Bhasa, the worthy predecessor of Kalidasa, was to us a mere name until in the year 1912 the late Mahamahopadhyaya Ganapati Sastri claimed to have discovered thirteen plays written by Bhasa. It was in the nature of things that in the first sensation of this discovery, so fraught with the most wide-reaching results for the history of Sanskrit drama, it should have been hailed by a chorus of applause to which both East and West joined their voices. If, however, there was an unreasoned and uncritical haste in propounding and supporting the theory, there was also not lacking the nerve and the animus of a hot controversy in the arguments urged against the theory by those who declared these dramas to be the work of the later playwrights of Kerala. The problem, even after many years of heated controversy, appears to be much more complex than was generally supposed and is as far from a satisfactory solution as ever. Here are the texts of all the thirteen plays with four appendices which include a consolidated metrical Index, together with a table giving at a glance the number of verses in a particular metre in the various plays; a collection of all anomalous forms and constructions; a list of citations from rhetorical and other works wherein reference is made to Bhasa or his works; and lastly, a glossary of rare and out-of-the-way expressions employed in these plays.
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