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 ________
been given to Udayana first, Vasava·datta quickly takes the lead when Udayana takes her physically from her father.
Harsha borrows his plots but expands on them, as he himself says, in the stage director’s voice, at the start of both ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ and ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’:
His majesty Shri Harsha has composed a play called ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’/‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ graced by an unprecedented arrangement of the plot.
Sylvain Levi criticizes Harsha for stealing his plot(s) from Kali·dasa’s ‘Malavika and Agni·mitra’ (Malavikagni- mitra), though in fact there is a far closer link to Bhasa’s ‘Vasava·datta in a Dream’: where Kali·dasa’s play has much the same plot, but different characters, Bhasa’s has not only the same plot but the same king and queen. Indeed, by these criteria, Harsha even plagiarized himself, taking the plot of ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’ from ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace.’ But surely this is the wrong way to think of it. Rather, Harsha was playing new variations on an old theme.
The particular dramatic form of Harsha’s plays is that of the minor comedy called a natika (the stage director explicitly identifies it as such), and every natika must follow the same general outline: it is a four act play with many female characters, including a heroine (of royal birth) who is in love with the king and a queen who gives her consent in the end. Its principal mood should be erotic. It most closely corresponds to a romantic comedy in the English theatrical tradition. (The play within a play in ‘The Lady who Shows ________
her Love,’ by contrast, is identified by all the characters in the play as a nataka, a major drama.)
Even Levi grudgingly admits that Harsha introduced into the inherited plot a number of original touches: the parrot, the disguise of the maid, the king’s playacting, and so forth. It seems to me (and I will argue below) that he also introduced major meditations on self-imitation and artistic representation. The two plays together constitute a kind of variorum edition of the tale with its variants, or, to change the metaphor, a Bach fugue: they go along together for a while on the same path, with the same characters sometimes saying a line that you recognize from the other play, then they part for a while, then meet and part again.
Was the audience in on it from the start, because they knew the story from the earlier sources? Or is it like a murder mystery in which we’re in suspense—What was the seer’s prediction? Why is Sagarika in disguise?—until Yau- gandharayana explains it all at the end? I think the former situation is far more likely than the latter. James Thurber (1942) wrote a satirical essay called ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery,’ in which he imagines a woman who doesn’t know the plot of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ but is addicted to murder mysteries, seeing the play for the first time and wondering all through who did it. We would be just as foolish as she was, if we were to assume that Harsha’s audiences expected a surprise. The story of Udayana and Vasava·datta was already a myth in Harsha’s day, and originality is not an essential ingredient of a good myth. The voice of myth is predictable, one that the storyteller knows and the audience expects. The audience has an expectation of what the story _________________
should say, and the storyteller imitates that paradigm, fulfills that expectation; the audience takes pleasure in predicting what will happen, and satisfaction in seeing it happen, rather than in being surprised or shocked.
In addition to the general convention of the well-known Indian tale of Udayana and Vasava·datta, ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ also follows the cross-cultural convention of what literary critics call the recognition narrative, the ultimate revelation of the identity of someone who has been in disguise for much of the story. The recognition narrative served, like the theme of the Pietà or the Madonna and Child for medieval European sculptors, as a classical, shared theme that challenged the artist to use it as a foil for individual originality—for tellers of myths can, in fact, be highly original, as long as they also take pains to touch all the bases that their audiences expect. The recognition scene in narratives is a cliche, which has led literary critics and cultural snobs (two often intersecting groups) commonly to regard such stories with contempt and suspicion. But the audience enjoys the way that, as the story unfolds, we see through the disguise of the new superficial details—a different character, a different country—to realize that it is, in fact, our old friend the finally revealed heroine. When the victim in a masquerade narrative finally recognizes the masquerader (“Oh, it’s the princess!”), the reader or listener of the story recognizes the plot (“Oh, it’s a recognition story!”). And it is precisely this known quality of the cliche plot (plus its intrinsic appeal: cliches endure because they represent truths) that makes it ultimately fulfilling. The moment when the two apparently different characters are revealed to be two ________
aspects of one person brings with it the same satisfaction as the moment when the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle—or the last line connecting the dots—slips in to reveal the total image, or when, in a piece of classical music, the expected final sequence of chords comes into resolution. This accounts for the extraordinary popularity of recognition scenes in all types of literature, a popularity that remains in tension with the contempt of the critics.
Self-impersonation1
Several characters in the two plays by Harsha accidentally (or, occasionally, purposefully) imitate themselves, and in both plays, the double disguise frees another self. In ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ Udayana-as-Mano·rama-as-Udayana is able to make love to his new woman—Priya·darshika-as-Aranyika-as-Vasava·datta—under the eyes of his queen and get away with it, as he fails to do in his own persona, the king-as-the-king. And in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ it is only when the queen inadvertently masquerades as her rival, the queen-as-Ratnavali-as-Sagarika-as-the-queen, that the truth comes out, first in the king’s words and then in Vasava·datta’s honest expression of her hurt and her anger.
Udayana’s impersonation of Udayana in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’ is the most explicit instance of self-impersonation, but in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ the queen says of him, when he behaves in a characteristically adulterous manner, “My husband, this is worthy of you; it’s just like you.” The word she uses, sadrsam, more specifically refers to something that looks just like some- ________
thing else. She means that he is true to type, but she says that he gives the appearance of being himself. His