Thinker · TH-0080
Bharata
Bharata is the attributed author of the Nāṭyaśāstra, a Sanskrit treatise on drama, dance and music usually dated to between about 200 BCE and…
भरत
Also known as Bharata Muni
c. 200 BCE – 200 CE (date of the text) · Ancient India (no reliable biographical location)
Traditions: Indian
Bharata is the attributed author of the Nāṭyaśāstra, a Sanskrit treatise on drama, dance and music usually dated to between about 200 BCE and 200 CE. The text itself presents Bharata as a legendary sage, and the dates belong to the text rather than to a known lifespan; it may have been compiled over time. Its rasa-sūtra explains how a performance produces aesthetic experience from depicted emotions, and its scheme of eight rasas became the starting point for later Indian aesthetics.
Key ideas
- Rasa arises from the combination of determinants, consequents and transitory states.
- Eight rasas correspond to eight basic emotions, among them the erotic, comic, compassionate, furious and fearful.
- Drama aims to produce rasa in the spectator, not simply to imitate life.
- Later tradition added a ninth rasa, the peaceful (śānta).
Major works
- Nāṭyaśāstra (attributed; c. 200 BCE – 200 CE)
- Abhinavagupta's Abhinavabhāratī (c. 1000), the commentary through which the rasa-sūtra was chiefly read
In the conversation
- Discussion Rasa and catharsis: is tasting an emotion the same as purging it?
- Question I judge wine for a living. Can someone be wrong about what tastes good?
- Question Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?
- Discussion Rasa and ordinary emotion: why can grief in a play be a kind of delight?
- Reading group Reading group: Aristotle’s Poetics as a craft manual, with the Nāṭyaśāstra beside it
- Reading group Reading group: the Nāṭyaśāstra’s chapters on rasa and bhāva
- Reading group Reading group: how grief becomes rasa, from Lollaṭa to Abhinavagupta