Abhinaya Darpana

Nandikeshvara (2nd century AD) was the great theorist on stage-craft of ancient India, and a formidable rival of Bharata Muni. He was the author of the Abhinaya Darpana (The Mirror of Gesture).

Nandikeshvara seems to have preceded Bharata, according to Ramakrishna Kavi. Some consider him to be Bharata's master. The most concrete example of Nandikeshvara's teachings have survived thanks to Bhasa. The poet and playwright Bhasa who wrote in Sanskrit, scrupulously executed "in his stage direction a good number of theoretical instructions received from Nandikeshvara, overtly disregarding the strict injunctions formulated by Bharata as it is manifest in the spectacle of kutiyattam." Bhasa’s plays had seemed, indeed, to ignore major inhibitions imposed by Bharata : for instance, that of fighting or inflicting capital punishment on the stage, etc. Even if it cannot be proved that the Kutiyattam is as old as Bhasa's texts, nobody can disregard the considerable influence of this prince among playwrights on the traditional abhinaya we are speaking of, probably the oldest in the world.

A few years before World War I, Pandit Ganapati Sastri, near Padmanabha-Pura in Kerala, found a bundle of about two-thousand-year-old palm-leaf manuscripts containing eleven texts composed by the legendary dramatist Bhasa. They represented the Dravidisation of Sanskrit which had begun during the centuries preceding the Christian era.

Although Bhasa's texts had mysteriously disappeared, his contributions had been, however, remembered by Kalidasa himself in the 4th century in his play malavikagnimitra, by Banabhatta in the 7th century in his harshacharita and, early in the 8th century, by Bhavabhuti (author of the play malatimadhava). Thus, Bhasa had remained not only a model for his posterity but, in the 6th century – out of the theme of Charudatta accredited to him -, Shudraka had recreated the famous play known as the mrit-shakaTika. Even in the 12th century, Jayadeva, author of the gita govinda, had hailed Bhasa as the "smile of the Goddess of Poetry".

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Wikipedia