Revisiting Bhasa- Perspectives and Perceptions

Revisiting bhāsa: Perspectives and Perceptions This is a collection of papers presented at the National Seminar conducted by Department of Sanskrit, Calicut University to discuss aspects of the thirteen plays ascribed to Bhāsa, including their sources, deviations made by the playwright, characterization, imagery, stage traditions, poetic qualities, humour, tragic concept, narrative devices, language and dialects as well as the depiction of unusual items like death and violence. The book will hopefully go a long way in retrieving the literary and aesthetic dimensions of the Trivandrum plays often sidelined in discussions related to their authenticity and authorship.

C. Rajendran (1952) former Professor and Head of the Sanskrit Department of Calicut University is the author of thirty five books and more than two hundred research papers. He is also the recipient of prestigious awards including Ramakrishna Sanskrit Award and Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. He has delivered lectures at Cambridge, Brussels, Warsaw, Berlin, Helsinki, Milan, Leipzig, Aix En Provence, Singapore and Cagliari and worked as Visiting Professor at École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociale, Paris and Jageillonian University, Krakow, Poland.

The present volume is a collection of the papers presented at the a three day national seminar on Bhāsa organized by Department of Sanskrit, Calicut University on June 21-23 June 2011 at Calicut University, Kerala in collaboration with Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi to commemorate the century of the discovery of the manuscripts of Bhasa plays.

When the thirteen plays ascribed to Bhasa were discovered by T. Ganapati Sastri exactly one century back, it proved to be a momentous event in the cultural history of India. The plays revealed a hitherto unimagined facet of Sanskrit literature where drama had not degenerated into mere scholasticism and characters resemble human beings of real life. Bhasa had dramatized the most memorable aspects of the epics and popular stories in his well-knit plays. They have tremendous stage appeal and many of them have been presented on Kerala's Kūṭiyāṭṭam theatre.

**Contents and Sample Pages**