ИСТИНА

Bharatendu Harishchandra on the way to Modern Hindi Drama The paper deals with “Vidya Sundar”. – an early play by the founder of Modern Hindi literature and “father of modern Hindi” Bharatendu Harishchandra. Based on a very popular in India, traditional plot, describing love between Sundar, the Prince of Kanchi and the Princes of Burdwan in Bengal Vidyaavati, this play is considered to be a roopaantar –an adaptation of a Bengali play by Yatindramohan Thakur. An earlier and the most popular version of this plot we find in “Kalika mangal” (a second part of “Annada Mangal Kavya”), also known as “Vidya Sundar” by a classic of Bengali Medieval Literature Bharatchandra Ray Gunakar. The fact that it was translated into Russian by Gerasim Lebedev in the late 18th c. confirms this poem’s popularity which continued till the middle of the 19th c., when it was adopted or translated by other Indian writers. “Vidya Sundar” by Bharatendu Harishchandra was published twice (with 15 years interval) during his very short life-time and was one of the earliest plays in “pure Hindi”. Still, the play did not attract so much attention of scholars as other, original plays by Bharatendu. The paper considers changes, we find in the plot of the play by Bharatendu in comparison to the earlier version of Vidya-Sundar love-story by Bharatchandra Ray. They are very relevant for creating modern atmosphere of the action. There are practically no fairy-tale motives left in the play’s plot, and language of the personages is very close to contemporary colloquial Hindi. These and some other features of the play will be discussed in the paper from the point of view of Bharatendu’s treatise on drama “Nataka”. It helps to understand the place of this early drama among the dramatist’s other creations, and to estimate some methods which Bharatendu used for creating Modern Hindi drama.