Harsha came of a powerful ruling family and ruled over the fertile land between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, a kingdom that he extended into most of Bengal, Bihar, and Malwa, until he ruled the whole of the Ganges basin ________
(including Nepal and Assam), from the Himalayas to the Narmada river, besides Malwa, Gujarat, and Saurashtra (the modern Kathiawar). He shifted the center of power from Ujjain in the west to Kanauj farther east. He was said to be able to field 60,000 war elephants and 100,000 cavalry. But when, in 620, he tried to cross the Narmada and extend his territory southward into the Deccan, he was stopped by king Pula·keshin II, the Chalukyan ruler of a Deccan kingdom. After his initial conquests, there was peace in his empire.
In light of the court intrigues in the two plays attributed to him, the details of Harsha’s political connections are highly suggestive. Harsha was descended through his grand- mother from the second Gupta line, and through his father from the Pushya·bhutis. His sister, Rajyashri, was married to the Maukhari king at Kanauj. According to Bana, after her husband was killed in battle, Rajyashri was taken hostage. She escaped and fled to the Vindhyas where she was about to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, but Harsha snatched her from the pyre. She then hoped to become a Buddhist nun, but Harsha dissuaded her, as through her he could control the Maukhari kingdom. According to a second tradition, Harsha succeeded to both the Pushya·bhuti and Maukhari thrones, after his elder brother, Rajya·vardhana, the crown prince, and his sister’s husband (the Maukhari king) were killed in battle with the Guptas (Robb 2002: 42). A third tradition holds that Rajya·vardhana was treacherously murdered by the king of Bengal, whom he had sought as an ally in an expedition against the Raja of Malwa (Kale 1921: xxi; Smith 1914: 335–9), and _____
a fourth, that Rajya·vardhana retired to a hermitage after their father’s death.
Harsha died without leaving an heir. On his death, one of his ministers usurped the throne. His empire did not survive him.
He was a cosmopolitan king, known as a patron of the arts and of all religions. Besides the poet Bana and another famous poet, Mayura, he also kept at his court a man named Matanga Divakara, a critic and dramatist who came from one of the excluded, Dalit castes, a candala. (The Kashmiri historian Raja·shekhara first made this assertion in the ninth century. Sylvain Levi identifies him as a Jain, but his name indicates his low caste origin (1963: 184–95)). Harsha was also a religious eclectic; two of his three plays (the ones translated in this volume) are dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, while the third, ‘How the Nagas were Pleased’ (Nagananda), invokes the Buddha. Such eclecticism is unprecedented in Sanskrit drama, D. Devahuti claims; she continues: “Harsha’s quinquennial assemblies further confirm his allegiance to both Hinduism and Buddhism, which were beginning to show increasing signs of convergence. The assemblies were in the Buddhist tradition but were held at the holy Hindu site of Prayaga. Donations distributed on the occasion benefited followers of all sects” (Devahuti 1970: 154–7). Harsha may have became a convert to Buddhism in his later life; we know that he sent a mission to China. ________
Did Harsha Write These Plays?
Tradition ascribes both ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ (Ratnavali) and ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’ (Priya/darsika), as well as ‘How the Nagas were Pleased,’ to Harsha (Kale 1921: xvii). But Mammata’s ‘Illumination of Poetry’ (Kavya/prakasa), in the early eleventh century, notes that Harsha gave a great deal of money to Bana, and this is the source of the long-standing rumor that Harsha paid Bana to ghost-write the plays for him (Levi 1963: 184–95). Further complications are added by the tendency to confuse this Harsha with either or both of two other Harshas, one of whom was a king (ruler of Kashmir between 1113 and 1124) and the other a poet (the author of the twelfth-century Naisadhiya/carita)—or could these be a single twelfth-century person, another poet-king named Harsha?
I am persuaded, however, that king Harsha really wrote the plays in this volume himself. After all, ancient India had a great many kings, and many of them employed first-rate poets at their courts. Yet Harsha is almost unique in claiming that he himself, rather than his court poet (in his case, Bana), wrote the three fine plays composed at his court. Moreover, ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ and ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’ are the sorts of plays a king might well write: the plots are full of political intrigue (which involve mistaken identities, both political and erotic, that are mirrored in the frequent use of paronomasia, extended double entendre). And though some of the poetry is quite good, refreshingly simple and straightforward (might one say commanding, or martial?), some of it—let’s be frank—is pretty dreadful (take a look at ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ 3.87 (verse ________
11)—worse than anything that Bana or any court poet of the first order would produce for the sake of the seventh-century equivalent of a MacArthur grant. But there is another, better argument for the royal author.
I have said he was almost unique, because another poet king, the Pallava ruler Mahendra·varman, wrote a delightful satire called the ‘The Comedy of the Madman’s Antics’ (Matta/vilasa/prahasana). These two are the only kings who wrote Sanskrit plays good enough to be frequently cited within the tradition or, as far as we know, to survive at all. (Other kings, of course, may have written plays, perhaps in vernaculars as well as in Sanskrit, but no one cared to preserve them by having them copied over and over again; in a climate like India’s, only the fittest texts survive.) Oddly enough, Mahendra·varman was a contemporary of Harsha and was defeated by the same Pula·keshin II who defeated Harsha. Mahendra·varman ruled Kanchi, on the other side, the southern side, of the same Vindhya stronghold that formed the southern border of the empire of Harsha as well as of the hero of his plays, the mythical King Udayana of Kaushambi. Pula·keshin II, therefore, surely appears in the Harsha plays as the king of Kosala/Vindhya·ketu, whom Udayana, unlike his author, succeeds in conquering in the battles of the Vindhyas. Pula·keshin II did not, apparently, write any plays worth keeping.
And if we assume that a ruling king really wrote these two plays, we gain access to certain suggestive insights into their plots. Clearly they owe a great deal to the ‘Kama Sutra’ (Kama/sutra), the ancient Indian textbook of eroticism, but the ‘Kama Sutra’ itself is closely based on the ‘Artha· ________
shastra’ (Artha/sastra), the ancient Indian textbook of politics. The fantasy of sneaking into the harem, for example, is part of a broader mythology of intrigue that the ‘Kama Sutra’ presents, a whole new erotic mythology that it creates by applying to sex the Machiavellian politics of the ‘Artha·shastra,’ composed perhaps a century, or less, before the ‘Kama Sutra’ (Doniger and Kakar 2002: xi–xiii). The ‘Kama Sutra’ explicitly refers to the ‘Artha·shastra,’ and the two texts have much in common. The ‘Kama Sutra’ tells you how to test married women, to detect a woman likely to commit adultery, in precisely the way that the ‘Artha· shastra’ tells you to test potential defectors, assassins, and so forth, how to detect suspicious characters. The list (in ‘Artha·shastra’ 1.14.2) of people in the enemy’s territory who are dissatisfied and can be seduced politically is the model for the lists (in ‘Kama Sutra’ 5.1.52–54) of women in their husband’s territory, as it were, who can be seduced sexually.
The ‘Artha·shastra’ advises the king to test his potential ministers of various departments to make sure they are impervious to the temptations of each of the three goals of life: dharma (religion), artha (power) and kama (desire) (1.10.3); he also tells him to test the candidate against a fourth power, fear. This then appears in the ‘Kama Sutra’ as just one test, the test of the guard for the harem, a four-fold