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Reading group: the Nāṭyaśāstra’s chapters on rasa and bhāva

Kavya Menon Fellow
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Beauty & artIndianAbhinavaguptaBharataBhatta LollataBhatta NayakaSankuka#bhava#natyashastra#rasa#reading-group
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I'm a poet and literature postgraduate in Kochi, and new to formal philosophy. Everyone in my department mentions rasa, almost nobody has read the chapters where the theory is actually set out. I'd like to read them with company, and with people who know more Sanskrit than I do.

Translation: Manomohan Ghosh's English translation of the Nāṭyaśāstra, which most university libraries have. Chapter numbering differs between editions, so I'll describe sections by content.

Plan:

  • Week 1: the rasa chapter. The famous sūtra: rasa arises from the combination of the determinants (vibhāva), the consequents (anubhāva) and the transitory states (vyabhicāri-bhāva). Then the eight rasas, with the situations and signs that produce each.
  • Week 2: the bhāva chapter. The durable emotions that underlie the rasas, the long list of transitory states, and the involuntary bodily states (trembling, tears, horripilation) that actors must show.
  • Week 3: the commentators. We can't read Abhinavagupta's commentary in full, so I suggest Raniero Gnoli's The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, which translates and explains the key passages, including his reports of the earlier views of Lollaṭa, Śaṅkuka and Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka.

What I most want to understand: why the rasa the audience tastes is not the emotion itself, and why grief on stage can be savoured when grief in life only hurts.

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4 replies

  1. Govinda Prasad Mishra

    Fellow

    Week 1. Look at the food comparison right after the sūtra. Bharata says rasa is tasted the way a discerning person tastes a dish made with many ingredients and spices: the taste is something new, produced by the combination, not any one ingredient. That's the seed of everything later commentators argue about. Is rasa in the combination on stage, or in the taster?

    And do mind the editions, as Kavya says. The text has a complicated transmission, and the chapter numbers and even some verses vary.

  2. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    Week 1, my report. What surprised me is how technical it is. I expected mysticism and found something like a craft manual: for the compassionate rasa, show these situations, these reactions, these passing feelings. As a poet I find that freeing. It suggests the emotion in a poem is built, not just poured out.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Parisa Moghaddam

    Contributor

    Week 2, late but I had to join. I cut films for a living, and the anubhāvas are basically reaction shots. Bharata understood that the audience reads an emotion from the visible responses, not from the cause alone. Film editors learn the same thing: often the strongest moment is the face of the person watching, not the event itself.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    Week 3. Gnoli is the right choice. The sequence of views Abhinavagupta reports is a lovely piece of philosophy in itself: roughly, Lollaṭa places rasa in the character, intensified; Śaṅkuka treats it as the audience's inference or imitation; Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka adds a generalising power (sādhāraṇīkaraṇa) by which the emotion is freed from belonging to any particular person; and Abhinavagupta argues that what results is a non-ordinary, blissful tasting, not ordinary feeling with the edge taken off. Each view answers a difficulty in the one before.

    That's Kavya's answer, I think: grief on stage is savoured because it is no longer mine or his. And the peaceful rasa, śānta, was argued into the list later, mainly in Kashmir. Its status was disputed for a long time.

    Helpful · 3