In ancient India drama was conceived as but a method of imparting knowledge to the people and it was not meant to excite but to educate, not to entice but to elevate.
The Indian drama as such was therefore it was that not meant to be amusing. It was that which used amusement to reveal verities. If the verities of life can be so well embodied in words as to picture in the mind of the hearer the life of the world as it is and as it ought to be, there then is a feat of the artist. Such feats are not dreams of mere rhetoric, but wore actually realized by seers like Vyasa and Valmiki. But, when times changed, it needed the introduction of what are called drishya karya, meaning ‘visible poetry’, i.e. , drama.
This was the origin of the drama in India. What then were the fundamentals of this great art then? The answer is not far to seek, when the function of the drama is to epitomize not only the world of actualities but also of the verities behind that govern them visibly or invisibly. To the Hindu, knowledge, therefore, is that which enables him to see the transient merge in the eternal by his transcendental vision. Herein is his bliss and the urge of life, the conclusion of all philosophy and religion too. To accomplish this is the function of great teachers end the raison d’etre (reason for being) of drama.
Drama, therefore, cannot logically be only the depiction of life as it is seen and lived on the surface. The invisible other side as well, the undercurrent which life is oblivious of in pleasure and pain, should be suggested by it. Then only can drama expand vision. It can neither be picture-painting nor anything only didactic; the former no lesson and the latter has no life. The one has nothing to teach and the other no appeal, having no touch with life.
Life being what it is—neither pleasure nor pain exclusively– drama too cannot be wholly comedy or tragedy.
The purpose of it, therefore, should not be to represent life as optimistic or pessimistic but visionful if not transcendental. For instance, what use has the common world of a Buddha or a Christ if it cannot have a glimpse of the glory of their renunciation ? It is that vision of the resurrection that makes the cross a bed of roses. And no drama can have mission for the commonalty which has not that vision.
sivaayyala 