Unmattarāghava
116956
Bhāskara Bhaṭṭa
Durgāprasād and Parab 1899
25
Play in one act, with a prologue (prastāvanā).
Location markers (page,line) designate the start of each speech block or centered stage direction.
Rāma Beside Himself (Unmattarāghava) is a one-act Sanskrit drama by the 14th-century poet Bhāskara that reimagines the famous golden deer episode of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa as an intensely lyrical study of madness (unmāda) occasioned by love in separation. In the traditional narrative, the demon Mārīca disguises himself as a golden deer in order to draw Rāma away and enable Rāvaṇa to abduct Sītā; Bhāskara’s play, however, omits both Mārīca and the abduction. Instead, it builds upon a tradition of depicting madness born from separation, beginning with Rāma’s response to Sītā’s abduction in the “Forest Book” of the Rāmāyaṇa and powerfully reshaped in Kālidāsa’s How Urvaśī Was Won (Vikramorvaśīya). Written in a mixture of Sanskrit and Prakrit, and alternating prose dialogue with densely imagistic verses composed in more than a dozen meters, the play begins with a formal benediction and prologue before turning to its forest plot: Sītā wanders into an unfamiliar part of the woods to gather flowers and is mysteriously changed into a doe by the lingering force of an old curse. When Rāma returns from the hunt and learns that she has disappeared, grief overwhelms him, and, accompanied by Lakṣmaṇa, he searches the forest in a state of delirious longing, recalling Sītā upon finding her footprints, sensing her presence in flowers and vines, addressing breezes and bees as possible messengers, and mistaking flowering trees for bandits carrying off her jewels. At last, the seer Agastya appears with Sītā and explains the curse, bringing the play to a gentle resolution through reunion, blessing, and a closing benediction for the welfare of the world. The drama’s central movement is thus not outward action but Rāma’s deteriorating mental state, in which understanding and delusion, perception and memory, erotic longing and poetic imagination blur together in a poignant depiction of the dominant aesthetic mood of love-in-separation (vipralambhaśṛṅgārarasa).
Personal files of T. Richard.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
I (T. Neill) produced this HANSEL edition. I first manually extracted T. Richard's submitted Word document to plain-text, then added basic structural markup (page breaks, tabbed verses, marking of stage directions and Prakrit). Next, I re-OCRed the PDF (Cloud Vision and Sarvam Vision auto-harmonized with Gemini 2.5 Flash) to recover line-break information, then merged this information into the structured transcript. Finally, I interviewed T. Richard for much of the metadata (the Work Description is entirely his) and ingested the data into HANSEL. T. Richard and I then proofread and reviewed presentation features together (shoutout to Filter Kaapi in Brooklyn!)
Drama
Devanāgarī-like (ityevam, not ity evam)
2026-06-22
2026-08-03
2026-08-03