The stage kept what the shelf dropped

Claim (verbatim)

The thirteen "Trivandrum plays" — Svapnavāsavadatta, Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa, and their companions, recovered by T. Gaṇapati Śāstrī in 1912 and attributed to Bhāsa, a playwright so long lost that Rājaśekhara's stray verse praising the Svapnavāsavadatta stood among the chief testimonies — are the reverse-control for the whole missing-literature problem: a rediscovery lets us inspect how a lost classic had actually survived. The answer looks theatrical, not literary: Kerala's temple theatre kept the texts as working performance material (the Kūṭiyāṭṭam repertoire includes the Mantrāṅkam, an act of the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa) after the pan-Indian literary tradition dropped them. If performance was the vector, the witness geography must show it — and a single contrary manuscript would kill the claim. Prediction: in the New Catalogus Catalogorum and published catalogue records, every pre-1912 manuscript witness of the thirteen plays will be Kerala-provenanced (Malayalam script or Kerala collections), with zero witnesses in Nepalese, Bengali, Śāradā, or North Indian Devanagari collections, while a Kālidāsa control (the Abhijñānaśākuntala) shows witnesses in at least four script-regions (primary clause: zero non-Kerala pre-1912 Bhāsa witnesses; one Nepalese or northern witness kills it). Kill: the New Catalogus Catalogorum entries for the thirteen plays, T. Gaṇapati Śāstrī's Trivandrum Sanskrit Series introductions (1912-1915), and the NGMCP online catalogue as the Nepal-side null check.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the New Catalogus Catalogorum and published catalogue records, every pre-1912 manuscript witness of the thirteen plays will be Kerala-provenanced (Malayalam script or Kerala collections), with zero witnesses in Nepalese, Bengali, Śāradā, or North Indian Devanagari collections, while a Kālidāsa control (the Abhijñānaśākuntala) shows witnesses in at least four script-regions (primary clause: zero non-Kerala pre-1912 Bhāsa witnesses; one Nepalese or northern witness kills it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the New Catalogus Catalogorum entries for the thirteen plays, T. Gaṇapati Śāstrī's Trivandrum Sanskrit Series introductions (1912-1915), and the NGMCP online catalogue as the Nepal-side null check.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The Kerala-only witness base of the thirteen plays — Malayalam-script manuscripts tied to the Kutiyattam performance tradition — is a foundational published datum of the Bhasa controversy from Ganapati Sastri onward (it fuelled the Kerala-adaptation counter-thesis surveyed by Pusalker) and was systematically confirmed by the Wurzburg/Tubingen Bhasa project, which located c. 200 further manuscripts, in Kerala. The Kalidasa multi-recension control is likewise standard recension knowledge, so the predicted witness geography is already established.

• H. Bruckner, 'Manuscripts and Performance Traditions of the So-Called Trivandrum Plays Ascribed to Bhasa — A Report on Work in Progress' (2000)
• A.D. Pusalker, Bhasa — A Study (Lahore, 1940)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.