ORIGIN AND ITS GROWTH OF INDIAN DRAMA: A CONCISE CHRONOLOGICAL STUDY

Drama in ancient period was one of the significant media of communication in India. There were many dramatists in India who wrote several dramas on several themes. Edmund Spenser in his epoch-making sonnet sequence titled Amoretti talks about poetry or verse to immortalized his beloved. Hence, he wrote sonnet 75 title One day I wrote her name upon the strand where he has immortalized his beloved on the following way: To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, And in the heavens write your glorious name;Where when death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew. (Spenser,1595) Similarly, Indian dramatist did the same. They took help of the genre named drama and they have immortalized themselves through it. This paper will try to shed some lights from ancient dramatist like Kalidasa and Bhasa to the modern dramatist. In order to give a clear-cut idea on the origin and its growth in Indian drama, the study will deeply concentrate on Natyashastra. Malyaban Chattopadhyay in his article titled “A Historical Study of Ancient Indian Theatre-Communication in the Light of Natyashastra” quoted Richard Salomon who in his typological analysis of inscription in Indian Epigraphy has mentioned that in the literary inscription we can find the reference of drama and it proves that dramatic performance was popular in ancient India. According to Natyashastra, a performance could be done at a period of day or night which was most appropriately suitable to communicate, the mood of the performance.