AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The playbill is longer than the shelf
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
Sanskrit dramaturgy preserved a playbill its libraries lost. The technical treatises quote plays by title and verse to exemplify plot-junctures: Sāgaranandin's Nāṭakalakṣaṇaratnakośa (recovered from a Nepalese manuscript and edited by Myles Dillon in 1937), Rāmacandra and Guṇacandra's Nāṭyadarpaṇa, and Bhoja's enormous Śṛṅgāraprakāśa, whose cited-works census V. Raghavan compiled. Their exemplar stock includes famous ghosts — Viśākhadatta's Devīcandragupta, the play of Candragupta II and the Śaka king, survives only as such quotations. The mechanism is a differential clock: a play's textual life depended on performance repertoires and courtly fashion, both volatile, while a treatise's life ran on scholastic pedagogy — so the treatises outlived their own examples, and the drama corpus they sampled should now be measurably ghosted. Prediction: compiling the distinct titled dramas cited across the Nāṭakalakṣaṇaratnakośa, the Nāṭyadarpaṇa, and the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa and resolving each title against the New Catalogus Catalogorum, at least one-third will have no surviving manuscript witness, and the lost share among plays cited only in these treatises will exceed the lost share among plays also transmitted with commentaries (primary clause: the one-third lost share; the verdict follows it). Kill: Myles Dillon's edition of the Nāṭakalakṣaṇaratnakośa (1937), the Nāṭyadarpaṇa (Gaekwad's Oriental Series edition), and the citation registers in V. Raghavan's Bhoja's Śṛṅgāra Prakāśa (Madras, 1963), resolved against the New Catalogus Catalogorum (University of Madras).
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: compiling the distinct titled dramas cited across the Nāṭakalakṣaṇaratnakośa, the Nāṭyadarpaṇa, and the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa and resolving each title against the New Catalogus Catalogorum, at least one-third will have no surviving manuscript witness, and the lost share among plays cited only in these treatises will exceed the lost share among plays also transmitted with commentaries (primary clause: the one-third lost share; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: Myles Dillon's edition of the Nāṭakalakṣaṇaratnakośa (1937), the Nāṭyadarpaṇa (Gaekwad's Oriental Series edition), and the citation registers in V. Raghavan's Bhoja's Śṛṅgāra Prakāśa (Madras, 1963), resolved against the New Catalogus Catalogorum (University of Madras).
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-16, breadth wave weighting India/South Asia by inferred textual production rather than survival; every item grounded in real works, authors, catalogues, and testimonia, including the real evidence of loss (citing authors, catalogue entries, translation corpora, rediscovery cases); no fabricated citations.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
That the dramaturgical treatises preserve titles and verses of otherwise-lost plays is a commonplace — the Devicandragupta surviving only in Natyadarpana quotations is the showpiece — and Raghavan compiled the Srngaraprakasa's cited-works census. The aggregate lost-share computation across the three treatises resolved against the New Catalogus Catalogorum has not been run.
- V. Raghavan, Bhoja's Srngara Prakasa (Madras, 1963)
- M. Dillon (ed.), Natakalaksanaratnakosa of Sagaranandin (London, 1937)
Predictions
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