महावीरचरितम् (महाकवि भवभूति - वीररस-प्रधान रामकथा नाटक सम्पूर्ण ७ अङ्क सटीक)

xv] Note by the General Editor
His Excellency the Prime Minister of Nepal sent lately to Oxford,
to be copied photographically for the use of scholars, seventy manuscripts
of the Nepal Durbar Library. Such enlightened co-operation between East
and West deserves mention, not only by way of grateful acknowledgement,
but also as an admirable example which—let us hope—may be followed
by others. It suggests the establishment, perhaps at the Nirṇaya Sāgara
Press in Bombay, of a central agency to which Hindu Librarians may
safely entrust manuscripts for mechanical reproduction, without sending
them to Europe. The requirements for such an establishment are by no
means too hard to provide. They are (1) a safe place of storage, (2) the
photographic apparatus, and (3) a competent operator.—See Postscript on
the next page.
It is with hope and with gladness that I lay before students of the
history of the East the work of Doctor Belvalkar. I am glad that a Hindu,
well versed in the learning of his native land, should think it worth while
to learn of the West. And I hope that his residence in America may make
his Eastern learning vastly more fruitful for us Occidentals than it ever
could be, if he had not come hither to find out (as I said) what lessons from
his country's past may best be taught to us. And I hope again that
many in the coming years may follow his example, establishing thus most
valuable relations of personal friendship and co-operation between Indianists
of the Orient and the Occident.
Aeschylus—as Athenaeus¹ reports—said that his dramas were fragments
of the great banquet of Homer's table. And so of Sophocles: his Ajax,
for example, is essentially the Ajax of the Iliad. In like manner, the
material of the greatest Hindu dramatists, Bhāsa and Kālidāsa and
Bhavabhūti, is in large measure taken from the Hindu epics.² Thus the
play before us, Rāma's Later History, is, as appears from its title, a
dramatization of the Rāmāyaṇa. Its author, Bhavabhūti, for knowledge
¹ viii. 39 . . . Αἰσχύλου, ὃς τὰς αὑτοῦ τραγῳδίας τεμάχη εἶναι ἔλεγε τῶν Ὁμήρου μεγάλων δείπνων.
² The Mahā-Bhārata itself, using the very same metaphor as Aeschylus, declares (i. 2. 389)
that 'all the best poets live upon this story' of the Bhāratans. And it adds (385, 388) that
'the inspiration of the poets comes from this incomparable narrative', and that 'there is not
a story in the world that does not go back to the Bhārata'.
इदं कविवरैः सर्वैराख्यानमुपजीव्यते ।
इतिहासोत्तमादस्माज्जायन्ते कविबुद्धयः ।
अनाश्रित्यैतदाख्यानं कथा भुवि न विद्यते ॥