Thirteen Plays in a Kerala Cupboard

For fifteen hundred years Bhasa was a name that other writers admired, and nothing else.

Kalidasa praises him, by name, in the prologue to one of his own plays, listing the great predecessors an audience would know. Later critics quote him. Anthologies preserve stray verses.

And not one complete play. He was, as far as anybody could tell, permanently lost.

1910

Then a Sanskrit scholar named Ganapati Shastri was working through palm-leaf manuscripts in Kerala and found thirteen plays that had never been catalogued, in the Malayalam script, with no author's name on any of them.

They were anonymous, and they shared an unusual set of stage conventions, and they did not look like anything else that survived.

Shastri concluded they were Bhasa's.

And the argument about that has run ever since. The plays share features, a distinctive opening, an unusual handling of the prologue, a common technique, which suggests one author or one school. Whether that author is Bhasa, or a Kerala tradition rewriting older material for performance, is genuinely unsettled, and serious scholars hold both positions.