There are a number of disguises in the involuted plot of ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ (Doniger 2005: 29–35). People constantly accuse one another of imagining things to be other than they are, and they are usually right. Ratnavali is disguised as Sagarika before the play begins. She mistakes Udayana for Kama, the god of love (an understandable mistake, since she sees Vasava·datta simultaneously worshipping Kama and Udayana), and she imaginatively represents herself as the king’s lover in the portrait she paints. Then the intentional disguises begin: Ratnavali-as-Sagarika is disguised as Vasava·datta and mistaken for Vasava·datta, and Vasava·datta, not disguised at all, is taken for (Ratnavali-as)-Sagarika-as-Vasava·datta. Vasava· datta begins the masquerade inadvertently when she gives her own clothes to her rival’s friend; but then the reins are taken out of her hands when the clothes are used to deceive her and she unconsciously impersonates Ratnavali-as-Sagarika consciously impersonating her. Through a kind of double-double-cross, in which the king mistakes his queen for the Other Woman, and the Other Woman for the queen, ________
he actually makes love to Vasava·datta when she is undisguised, thinking she is someone else pretending to be her. He calls her by the wrong name, “Sagarika,” a fatal (and, in Sanskrit literature, conventional) error. The king cannot tell his women apart, but from time to time he drops remarks that indicate his deeper knowledge that, in various ways, Ratnavali-as-Sagarika is replacing his wife.
This idea of the king’s self-imitation is taken into new realms of performance in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ through the play within the play, a genre that the Sanskrit tradition nicely calls an “embryo play” (garbha/nataka), a play for which the outer play serves as a womb. For the king, the play within the play is not only a double impersonation but a double change of gender, a double-cross dress, a double drag that cancels itself out: the king pretends to be a woman pretending to be him. The complexities are multiplied when the play is produced by one of those Indian traditions—alluded to in this very play—in which women play the parts of men: at such a moment, one could imagine a woman playing the part of the king playing the part of a woman playing the part of the king.
What did the queen hope to accomplish by having her rival impersonate her? (She stages the play after the king has fallen in love with Aranyika.) Did she think the king would transfer back to her the love he had apparently transferred from her to the new woman? Did she hope to rekindle his love, fanning an old flame, as it were? How bitter must her humiliation have been when she realized her ruse had backfired in such a way that she herself had made it possible for the king to make love to her rival, right before her eyes. ________
The king “outs” Priya·darshika without her permission or her conscious knowledge, tricking Priya·darshika-as-Aran- yika-as-Vasava·datta into letting him touch her. Priya·dar- shika’s own body also forces a Cartesian duplicity upon her: her mind thinks she is touching the hand of Mano·rama, but her body knows she is touching the hand of the king. In the end, Udayana’s vision overpowers Vasava·datta’s, and she sees not what she wants to see (her straying husband making love to her as she was when he loved her) but what she fears to see, actually sees, and allows herself to be talked out of saying that she sees: her husband making love to her rival. She stages her dream, and the king stages her nightmare. The queen moves, and the king checkmates her.
Representation
Who is staging the dream? Who is in control? We might make a distinction between active dreams and passive night- mares, or conscious and unconscious tricksters. The active masqueraders are the manipulators, like Queen Vasava·da- tta at first both in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ and in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ and like Udayana later in that play; the passive, unconscious masqueraders would in- clude people who discover that, without willing it, they have been masquerading as themselves, like Vasava·datta later in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace.’ Yet even (or especially) the active masqueraders tend to get caught up in their own tricks and discover a frame outside (or inside) the one that they themselves construct to impersonate someone else, a frame in which that someone else may be impersonating them, or they themselves may be unknowingly impersonat- _____________
ing themselves. This is what happens, in different ways and in different texts, to both Udayana and Vasava·datta.
What is the relationship between the various forms of mental transformation used in all of these retellings of the tale of Udayana and Vasava·datta, both Harsha’s and those of his sources? We have magical illusion (used by Kalinga· sena’s magician in the ‘Ocean of the Rivers of Story’ and Va- sava·datta’s in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ and by the king himself in both plays—a magic plant fertilizer in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ and a magic snake-venom cure in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’), art (the trick of garland-making and the portrait made by Sagarika), the slip of the tongue (which happens twice), dreaming (experienced by king Udayana in the play by Bhasa and by the jester in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’), masquerading (by the women in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’), and play-acting (by the king in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’). How do these various forms of illusion—magic impersonation, magic disguise and art, portrait, play, slip of the tongue, and dream—work, each in its own way, as roads to the recognition of the true self and the true beloved? What do they tell us about the relationship between dreams, theatre, and personal masquerade? The jester’s sleep, in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ which lets him unconsciously reveal the truth to the queen, a key moment in the plot, is a transformation of the king’s dream in ‘Vasava·datta in a Dream’ (itself a transformation of the revealing sleep in the ‘Ocean of Rivers of Story’). The mynah bird in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ (whom the jester mistakes for a ghost, at first) is similarly unconscious of what she says, ________
but she carries the message that is crucial to the plot. Magic takes one form in one play, another form in another, as does portrait-painting. And, ultimately, they replace one another.
The first transformation (magical illusion) differs from the other three in several ways: the illusory form of the magician lies. It prevents rather than facilitates the union of the king and his mistress, and is ended, rather than created, by the suspension of rational thought. In all of the other variants, the illusory form tells the truth, brings about the ultimate union of the king and the mistress, and is created by the suspension of rational thought. The exception highlights, if it does not actually prove, the rule: one can dream by daylight, through masquerade and the theatre, and reach out to the same kind of emotional truth—often a painful truth—that we find in our dreams.
The play within a play (best known to us from ‘Hamlet’) is a popular device in Sanskrit literature, beginning long before these plays (in Valmiki’s ‘Ramayana’ (Ramayana), for instance; Doniger O’Flaherty 1984: 175) and continuing on into other plays (in Bhava·bhuti’s ‘Rama’s Last Act’ (Uttara/rama/carita), for instance; Doniger 2005: 66–7). Vasava·datta’s play in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ or the magician’s magic illusion in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ is actually a play within a play within a play, since the level on which Vasava·datta exists is framed, Pirandello-fashion, by the traditional opening remarks of the stage-director, who tells us that we are going to see a play. Indeed, at the start of ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ the stage-director is joined by his wife, the actress, who ________
tells us of her concern for her daughter who is to marry a man in a far distant land. This is, of course, the situation of both Ratnavali and Priya·darshika, so that the actress is putting herself in the position of a person otherwise never mentioned by anyone in either play—the mother of the heroine. (We hear a lot about their fathers, kings, but not their mothers.) Nor do we hear another word about this story of the actress’s daughter that presumably plays itself out beyond the fourth wall, in a world parallel to the worlds of the heroines of the plays. We know that the stage director’s brother plays Udayana’s Prime Minister, Yaugandharayana, in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ and the equivalent, Udayana’s chamberlain, in ‘The Lady who Shows her