Messengers brought a portrait of Vasava·datta with Udayana, sent by Vasava·datta’s mother. The identity of Vasava·datta was revealed through the portrait.
There are three mistaken identities in this play: Vasava· datta masquerades as the minister’s sister; Vasava·datta at first mistakes the king for Padmavati in the bed; and the king mistakes the real Vasava·datta for the Vasava·datta in his dream. The content of the dream is most revealing: the king, ________
asleep (innocently) in the rival’s bed, remembers another occasion on which he behaved less innocently in another rival’s bed and was revealed by the shameful slip of the tongue (a subconscious act, just like a dream, hence a kind of dream within a dream). (Indeed, it is not clear whether the king in the play or the author himself has yet another slip of the tongue about the slip of the tongue, substituting Virachika for Virachita.) This conversation within the dream is particularly noteworthy because the traditional dream books usually analyze only the visual images of dreams, never the words (Doniger O’Flaherty 1984: 25).
In both of these stories about the co-wife Padmavati, the king loves Vasava·datta more than the other woman, and merely takes a second wife for political reasons. But in Harsha’s plays, the king prefers the second wife erotically as well as politically, and Vasava·datta’s quandary is not merely political, nor is it so easily resolved. Significantly, these co-wives do not have political pseudonyms, as Vasava·datta does when she calls herself Avantika, but, rather, natural pseudonyms, like Padmavati (“the Lady with the Lotus,” who is briefly mentioned as another co-wife in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’): they are called “Sagarika” and “Aranyika,” the ladies of the ocean and the jungle. In Harsha’s plays, moreover, as in the third narrative text, it is the identity of the co-wife, not of Vasava·datta, that is concealed for political reasons, and the co-wife therefore suffers much of the loss of status and identity that Vasava·datta suffers in the other versions. To this extent, our sympathy is with the co-wife; but we also empathize with Vasava·datta, who suffers the loss of the king’s love.
A final version, that omits the co-wife but reshuffles other familiar elements of the plot, is Subandhu’s Sanskrit prose romance, ‘Vasava·datta,’ composed c. 600 ce:
Prince Kandarpa·ketu saw Vasava·datta in a dream and set out with his friend 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