Book excerpt: 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.