The play satirizes various religions in Kashmir and their place in the politics of King Shankara-varman (883-902 CE). Jayanta's strategy is to take a characteristic figure of the target
religion and unmask him as a fraud. By turning his victim's own religious doctrines against him, Jayanta makes a laughingstock of both the philosophy and its adherents.
The leading character, Sankarshana, is a young and dynamic orthodox graduate of Vedic studies, whose career starts as a glorious campaign against the heretic Buddhists, Jains and other
antisocial sects. By the end of the play the realizes that the interests of the monarch do not encourage such inquisitional rigor, and the story ends in a great festival of tolerance and
compromise.
