Abstract
In the present renaissance of India's traditional arts, a great deal of attention is being focused upon dance and dance-drama. Much has been done for their revival, and several attempts have been made to relate the present survivals of traditional dance and dance-drama to the Sastric literature of antiquity, principally to the Bharata Nāṭyaśāstra. In the West, the study of Sanskrit plays and Sanskrit dramaturgy has been limited mostly to the literature per se and to those aspects of it that could yield historical or philological material. Only in the last thirty years or so has the general social stigma attached to the traditional profession of dance in India been substantially removed, bringing about a new resurgence in practice and scholarship. We are indebted to a number of recent Indian scholars who have done valuable work in tracing the theoretical, and in some cases practical, relationships of the current forms of dance and dance-drama to the precedents and usages of dramaturgy as described in the Bharata Nātyaśāstra and allied works.
