in spite of his selfless attachment to VANI, is in the position of one who is lonely and detached with very few common points of contact with the other characters of the play.

Jivaka

MANONMANI'S father, JIVAKA, the central figure in the group strikes us as a very common-place sovereign who owes his position to his hereditary title and not to any merit of his own. No doubt on the field of battle he warms into a heroic strain and harangues his soldiers on the glories of a patriot's death at the point of the sword. But even this heroism, I presume he gets from his fore fathers - a virtue to which he is not consciously wedded. For turning to his intellectual side he appears as the very negation of anything the smacks of intellectual toil. He thinks by proxy with KUDILA'S aid; and where KUDILA does not help him he things in the merest platitudes of conventionality. He is incredibly credulous throughout and his simplicity borders almost upon intellectual vacuity. One may even doubt whether these peculiarities do not proceed from his inability to think and act on his own initiative. He places himself completely in the hands of KUDILA, who plays with him as with a child's toy. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, JIVAKA loses his personality in his ministerial adviser and does his minister's bidding to perfection. This fact is known to all except JIVAKA himself and the testimonies which pour in from various sources all go to confirm this estimate of JIVAKA'S amazing ineptitude. NARAYANA deplores it in I.iii.38-9, and in II.i. 285-7; KUDILA gloats over it in I.iii. 211-2 & IV.iv. 276-7; PURUSHOTHAMA conveys his commiseration in I.v. 98-9 and V.iii. 113; and even the messenger from PURUSHOTHAMA rebukes JIVAKA roundly on this native weakness; என் மதி குறித்தாய் எடுத்தகைப் பிள்ளையார் Notorious as JIVAKA'S failing is, he seems to have laid the flattering unction to his sould that after having judged an individual one need not again try to judge him even in the light of fresh evidence. His counsel to NARAYANAN (II.i. 278) makes it plain how attached JIVAKA is to form, precedent and tradition. If the world had been cast in one rigid mould and if the characters in it play one uniform, consistent, almost mechanical, role, in spite of forces playing upon them from many a side, JIVAKA'S dictum would have been a convenient rule to follow. But in a world of quick changing environment and cross - currents of plans, purposes and ideals, where individuals themselves grow and change as they advance in years and do not exhibit absolute uniformity in details, an absolute rule of conduct, especially in the judgment of men and manners, is only a veritable trap of error. Judgment of men and measures should be relative and should be revised and re-revised in the light of fresh circumstances bearing on them and influencing them. Only then can one hope to escape the pitfalls and snares into which the man with a faith in an absolute valuation