Money, Morality, and Masculinity: Staging the Politics of Poverty in Sanskrit Theater

Explored here is a series of rhetorico-narrative linkages in the Sanskrit play Mṛcchakaṭika (“The Little Clay Cart”), a set of associations between terms such as wealth, poverty, virtue, and crime. These connections add up to a governing sociopolitical concept, allowing us to extrapolate from the world of the Mṛcchakaṭika’s concepts to its concepts of its world.