The Matta-Vilāsa and “Bhāsa”

Extract

In 1912 Pandit Ganapati Sastri, the learned editor of the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series, began to publish a group of thirteen plays, all apparently by the same author, which now fill numbers 15–17, 20, 22, 26, 39, and 42 of the series, and for which he claims Bhāsa as author. As Bhāsa was considerably earlier than the great Kālidāsa, who speaks of him in the prelude of his Mālaxikâgnimitra as a poet of established reputation, and as no works of Bhāsa have hitherto been known to survive, this discovery has naturally aroused much interest, and the erudite accepted.