Jagat

1. Introduction Having looked through the secular accounts of adulterous love we have come to the following conclusion: though the paroḍhā woman was accepted by the poeticians as a legitimate category of leading woman or nāyikā , she was in fact held to be an inappropriate character for the play, as indeed she was in life. Where she was not exclusively devoted to a single man, she would be relegated to a farcical role, like that of the prostitute in one of the minor varieties of play such as the prahasana . The prostitute was acceptable as a character in a certain type of play, the prakaraṇa , if she was exclusively in love with the hero, such as is the case in the play Mṛcchakaṭikā . Though the paroḍhā might perhaps have been theoretically acceptable in similar circumstances, there are no examples of such characterisation in any extant literature. The accepted face of the parakīyā woman was the virgin, who became the primary vehicle for love in the romantic Sanskrit drama. On...

1. Introduction As we have taken pains to stress, there are no comprehensive works of Sanskrit poetry or drama that have an adulterous woman as the heroine. The prostitute figures prominently as a character in the bhaṇikās and prahasanas , and the "chaste" prostitute in Mṛcchakaṭikā . The prostitute is the main character in the 8th century Damodara Gupta's "Doctrine of the Bawd" ( Kuṭṭanī-mata ), where the adulteress is highly glorified in a significant speech given by the courtesan Manjari. The great collections of Prakrit and Sanskrit poetry, the muktaka found Hāla's Gāthā-sattasāī (2nd to 4th centuries A.D.), Jayavallabha's Vajjālagga (ca. 740ā.D.), Vidyakara's Subhāṣita-ratna-kośa (Srk, 11th c.) and Sridhara's Sad-ukti-karṇāmṛta (Skm, 1204 A.D.), etc., contain numerous verses about women who are unchaste or wanton under the rubric of asatī (Prakrit asaī ). The asatī may also be called svairiṇī , kulaṭā, or occasionally, raṇḍā ....