Theatre and Dramatic Cultures

50.1 Theatre is an event before it is a text The history of theatre cannot be written from playbooks alone. A dramatic text preserves possible speech, songs, roles and sequences, but performance also requires bodies, voice, movement, music, costume, a place, an audience and a social occasion. For Mithila, Vajji and Anga the archive is therefore uneven: some periods preserve manuscripts but no witnessed staging; others preserve living performance with uncertain antiquity; still others leave only literary references to actors or entertainment. This chapter uses a layered method. A play may establish a dramatic repertoire without proving exactly how it was staged. A modern performance may preserve an older narrative without being an unchanged medieval survival. The object of study is the changing institution of performance itself. 50.2 Dramatic evidence survives in unequal layers Archaeology rarely preserves a temporary stage, painted backdrop or performer’s garment. Manuscripts may survive because they entered libraries, while popular scripts, memorized parts and inexpensive booklets disappear. Court records privilege patrons; literary histories privilege authors; ethnography may record only the late life of a tradition. The archive therefore systematically overrepresents durable and elite materials. A responsible history combines play texts, manuscript colophons, stage directions, courtly and religious contexts, references to performers, printed ephemera, and where available recorded performances. Absence of a surviving script is not proof that theatre did not occur, and possession of a script is not proof of a continuous troupe. The evidentiary asymmetry is itself part of the social history. 50.3 The Nāṭyaśāstra provides concepts, not a local transcript Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra remains indispensable for the language of rasa, gesture, costume, music, character type and theatrical convention. Yet it is a pan-Indian normative treatise with a long and complex textual history, not an ethnographic description of medieval Mithila. Later dramatists could inherit, adapt or selectively cite its conventions while performing in different spaces and for different audiences. Terms such as nāndī, sūtradhāra, nāṭī, abhinaya and āhārya can therefore illuminate dramatic structure, but they should not be used to reconstruct an imaginary permanent Sanskrit theatre building in every regional centre. Regional evidence begins where texts, manuscripts, patrons, linguistic choices or performance records anchor those concepts to a historically located practice. 50.4 Jyotiriśvara’s Dhūrtasamāgama is a crucial early dramatic witness Dhūrtasamāgama, associated with Jyotiriśvara Ṭhākura and the Karnata courtly world of early fourteenth-century Mithila, is the most important early surviving dramatic witness for the region. Modern manuscript scholarship describes it as a satirical prahasana that combines Sanskrit and Prakrit dramatic material with Maithili songs and survives in manuscript traditions extending into Nepal. Its value is double. As literature it represents comic social types, dispute, desire, mendicancy and urban encounter; as theatre it demonstrates that learned dramaturgy and vernacular song could coexist in one dramatic architecture. What it does not give us is a filmed performance or complete production dossier. The historian must distinguish the text’s performative design from the exact circumstances of any particular staging. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 196 — Evidence ladder for theatre history 50.5 Comedy makes social difference audible Prahasana works through contrast. Different characters can be marked by speech register, occupation, bodily conduct, moral pretension or social vulnerability. In a multilingual region, linguistic contrast can become theatrical material: Sanskrit may carry learned authority, Prakrit may mark conventional dramatic roles, and vernacular song may create immediacy or local recognition. This does not yield a simple language- to-caste dictionary, because dramatic language is stylized and genre-bound. It does, however, reveal that audiences were expected to recognize differences in register and social persona. Theatre therefore belongs to language history as well as literary history: it stages hierarchy, mimicry and negotiation rather than merely describing them. 50.6 A courtly text is not only court propaganda Royal patronage matters because courts could support poets, musicians, ritual specialists and manuscript production. Yet the social world represented in comedy extends beyond kings and scholars. Servants, mendicants, brokers, women, performers and urban figures enter the dramatic field precisely because theatre converts social difference into interaction. The court may have financed or received a work without exhausting its meanings. Conversely, the presence of ordinary characters in a play does not prove that ordinary people attended a particular court performance. Patronage, representation and audience must therefore be kept separate. This distinction prevents both an elite-only history of theatre and an equally unsupported claim that every court drama was popular public theatre. 50.7 The project assigns Gorakṣavijaya to the later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura This volume maintains its adopted two-Vidyāpati framework. Gorakṣavijaya belongs here to the later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura associated with the Oiniwar courtly and Sanskrit-Avahaṭṭa intellectual world, not to the earlier Mahākavi Vidyāpati of the Maithili Padāvalī. The play is especially important because its Sanskrit and Prakrit frame is interwoven with Maithili songs in a narrative of Gorakhnātha and Matsyendranātha. Modern scholarship commonly attributes the work to a single fifteenth-century Vidyāpati, while some 525525 GAJENDRA THAKUR scholarship has questioned the authorship of the fully realized play. This volume states its own attribution rule explicitly rather than turning it into a claim of universal scholarly consensus. 50.8 Gorakṣavijaya shows a stronger vernacular dramatic presence Compared with a predominantly classical-language dramatic frame, Gorakṣavijaya gives the vernacular song sequence a larger narrative burden. Songs do not merely decorate a story; they help move it, characterize religious conflict and organize performance. That feature is central to the later Kīrtaniyā dramatic tradition, where music, recitation, dialogue and gesture form one event. The manuscript itself still cannot tell us whether every performance used the same melodies, tempo, cast or choreography. It does show that the boundary between “play” and “song performance” was structurally porous. This is one reason Chapter 49 and the present chapter overlap: music is not accompaniment added after drama, but one of the means by which dramatic action becomes public. 50.9 Kīrtaniyā drama is a performance system, not merely a genre label Kīrtaniyā nāṭaka is best understood as an institutional arrangement joining devotional narrative, sung verse, dialogue, gesture, musicians and a troupe. Literary histories often identify professional or semi- professional Kīrtaniyā performers and connect the tradition with Maithili devotional drama. The social implications are significant. Performance required training, memory, musical coordination, travel, patronage or payment, and access to occasions at which a troupe could gather an audience. Such labour complicates the familiar division between “classical” court art and anonymous “folk” expression. A troupe may serve a noble household on one occasion and a broader public gathering on another; the same story can move between prestige and popular settings. 50.10 Umāpati Upādhyāya’s Pārijātaharaṇa became a key dramatic text Umāpati Upādhyāya’s Pārijātaharaṇa is central to the history of Maithili dramatic writing. George A. Grierson edited and translated the work in 1917, and later Maithili editions kept it within the regional literary canon. Its Kṛṣṇa narrative, frame conventions and substantial Maithili song material make it especially useful for understanding the relation between Sanskritic dramaturgy and vernacular performance. The text has long been associated with Kīrtaniyā presentation, but the date of a composition, the date of a surviving manuscript and the date of a documented performance are not interchangeable. The safest historical claim is that the work became an important dramatic repertoire and that later performance traditions treated it as performable devotional theatre. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 197 — Kirtaniya dramatic architecture 50.11 Dramatic structure can survive even when staging changes A nāndī, introductory frame, character entrance or repeated song cue can remain legible across centuries even when the performance environment changes. A manuscript copied for reading may preserve instructions created for staging; a printed edition may stabilize words while living performers continue to alter delivery. Theatre history therefore needs two chronologies: the history of the dramatic structure and the history of its realizations. The distinction is especially useful for Pārijātaharaṇa and related repertoire, where the surviving text preserves classical conventions but modern recollection of Kīrtaniyā performance may emphasize song, devotional affect and troupe practice. Neither chronology should be allowed to erase the other. 50.12 Performance spaces were flexible and socially differentiated The region does not require a permanent proscenium building in order to possess a theatrical culture. Court halls, temple or shrine precincts, courtyards, festival grounds, temporary platforms and open public spaces can all host dramatic events. Each setting changes audience composition and authority. Court performance can foreground patronage and etiquette; ritual performance can embed theatre in worship; a fair can create a mixed temporary public; a courtyard can intensify proximity between performer and spectator. Because direct architectural evidence for specific medieval performances is scarce, these spatial categories should be treated as historically plausible types only when connected to texts or later documentation. Chapter 51 examines fairs and public culture more directly. 50.13 Costume and props are evidence only when they are actually attested Dramatic texts can mention ornaments, weapons, ascetic marks, crowns, veils or distinctive costume, while sculpture and painting can provide a wider visual vocabulary. Yet a pictured deity is not automatically a theatre costume manual. The āhārya dimension of performance must be reconstructed by triangulating textual stage cues, object history, regional dress evidence and later performance documentation. This is particularly important for mythological theatre, where modern costumes may draw on calendar art, cinema 527527 GAJENDRA THAKUR and manufactured materials unavailable to earlier performers. The historical task is not to make the past look theatrically complete; it is to identify what can be dated and to leave the rest open. 50.14 Gesture turns speech into embodied social action Entrances, glances, movement, dance and comic bodily exaggeration are not secondary to dialogue. They determine status, desire, fear, authority and ridicule in the moment of performance. Classical dramaturgy offers a rich vocabulary for embodied expression, but regional practice can simplify, recombine or vernacularize gesture. A song may be acted, a dialogue may be rhythmically delivered, and devotional movement may shift the event toward kīrtana. This embodied dimension helps explain why the written archive always understates theatre: the page records only a fraction of what spectators experienced. Where no choreography survives, the historian should analyze the functions implied by the text rather than invent precise gestures. 50.15 The Nepalmandala archive is central to Maithili theatre history The movement of manuscripts, scholars and courtly practices across the plains-Himalayan corridor made Nepalmandala one of the major archives of Maithili dramatic culture. Surviving manuscripts in Nepal preserve works whose composition or earlier circulation belonged to Mithila, while Malla courts themselves became productive centres of Maithili dramatic writing. This is not a marginal afterlife of a “pure” tradition located elsewhere. It is a connected history in which languages, scripts, patrons and stage conventions were reassembled in new political settings. The archive therefore prevents a modern national border from being projected backward onto the history of Maithili performance. 50.16 Bhaktapur developed a substantial Maithili court-stage tradition Ramawatar Yadav’s study of medieval Maithili stagecraft in the Nepalmandala identifies Bhaktapur as a major school of dramatic production. The seventeenth-century Malla court generated numerous plays in Maithili, alongside Newari and other literary activity. Stage directions, multilingual manuscripts and named royal authors provide unusually dense evidence for theatre as an institutional court practice. The significance extends beyond royal authorship. A play presupposes scribes, singers, actors, musicians, rehearsals, costumes and audiences, even when the archive names the king more clearly than those workers. Reading the court archive socially therefore means recovering the hidden production system behind the celebrated author. 50.17 Jagajjyoti Malla marks an important linguistic transition on the Nepal stage Modern scholarship on Nepalese drama identifies Jagajjyoti Malla of Bhaktapur as an important early seventeenth-century patron-author in the shift toward Maithili as a court dramatic language. Works attributed to him include Maithili plays such as Muditakuvalayāśva-nāṭaka and Haragaurīvivāha-nāṭaka. The larger importance is not a list of titles but the linguistic ecology of performance: Maithili could function as a prestige dramatic medium in a Newar-speaking court. Such use demonstrates cultural circulation rather than ethnic replacement. A court can stage a language because of literary prestige, performer networks, repertoire or political-cultural connection without making that language the everyday speech of the entire population. 50.18 Jagatprakāśa Malla shows how Maithili and Newari dramatic creativity could coexist Jagatprakāśa Malla’s seventeenth-century oeuvre is especially revealing because he wrote in both Maithili and Newari. Recent scholarship emphasizes that Maithili had an established courtly dramatic role even as HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Newari literary creativity expanded. This bilingual productivity dissolves a false choice between “local” and “imported” culture. Performance traditions can overlap: a court may inherit one prestigious dramatic language, cultivate another as mother tongue, and draw music or ritual from still wider networks. The theatre history of Nepalmandala is therefore a history of multilingual competence and selective patronage, not a sequence in which one language simply replaces another. Figure 198 — Mithila–Nepal dramatic corridor 50.19 Royal authorship hides collective theatrical labour When a king’s name survives on a play, the archive can make theatre look like solitary literary composition. Actual staging requires far more people. Musicians keep time; singers carry lyrics; actors memorize and improvise; dressers and craftsmen prepare appearance; scribes copy or prompt; attendants manage space and objects; patrons finance the event. Some roles may be hereditary or professional, others temporary. The absence of names for these workers is not evidence of their absence. Theatre history must therefore distinguish authorship from production. This is also a social-history correction: artistic prestige often rises upward toward a patron while labour disappears downward into anonymity. 50.20 Manuscript stage directions are small but powerful evidence A brief instruction such as “enters,” “sings,” “dances” or a note identifying a character can reveal how a text imagined action. In Nepalese manuscripts, stage directions may appear in a language different from the main dialogue or songs, documenting the practical multilingualism of production. Their evidentiary value is high because they point beyond reading toward enacted sequence. Yet even stage directions can be copied conventionally from earlier models. They should be assessed alongside the manuscript’s date, scribal context and local dramatic corpus. The most persuasive reconstruction emerges when formal directions, song structure and a known theatrical environment support one another. 50.21 Gender on the stage cannot be reconstructed from character lists alone Plays contain queens, heroines, attendants, goddesses, ascetics and female comic figures, but the sex or social identity of historical performers is often not recorded. A female role does not prove a female actor, and a male-dominated manuscript archive cannot prove that women never participated in performance. 529529 GAJENDRA THAKUR Household song traditions show women’s major role in regional performance culture, but that evidence cannot simply be transferred onto court theatre. The correct method is to separate character gender, performer gender and audience gender, and to state uncertainty where the record is silent. This prevents later assumptions about respectability or troupe custom from becoming invented medieval facts. 50.22 The sacred and the comic frequently occupy the same performance ecology Devotional theatre is not necessarily solemn, and comedy is not necessarily secular. Kṛṣṇa narratives can include teasing and rivalry; Śaiva or Nāth narratives can stage temptation and bodily humour; prahasana can criticize religious pretension while remaining embedded in a religiously literate world. Kīrtaniyā performance especially demonstrates how worship, entertainment and social assembly can converge. This hybridity matters for audience history. People may attend for devotion, music, spectacle, patronage, sociability or laughter at the same event. Modern genre labels that separate “religious ritual” from “theatre” too sharply can therefore obscure the actual historical institution. 50.23 Anga’s Bihula–Bishahari complex belongs to dramatic history as well as ritual history In the Bhagalpur-Champanagar cultural zone, Bihula–Bishahari performance combines narrative, song, ritual sequence, costume, image and public assembly. Contemporary scholarship and regional documentation describe a folk-theatre dimension within the larger Manasā/Bishahari ritual complex. Its present form should not be projected unchanged into ancient Anga, but its documented modern ecology is historically significant. It shows how dramatic action can remain attached to shrine, festival and narrative memory rather than separating into a ticketed theatre building. The tradition also demonstrates the permeability among Chapters 47–50: image-making, song, ritual object and theatre can participate in one seasonal complex. 50.24 Narrative theatre creates temporary publics A performance gathers people who may not otherwise share one institutional space. Spectators respond, donate, joke, move, remember and sometimes interrupt. Vendors, musicians, ritual specialists and patrons create an economy around the event. Temporary public formation is especially important in fairs and festival settings, where theatre is one attraction among exchange, worship and sociability. The stage thus becomes an economic and political space as well as an artistic one. This is the bridge to Chapter 51: public culture is produced not merely by the existence of a market or fairground but by recurring practices that make strangers into an audience for a limited time. 50.25 Print changed drama from an event-memory into a reproducible object Manuscripts can circulate, but print multiplies identical or near-identical copies, creates title pages, prices, advertisements and new reading publics. A play can now be bought by someone who never sees it performed. Print also changes authority: editors establish a text, literary histories classify it, and schools or associations can revive it from the page. In colonial Mithila this process helped create modern drama while also recasting older Kīrtaniyā and classical models. The printed play therefore belongs simultaneously to theatre history and book history. Its survival may reflect the economics of a press more than the popularity of a stage production. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II 50.26 The late nineteenth century produced both revival and formal experimentation Literary historians often place Jīvan Jhā and other late nineteenth-century writers near the beginning of modern Maithili drama, while figures such as Candā Jhā reworked older dramatic and Sanskritic conventions. The period should not be narrated as a clean break from “traditional” to “modern.” Revival, reform, print, new urban audiences and changing notions of literary authorship coexist. A drama can imitate older frames while addressing current social concerns; another can adopt act divisions and prose dialogue yet retain songs. Modernity here is a rearrangement of media and institutions rather than the instant disappearance of Kīrtaniyā performance. 50.27 Brij Bihari Lal Mandal’s Mithilā Nāṭak exposes an excluded print public Pranav Prakash’s recent study of Bṛj Bihārī Lāl Maṇḍal’s Mithilā Nāṭak is important because it changes who appears in the history of Maithili theatre. One thousand copies were printed by Krishna Press in Bhagalpur on 2 February 1901. Mandal identified himself with a cowherd caste background, and the chapbook combined social satire, songs, multilingual print conventions and references to performers. Its later neglect demonstrates how canon formation can erase inexpensive and socially marginal print. The example is methodologically decisive: theatrical history cannot be reconstructed only from authors who entered elite literary histories. 50.28 Modern theatre inherits several pasts at once Twentieth- and twenty-first-century Maithili theatre can draw simultaneously on Sanskrit dramaturgy, Kīrtaniyā song-drama, colonial print, social-reform plays, folk narratives, proscenium technique, radio, film and contemporary festival circuits. A modern director may revive an old title while radically altering duration, casting, music and scenography. Such performance is neither “inauthentic” nor proof of unchanged continuity. It is historical reuse. The same principle applies to staged Vidyāpati, Salhesh, Bihula or mythological narratives: what matters is identifying which layer is inherited, which is reconstructed, and which belongs to present theatrical practice. 50.29 Method: separate text, manuscript, staging, repertoire and memory Five dates may coexist in a single theatre history. A story can be ancient; a play may be composed centuries later; the surviving manuscript may be later still; a documented staging may belong to another period; and present performers may remember an additional lineage. Historians create false continuity when they collapse these dates. This chapter therefore applies an evidence firewall: text establishes dramatic design, manuscript establishes a witness, stage directions suggest intended action, performance records establish an event, and oral memory establishes remembered continuity. Strong historical claims require more than one layer whenever possible. 50.30 Conclusion: dramatic culture is an infrastructure of social imagination Across Mithila, Vajji and Anga, theatre has joined language, music, devotion, satire, patronage, craft and public assembly. Its history runs through learned prahasana, vernacular song-drama, Nepalmandala court production, ritual narrative, printed chapbooks and modern stages without becoming a single unbroken form. The durable continuity is not a fixed script or costume but the repeated social act of turning story into embodied encounter before an audience. By keeping evidence layers distinct, we can recognize long regional creativity without inventing timeless institutions. Theatre thus belongs at the centre of socio-cultural history: 531531 GAJENDRA THAKUR it makes hierarchy visible, allows critique to be voiced, creates temporary publics and converts memory into shared action. Figure 199 — Theatre across changing media Table 50.1 — Evidence domains for reconstructing theatre and dramatic cultures Evidence domain What it can establish Principal limit Play text roles, dialogue, songs, dramatic does not prove an actual staging sequence Manuscript witness date/location of copying, scribal and may be centuries later than script history composition Stage directions entrances, song/dance cues, practical can be conventional or copied sequence Court / patron record institutional support, named authors, underrecords performers and political setting labour Visual / material costume vocabulary, instruments, not automatically theatrical evidence spatial possibilities Printed play / chapbook print run, price, readership, canon reading and performance are formation different histories Recorded / witnessed event, cast, venue, audience, cannot be projected backward performance embodied practice unchanged