Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
“The world with all its joys and sorrows, connected with the activity of various people, should find a place in the Nāṭaka.” This single line from Natyashastra contains perhaps the most ambitious artistic brief ever written. So what exactly is an ideal Nataka?
And more importantly, how do you build one that meets Bharata’s standard?
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What makes a Nataka “ideal” according to Natyashastra
An ideal Nataka must simultaneously carry technical completeness, emotional depth, popular accessibility, and social relevance. That is a demanding combination, and it is intentional.
How to build the Nataka’s form
Multiple styles and minor limbs (pratyanga)
Sage Bharata insists the playwright use different Vṛttis across the play. Vṛtti governs how a character speaks, moves, and occupies emotional space. Kaisiki (the delicate, graceful mode), Sattvati (the heroic), Arabhati (the energetic), and Bharati (the verbal-intellectual) each create distinct textures. A play that uses only one Vṛtti feels flat, tonally monotonous.
The Pratyanga, the minor limbs of gesture and physical composition, refine the actor’s body further. Think of them as the grammar underneath the speech.
Episode indication: the Pataka
The Pataka is one of the most misunderstood devices in Natyashastra. It is not a subplot in the Western literary sense. It is a dramatic flag, an embedded secondary narrative thread that runs parallel to the main story, enriching its meaning without competing with it.
A Pataka character appears, pursues their own trajectory, and in doing so casts light on the hero’s journey from a different angle. In Kalidasa’s Abhijnanashakuntalam, the character of Priyamvada functions something like this, her role shaping how we read Shakuntala’s situation emotionally without diverting the central arc.
Used well, the Pataka gives the audience a richer interpretive experience. Used poorly, it is just a distraction.
The five stages of dramatic action (avastha)
Every meaningful dramatic event in the Nataka passes through five Avasthas: Arambha (the beginning impulse), Prayatna (active effort), Praptysasha (the emergence of hope), Niyatapti (the certainty of attainment), and Phalagama (the fruition).
The Avasthas can pulse through individual scenes as well as across the whole play. An actor who understands which Avastha their character is in at any given moment will make very different physical choices than one who does not.
Five segments and their twenty-one distinctions (Panchasandhi)
The five segments, or Panchasandhi, are the structural joints of a Nataka: Mukha (the opening), Pratimukha (the development), Garbha (the complication), Vimarsha (the crisis), and Nirvahana (the resolution). Each segment contains further internal joints called Sandhi-angas.
In total, Bharata identifies twenty-one such distinctions across these five segments. They function like the articulations of a spine. A play without them moves stiffly, without natural dramatic rhythm.
The sixty-four limbs (anga) extend this further, covering everything from how a scene opens to how transitions are handled between dramatic units. Together, these create the internal anatomy of the drama.
Thirty-six laksanas
The thirty-six Laksanas are the distinguishing characteristics of the Nataka, features that mark it as distinct from the nine other major forms of Rupaka described in the Natyashastra. They include specifications about the hero (always a king or divine figure of great stature), the number of acts (five to ten), the range of sentiments, and the required presence of a bija, the seed-element from which the whole plot grows.
The aesthetic requirements: language, character, and sentiment
Gunas and alankaras
Bharata requires the ideal Nataka to contain Gunas, the qualities of dramatic excellence, and Alamkaras, figures of speech. The Gunas include things like Ojas (vigor), Prasada (clarity), Madhurya (sweetness), and Samata (equanimity of style). These qualities should shift across the play depending on the dominant rasa of each section.
The Alamkaras function at the level of language itself, the use of metaphor, alliteration, simile, and other rhetorical devices that elevate speech without obscuring meaning. A Nataka text stripped of Alamkara loses its luminosity.
Many sentiments
The Nataka should be emotionally capacious. Even within Abhijnanashakuntalam, you find Shringara (romantic love), Karuna (pathos and grief), Vira (heroic sentiment), and Adbhuta (wonder) moving through the structure in waves.
This multiplicity is what prevents the Nataka from becoming emotionally thin. The spectator is taken through a full human range, not just a single experience.
Exalted speech and characters of great people
The Nataka deals in height. Its heroes are kings, warriors, divine beings, great sages. Their speech must reflect that stature, not through artificiality but through weight and clarity. Bharata calls for “exalted speeches” because ordinary conversational language cannot carry the load of what these characters experience.
Drama models ideal conduct. Characters of great people, shown in both their strength and their vulnerability, offer the audience exemplars rather than just entertainment.
Description of good conduct
The Nataka is explicitly moral in its ambition. Bharata asks that it include the “description of good conduct.” This does not mean didactic lecturing. It means that through the unfolding of the drama, through consequence and resolution, the audience witnesses what Dharma looks like in action. The form itself teaches through structure.
Accessibility and stagecraft
Popular appeal and ease of production
The ideal Nataka should be popular and easy to produce on stage. He is not asking for simplicity in artistic terms. He is recognising that a drama which cannot reach an audience, or which collapses under its own production requirements, has failed its purpose.
“Soft words” is his specific instruction. The language must be smooth enough for oral delivery, for the actor’s breath and mouth, and for the audience’s ear in a live setting.
All arts and crafts
There is no wise maxim, no learning, no art or craft, no device and no action not found in the drama. And: those arts and crafts which are products of unique efforts should in their endless forms be applied to the Nataka.
This is an instruction to the playwright to draw on the full spectrum of human knowledge and skill. Music, architecture, governance, love, war, agriculture, philosophy. The Nataka is an encyclopaedic form. It should feel like the world inside a frame.
You can see how this connects to the five explanatory devices that Bharata prescribes for dramaturgical technique. Every device serves this larger ambition: to make the stage a complete world.
The human condition at the centre
It is the philosophical heart of the ideal Nataka. “The condition of the world arising from the happiness and misery and connected with the activity of various people, should find a place in the Nāṭaka.”
This is a radical statement of inclusivity. The play’s subject is not just kings and sages. It is the full condition of the world. The peripheral characters, the servants, the bystanders, the comic figures, all carry weight because they are all part of this world.
Human nature, with its joys and sorrows, depicted through gesture, word, costume, and inner feeling, is itself drama. Abhinaya is the means by which the inner life becomes visible to others.
The actor suppresses their own nature and gives expression to the character’s through movement of the limbs. This is a disciplined act of embodied imagination.
Putting it all together: the Nataka as a complete system
Here is the full architecture Bharata demands in a single view:
- Structural: Five Avasthas, five Sandhis, twenty-one Sandhi distinctions, sixty-four Angas, thirty-six Laksanas, multiple Vṛttis, Pratyanga, Pataka
- Aesthetic: Multiple Rasas, Gunas, Alamkaras, exalted speech, characters of great moral stature, description of good conduct
- Practical: Popular appeal, soft and intelligible language, ease of staging, calibrated to the audience’s capacity
- Philosophical: Mirror of the world’s joys and sorrows, encompassing all arts and knowledge, rooted in human nature
An ideal Nataka is the one that holds all of them simultaneously, in proportion, in tension, in rhythm.
That is precisely why Kalidasa’s work has survived two millennia. Abhijnanashakuntalam is not beautiful despite being technically correct. It is beautiful because technical correctness, at that level of mastery, becomes poetry.
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Frequently Asked Questions
An ideal Nataka is a complete dramatic form that combines precise structural elements, multiple rasas, exalted characters, and accessible language, all working together to reflect the full human condition on stage.
A Nataka requires five Sandhis (segments) with twenty-one internal distinctions, sixty-four Angas (limbs), and five Avasthas (stages of dramatic action) to be considered structurally complete.
Bharata instructs the playwright to study the audience’s character, reasoning, and capacity before writing. The language and complexity of the play must match what the audience can genuinely receive and enjoy.
The central characters must be of great stature, typically kings or divine figures, but Bharata insists the play must reflect the condition of all people, their joys, sorrows, and daily activities, making it universally resonant.
A Pataka is not a competing story. It is a parallel dramatic thread that illuminates the hero’s journey from a different angle, enriching the main plot’s meaning without diverting its momentum.
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Final thoughts
The ideal Nataka according to Bharata Muni is a living architecture that the playwright, actor, and director must inhabit together. The Natyashastra gives you the bones. The bones need breath.
What Bharata is ultimately describing is a form capable of holding the totality of human experience in structured, beautiful, transmissible form. That is a high standard. But it is also an invitation.
If you are a dancer, a playwright, a director, or a scholar working in this tradition, the ideal Nataka is a challenge issued to you directly, across twenty-four centuries, in the clearest possible terms.
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