Fodor Melinda Zulejka. Contribution à l’étude du genre dramatique des saṭṭaka, pièces en langue prakrite: la Karpūramañjarī et ses successeurs

Université Paris sciences et lettres, 2017. — 518 p.This thesis is the first in-depth and comprehensive study on Sattaka, an Indian dramatic genre whose characteristic lies in its language, the Prakrit. The name of this genre goes back to Kohala (2nd to 4th centuries), but it has become known by Rajashekhara’s Karpuramanjari (9th-10th centuries, Kannauj) who gives, for the first time, in the prologue of this play, its definition. According to this, it is a genre related to the Natika, a hybrid genre of classical theater. Prakrit - the generic term for various dialects – has developed in parallel with Sanskrit as a literary language. Its regional varieties have been attributed to various characters in classical theatre in order to indicate their social status. Rajashekhara, breaking with the multilingual rules of classical theater applied, inter alia, to the Natika, composed his Sattaka entirely in Prakrit, in accordance with the rules on phonetic qualities of literary languages in Indian poetics. His choice of language has been the matter of discussion among theoricians and his Karpuramanjari has become the standard for the later authors of Sattakas. In this thesis, after having traced the evolution of this genre, we analyze not only the various theories about the language and the dramatic structure of the Karpuramanjari, but also the plays themselves, in order to elucidate the following question: what is a Sattaka? This work also aims to promote related research works on the evolution of dramatic art during the Middle Ages, on the authors, as well as on their times. This study contains numerous citations of Sattakas, of which we give the first French translation and, for some of them, the very first one.