientalists discovered the play around 200 years ago, the saga of Vasantasena and Charudatta's trials and travails has travelled the world and been translated widely into Indian and global languages. A popular script, it was turned into desi and western operas, and presented several times on silver screen in multiple languages. Most famously, it became the lush Girish Karnad film Utsav.
Next week, Mrchhakatika will be staged in the world's oldest living dramatic tradition that claims a vintage as old as the play itself – koodiyattam, the Sanskrit theatre form from Kerala. Directed by scholar and choreographer G Venu, Mrchhakatikam will come alive at Bengaluru's Ranga Shankara theatre, its 10 acts compressed into about two hours.
'It is a very strong play for its time and the writing is remarkable,' said Venu. 'Shudraka's concerns are very progressive – he talks of revolt and inequalities. And I would describe Vasantasena as a feminist, and an important figure in the city where the play is set.'
Adapted for the first time for koodiyattam, the play marks a departure from the form's focus on mythological epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. For koodiyattam artiste Kapila Venu, who will be playing Vasantasena, this is what makes Mrchhakatikam an invigorating experience. 'I find it liberating playing her because she does not fit that subservient stereotype,' she said. 'Vasantasena is contradictory, she is wealthy, intelligent, beautiful and has agency. She does not succumb to the powerful and is drawn to Charudatta because he, like her, is kind and generous. When I play Sita or Shakuntala I am required to bring lajja (shyness) to the character. Here, I love that I get to keep my chin up at all times.'
Sooraj Nambiar, the koodiyattam artiste who plays Charudatta, says Mrchhakatikam is at heart a very current and a very political play. In koodiyattam, where characters are costumed very differently to indicate their high levels of virtuousness or infamy, the characters in the play will be wearing almost similar costumes to mark their ordinariness. 'Charudatta, for example, is an even-tempered man – he is not very expressive and that calls for subtlety,' he said. 'And even more unusually, it is not he who approaches the nayika with declarations of love or expression of desire. It is she who embraces him first.'
Fact and fiction
There is an ongoing debate over who the playwright Shudraka was. Some like Sanskrit scholar MR Kale believe that he was a king-playwright of the southern Andhrabhrityas dynasty. Others have concluded that he belonged to the nomadic Abhira (herdsman) dynasty and lived and ruled somewhere in modern-day Maharashtra. There are others still who claim that he was a Brahmin king of Ujjain.
As for the play's vintage, there is no agreement on that either – estimates place Shudraka between Kalidasa (4-5 CE) and Bhasa (3 CE). But Kale, in his 1926 work The Mrichchhakatika of Sudraka, dated him and his work even earlier – 2BC – arguing that the references to astrology, Buddhist institutions and figures and the Sanskrit itself should mark it as an older play.
What is generally agreed upon is that the play combines historical facts with fiction and likely that Shudraka had a ring-side view of the factual events, presumably as a ruler. The revolt of the herdsman Aryaka against the cruel king Palaka, Kale points out, could hark back to a historical putsch after the death of Buddha.
The play has stood the test of time well, having lent itself easily to translation. It was in 1826 that it was first rendered in English by Horace Wilson, an employee of the British East India Company. This was followed by French and German translations. The play bill for an 1895 French stage adaptation, Le Chariot de Terre Cuite, was designed by painter-illustrator Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. There are records of its performance in other parts of Europe in the late 19th century and in England, where it has seen countless productions.
In India itself, the play has seen adaptations in several languages, especially Marathi, Telugu, Bengali and Hindi. Activist and reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay played Vasantasena in a silent Kannada film by the same name in 1931. But one of the most inventive and contemporary adaptations of Mrchhakatika was Habib Tanvir's 1958 play Mitti ki Gadi, in which he first drew on the folk traditions of Chhattisgarh.
'It was at a 2002 show of his play that Tanvir and I spoke of the play's possibilities for koodiyattam,' said Venu. 'By that time we had done the first act of Shakuntala and he had been very appreciative of it. But starting any new production from scratch in koodiyattam is a very tough task.'
Koodiyattam is an art of extreme rigour. A ritual art that historians argue became the exclusive preserve of Brahminical groups around 9-12 CE, koodiyattam is a highly codified, arcane and stylised form where actors' manuals (attaprakaram) outline characters. The enactment, recalling past histories (nirvahanam) sometimes to the beginning of time, and painstakingly detailed character minutiae, lasts not over hours but days and weeks.
Scholar David Shulman, in a lyrical essay for The New York Review of Books in 2012, wrote of the experience of watching a 29-night performance of a single act from the Ramayana. Of the form's refusal to fast forward even in an attention-starved world, he said: 'I think I live my life in this constant rush toward death, almost never allowing a single movement of the body, or a single passing thought of any power or novelty, or even a single deep breath or tender gesture, to complete itself without being cut off too soon. I suppose that in this I am hardly alone. Kudiyattam is profoundly, perhaps uniquely, therapeutic in this respect.'
With the passage of time, many things have changed in the art: it is no longer exclusive to one community, it has stepped out of temple grounds, and increasingly the needs of the modern audience are kept in mind when the length of the exposition is decided.
Sudha Gopalakrishnan, the koodiyattam scholar who was among the experts to argue for the form's inclusion in UNESCO's intangible heritage list, says the change is both welcome and unsettling. 'The plot itself is secondary in koodiyattam, which is what marks it apart from realistic theatre,' she said. 'Its crux is about how you arrest a small moment and use multiple sources and contexts to elaborate it. The trend of adapting it for contemporary context – editing for time and content – started in the 1940s and 1950s with Painkulam Rama Chakyar. But I think this will likely become even more prominent in the coming years.'