This chapter analyzes Bhavabhūti's eighth-century Uttararāmacarita (The Later Deeds of Rāma, henceforth URC ),1 a text that dives deeper into Śambūka's death than any considered so far. Aside from it being a beautifully crafted piece of literature, I choose to focus on Bhavabhūti's play because it ties into developments related to Śambūka's depiction in Kālidāsa's RaV. In creating the URC, though, Bhavabhūti was not beholden to political oversight in the way Kālidāsa was, nor was he involved in a large-scale revisionist project like Vimalasūri. He did, however, have a framework within which to work as he redesigned not only how we are to understand Śambūka, but how we are to understand the entire Uttaraka ̄ṇḍa.

The URC is a Sanskrit drama, a genre with its own conventions. Characters, plot, and structure all follow elaborate formulae most clearly laid out in the Nātyasāśtra, a dramaturgical text compiled around the time of Kālidāsa (Gerow, 1984). The aesthetic effect of a Sanskrit drama relies on an intricate system of poetics centered around the theory of rasa, which Edwin Gerow summarizes in the dramatic context as being “a resolution of sentiments sufficiently general to abolish the mundane distinctions between audience, actor, and author” (ibid., p. 43). In blurring these boundaries between a work of art, the artist, and the audience, rasa is a poetic tool that underpins the enjoyment and appreciation of art.

Briefly, rasas—of which there are eight or nine, depending on the theoretician—are the various emotional catalysts in a work of art that exist as a product of the play's composition and the actors’ portrayal as well as their ability to resonate with a person's inherent experiences and emotions. The universally acknowledged eight rasas are śrṅgāra (erotic), hāsya (comic), karuṇa (piteous), raudra (furious), vīra (heroic), bhayānaka (terrifying), bībhatsā (disgusting), and adbhūta (wondrous); the debated ninth rasa is śānta (peaceful). While a drama may utilize any number of these rasas as the context warrants, it will have a single dominant rasa that best relates to the overarching plot.