Bhagavadajjuka
108127
Steiner & Straube 2006
33
Play in one act, with a prologue (āmukha).
Location markers (page,line) designate the start of each speech block or centered stage direction.
Bhagavadajjukam (“The Holy Man and the Harlot”) is a one-act farcical play (prahasana) preserved in a South Indian manuscript tradition and likely composed in the 6th or 7th century CE. Its authorship is uncertain: it is traditionally associated with Bodhāyana and has also been attributed to King Mahendravikramavarma Pallava, but neither ascription is secure. In the satirical plot, an ascetic, his pupil, and a courtesan (ajjukā) become caught up in a comic confusion of souls and bodies, poking fun at notions of religious discipline, intellectual discourse, and bodily identity.
The Straube–Steiner edition builds on the important edition of Achan (1925), going further through comparison with other editions and through careful normalization of orthography, punctuation, and Prakrit dialectical forms.
Personal files of R. Steiner and M. Straube.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
I (T. Neill) produced this HANSEL edition. I first manually converted R. Steiner's and M. Straube's submitted plain-text file by adding basic structural markup (tabbed verses, stage directions, Prakrit). I then did the same for Christian Ferstl's separately submitted manual transcript, which contained inter-word spacing (and also hyphenation for compounds, which I removed), Sanskrit chāyās (supplied/adapted from Achan 1925), and a few corrections of typos. Next, I re-OCRed the PDF to recover line-break information, then merged this information into the structured transcript. Finally, I added structural markup for HANSEL and gave the Sanskrit portion of the main text a full proofread, during which I checked word separation. The Prakrit and Sanskrit chāyā material still need to be proofread.
For technical reasons, in cases where a line started with a combination stage direction and speaker identification, I have inverted the order to place the latter first and the former second (e.g. “praviśya vidūṣakaḥ |” becomes “vidūṣakaḥ — ((praviśya))”.) This can be considered a bug which I should fix later.
Similarly, I have rendered the "nepathye" stage direction as speaker identification
Drama
Roman-like (ity evam, not ityevam)
2026-01-28
2026-03-22
2026-03-31