Rasa Natyashastra To Bollywood PDF
Rasa Natyashastra To Bollywood PDF
Rasa Natyashastra To Bollywood PDF
WESTERN INDOLOGY
ON RASA
– A PŪRVAPAKṢA
Proceedings of Swadeshi Indology Conference Series
Editor
Dr. K. S. Kannan
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Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies – 4
WESTERN INDOLOGY ON RASA – A PŪRVAPAKṢA
(Proceedings of the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series)
Selected Papers from two Conferences
(held in July 2016 (Chennai) & February 2017 (Delhi))
Edited by: Dr. K.S. Kannan, Former Director,
Karnataka Samskrit University, Bengaluru.
email: ks.kannan.2000@gmail.com
Pages: 284
Year of Publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-81-934486-6-3
Price in India: 175/-
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Contents
1. Naresh P. Cuntoor
Rasa Theory: Changes and Growth 39
2. Ashay Naik
Desacralization of the Indian Rasa Tradition 63
3. K. Gopinath
Towards a Computational Theory of Rasa 89
4. Charu Uppal
Rasa: From Nāṭyaśāstra to Bollywood 179
5. Sreejit Datta
“From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 201
6. Shankar Rajaraman
The West on Our Poems: A Critique 227
7. R. Ganesh
रसॄसमथ नम ् 251
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International Alphabet of
Sanskrit Transliteration
(IAST)
a अ ā आ i इ ī ई
u उ ū ṛ ṝ
lṛ ऌ
e ए ai ऐ o ओ au औ
ṁ ̇ ḥ :
k क् kh ख् g ग ् gh घ् ṅ ्
c च ् ch छ् j ज् jh झ् ñ ्
ṭ ट् ṭh ठ् ḍ ड् ḍh ढ् ṇ ण्
t त् th थ् d द् dh ध् n न्
p प ् ph फ् b ब ् bh भ् m म्
y य् r र् l ल् v व्
ś श् ṣ ष् s स् h ह्
kṣa jña
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Acknowledgements
Our conferences could not have happened without the active support
and participation of our volunteers and well-wishers.
We wish to thank Sri Udaykumar and his team from the Vande
Mataram Student Circle at IIT-Madras for their help in making
full arrangements for the first conference at Chennai. Sri Jithu
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Our gratitude is due to Sri Ramnik Khurana, Sri Sanjeev Chhibber,
and Sri Chetan Handa who have kindly offered to bear the expenses
of bringing out these volumes in print. We wish to thank Sri Sunil
Sheoran who has been a long-time supporter of our work. His help in
coordinating the printing of these volumes is deeply appreciated.
We are grateful to all the paper-presenters and the keen audience for
maintaining a high academic standard and decorum at the conference.
There of course are many more who have helped us and guided us
behind the screen and deserve our thanks.
IFI Team
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Volume Editorial
“A poem may have a good idea (artha), but the words therein may not be
grammatically sound (pada-śuddhi). It may have even this, but it may lack
style (rīti). Given even this, the work may not have a proper organisation
of its contents (ghaṭanā). Assuming even that, it may not be equipped
with new tropes (vakra-gati). Should that be there too, it would still be a
waste if the poem is devoid of rasa. Oh, how deep the art of poetry is!”
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have only been refined (śodhita).” “tasmāt satām atra na dūṣitāni / matāni
tāny eva tu śodhitāni”.
Cuntoor is careful not to “infer modern scientific notions from ancient
knowledge, or assert that ancient Indians discovered everything
before modern science”, which is only proper and fair. His motivation
is to see if we can “gain new insights into Rasa Theory using the
perspectives of the modern notions of cognitive and computational
models”. Cuntoor raises the question, for example, as to whether
the framework of multiple memory systems can be used to gain a
better understanding of the types of bhāva-s. Also to be investigated
is – whether Rasa Theory could provide new principles of perceptual
organisation in the context of experiencing literature; whether the
study of mirror neurons — in the context of imitation, self-identity
and empathy — can have a bearing on ideas pertaining to Karuṇa-
rasa. Pollock’s unnatural contentions – of the unnaturalness of pity
in man, and of his supposition of compassion as a Buddhist invention
– need also be be scrutinised. Computational aesthetics, dealing
with sentiment analysis and emotion recognition, can also be tried
for recognising rasa in literature. The technique of reductionism
may perhaps be tested to its limits in Rasa Theory, in particular.
Cuntoor also refers to the absence of a detailed discussion in Pollock on
aucitya, which constitutes, as Ānandavardhana says, the parā upaniṣad
(supreme secret) of rasa.
The second paper written by Ashay Naik (Ch. 2) is entitled
Desacralization of the Indian Rasa Tradition. Profanation verily
may well be described as the singular agenda of Pollock, and he is
accordingly on a fissiparous overdrive. Tradition linked rasa, the
poetic relish, with the Upaniṣadic rasa; and presented kāvya as but an
allotrope of the Veda inasmuch as kāvya being a kāntā-sammita (à la
a beloved) is kindred in spirit to the Veda which is a prabhu-sammita
(à la a king) – both thus seeking to subserve certain common purposes
though their modus operandi may differ. But Pollock is frantic to
drive a wedge between the Veda and the kāvya. Bitten as he is by the
reductivity bug, Pollock can perceive kāvya only as a socio-political
aesthetic, divested of its religio-spiritual dimensions – thus the very
antithesis of the Hindu ethos. And so this “Last Sanskrit Pandit” (as
his hagiographers hail him) aims his arrows against Abhinavagupta,
attempting to sabotage his status in the realm of Indian aesthetics. It
is not Pollock’s failure that arouses our pity, but his audacity. Pitting
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hearer’s). The actor and the spectator each loses his identity but
in different ways. Given the complexities involved, mathematical
modelling involving axiomatics may not constitute an apposite
approach, and a computational model may be nearer to the real
issues. Such a model may involve generative aspects and descriptive
aspects, and a particular sensitivity to Indic sensibilities. The Indic
perspective looks even into ontogenic aspects (as with the Piṇḍotpatti
Prakaraṇa in Saṅgīta Ratnākara involving embryological studies), or
the sandhi aspects in Pāṇini (involving the anatomical structures of
the sound-producing organs), and the great leap from the “atomic”
svara-s to a rāga endowed with a “personality” of its own. An
element of synaesthesis involves in the correlation of rasa-s and
colours. Apart from sthāyi-bhāva-s and rasa-s, each eight in Nāṭyaśāstra
with one-to-one mappings, there are eight sāttvika-bhāva-s and 33
sañcāri-bhāva-s with many-to-many mappings in between. Indian art
revels in the profusion of the interplay of vyañjanā-s, rather than in
the reductive, fixed-and-formed entities. None, else than Hindus,
excelled in extreme digitisation, as also in extreme integration, (but
note on the other hand that mindless proliferation of terminology
is an illness that besets modern linguistics, as Dwight Bolinger once
noted). The magnificent juxtaposition of linguistics and music on
a phenomenological basis was provided by Māgha long ago (anantā
vāṅmayasyāho geyasyeva vicitratā! – Śiśupālavadha 2.72).
Scientists are open to the suggestion that there is a connection
between the brain’s biomolecular processes and the basic structure
of the universe. The primacy of the sentence (in grammar) though
it is constituted of its own components of diverse patterns, and the
primacy of rasa (in Sāhityaśāstra) though it issues out of certain
combinations of its various constituent factors — in other words
of the integrality of the higher despite apparent decomposability
into numerous intermediary/terminal nodes — is an extraordinary
contribution of the Hindu mind. The top-down and bottom-up
approaches have been looked into, and their optimisations have also
been worked out — as in the two schools of Mīmāṁsā — in contexts as
of Anvitābhidhāna-vāda and Abhihitānvaya-vāda.
In a given passage, there may be no element (noun or verb, adjective
or adverb, or even a particle) that may not be suggestive; and even
so, in a performance there may be no element (word or song, mudrā
or aspect of dress etc.) that may not conduce to a particular rasa. The
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The paper by Sreejit Datta (Ch. 5) entitled “From Rasa Seen to Rasa
Heard”: A Criticism, takes a close look at Pollock’s depiction of the
evolution of the idea of rasa. Datta questions the very differentiation
between “literature seen” and “literature heard” that Pollock starts
with. He explores how literature as a Western category and sāhitya
as an Indian category differ. Pollock’s “Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard” is
essentially an exercise, he says, in peddling Western Universalism.
The very etymology seems to hint at something of the nature of their
content: Literature from Latin “litteratura” is something written or
something pertaining to learning; whereas sāhitya implies a blend or
fusion indicative of an integrality. The Nāṭyaśāstra speaks of what the
gods told Brahmā — that they want something which is at once dṛśya
as well as śravya.
Datta also draws our attention to Pollock’s reprehensible resort to the
translation of all technical terms in Sanskrit into English, which is
tantamount to epistemological domination of one culture by another
as indicated by Vazquez. To translate Dhvanyāloka as “Light on
Implicature” sounds atrocious. The very individuality of the original
words is totally lost in the translations – dilution and disfigurement
being the invariable consequences. Much earlier (1950), Manomohan
Ghosh had been careful enough to provide the Sanskrit term also, and
with a capitalisation of the first letter of the English rendering “lest
these should be taken in their usual English sense”. Recitation of the
Veda-s, eminently the śravya, is also enjoined to be accompanied by
mudrā-s (gestures); and the four vṛtti-s are related to the four Veda-s —
all emphasising once again the link between the dṛśya and the śravya
aspects. Kapila Vatsyayan also clarifies that the various arts are not
to be referred to in isolation or in mutual exclusiveness. The sonic
and deific forms of the rāga-s are set forth together by Somanātha in
his Rāga-vibodha (17th century C.E.); the former being śravya, and the
latter, dṛśya. To see schism where none exists, or create one where
only subtle differences are shown – is all a part of the fissiparous
agenda of the West.
***
The next two, in fact the last two, papers are authored by two eminent
Sanskrit poets from Karnataka, who have also a deep knowledge of
Indian poetics. We introduce in this context three verses that hold a
mirror to some of the raucous Western critics/commentators (Pollock,
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ye sad-artham ajānanto
vṛthā vacana-vistaraiḥ |
dūṣayanti kaveḥ kāvyaṁ
dhik tān paṇḍita-māninaḥ ||
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A poet himself, Shankar has drawn our attention to the very many
pitfalls of translators — the Western translators in particular, that
beam generally with confidence. The samples Shankar has provided
show that these translators neither possess a minimum sensitivity nor
display any remarkable sensibility. We do not know how many texts
were ultimately spoilt by Westerners who tend to think that it is their
prerogative to interpret any culture on Earth. And did not John Ruskin
admonish: “Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not
to find yours.”?
Their ridiculousness makes one recall a poet’s jibe:
(Loafing in the sky over the ocean, should a crow keep cawing, would
he realise on that account, the depth of the ocean below, or cognise
the gems therein?)
The last paper by R. Ganesh (Ch. 7) entitled Rasabrahma-samartha-
nam, counters some of the ideas of Pollock presented in the
introductory portion of his Rasa Reader. Ganesh contrasts the views
and approaches of some of the modern Sanskritists against those
of Prof. Hiriyanna, Narasimha Bhatta and Dr. D.V. Gundappa (all
hailing from Karnataka), and Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and
V. S. Agrawala, the two celebrated authorities in the field of Indian
art.
He contests at the outset the physicality of rasa which cannot be
reduced to mere chemical reactions in the brain. He also speaks of the
cyclicity/non-linearity of linguistic and metaphysical ideas, as against
the linearity of science, and rejects the idea of Bharata’s magnum opus
as representative of a field but in its stage of infancy. The Nāṭyaśāstra
is on par with the “epics”, in terms of their naturalness yet beyond the
pale of ordinary imagination. After the fashion of writers on Nyāya
and Vyākaraṇa, he invokes the analogy of Ayurvedic prescriptions
whose value/validity is not contestable despite advancements in
anatomy/physiology/biochemistry; and asserts the validity of the
Rasa Theory irrespective of the developments in modern psychological
investigation. Drawing on an analogy of universal experience as
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applicable to Vedānta, one may rather deny Brahman, but not the
experience of rasa, he says. He traces the genesis of rasa to early Vedic
literature — ancient portions such as the Puruṣa-sūkta, Nāsadīya-
sūkta and Skambha-sūkta, as also the Upaniṣadic portions such as the
Theory of Pañca-kośa (Five Sheaths), and even the chapter on Vibhūti-
yoga in the Bhagavad-gītā. Even as, in the depiction of M. Hiriyanna, all
the darśana-s (schools of Indian philosophy) find their culmination in
Vedānta, and are not contradictory to it, even so the Rasa Theory is in
no contradiction with the different darśana-s.
His focus is on the Introduction in the Rasa Reader, as it is that section
that teems with Pollock’s key notions. He grieves Pollock’s utter
ignorance of musicological works. Speaking of the applicability of
the Rasa Theory to other arts such as music and dance, he refers to
the preponderance of “practicals” in these realms as an important
reason for a lack of discussion in books on Indian rhetorics/aesthetics.
Further, they pose a few problems unique to their own fields. Pollock
limits the realm of rasa to literature — which is unfounded. All arts
originate in the mental realm of the artist and culminate in the mental
realm of the connoisseur. As Coomaraswamy states well: “The end
of the work of art is the same as its beginning, for its function is
... to enable the rasika to identify himself in the same way with the
archetype of which his work of art is an image”.
Pollock has a complaint that the principle of pratibhā (creativity)
has not been well formulated in Indian tradition. It is only logical
that it is so, argues Ganesh, as pratibhā is essentially subjective and
indescribable; and it is only in respect of its consequences that one can
speak of pratibhā. To seek the genesis of the faculty that is at the root
of all arts may well be an invitation to anavasthā, “endless regression”
— akin to seeking the definition of Brahman.
Similarly, it has been shown here how relish of poetry is more
valuable than its critical assessment. Pollock’s charge on the absence
of a comprehensive investigation of beauty is also baseless, as it is
comparable to a similar investigation of Brahman. The objection
raised by Pollock in regard to not counting vātsalya as a rasa is nothing
new. What is more important is an investgation into rasa as such,
rather than an examination of the number count of rasa-s.
As to the issue of the locus of rasa in regard to its being in the artist or in
the creator, it has been shown how even the artist enjoys his own work
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***
It goes without saying that the authors of the papers here all hold
themselves responsible for the ideas they have presented. Also note
that square brackets [ ] have been introduced within verbatim quotes
to add the explanations/remarks of the author of the paper.
***
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sin, unlimited. Bestow it, on the other hand, sensibly upon the
noble: you may well look forward to fame and weal, bliss and
benevolence, and the attainment of beatitude in fine).
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।। सादकीयम ्।।
“िनरर-रसोार-गभ-सभ-िनभराः ।
् ीवि न कथामाऽम आ
िगरः कवीनाम ज ् िौताः ।।”
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***
“...रसाते ।
ूिवशित दयम ्न तिदां
मिणिरव कृ िऽम-राग-योिजतः ॥”
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Chapter 1
– Naresh P. Cuntoor
(nareshpc@gmail.com)
Abstract
This paper analyses Pollock’s Rasa Theory which is seen through
a perspective of changes. The analysis focuses on three recurring
themes in Pollock’s writings: change in rasa conceptualization from
literature-seen and literature-heard, changes in the framework to
describe Rasa Theory, and change in rasa localization. The paper
then discusses Pollock’s tentative attempts at providing a scientific
perspective to Rasa Theory. To provide better contemporary scientific
context, the paper describes certain ideas of perceptual aesthetics
in modern computational and cognitive sciences. Active research
in reductionism, memory models and perceptual psychophysics
continue to sharpen our understanding of how the mind perceives and
recollects what is considered interesting or beautiful. If Rasa Theory
can be further understood in this context, its contribution may be
better appreciated.
* pp. 39–62. In: Kannan, K. S. (Ed.) (2018). Western Indology On Rasa – A Pūrvapakṣa.
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Introduction
Rasa has been a significant area of interest over several centuries
in Indian literary analysis. From Bharata to modern day Sanskrit
scholars, the theory of rasa has been studied under the formalisms
of Mīmāṁsā, Vedānta and Bhakti traditions. The formalisms have
sharpened our understanding of the contribution of rasa theorists. As
a result of the insight gained through analysis, we are often better-
equipped to appreciate the poet’s imagination. The primacy of rasa
has been debated in the context of several concepts of literary analysis
such as alaṅkāra, dhvani and aucitya. It is thus unsurprising that
rasa has attracted attention of Prof. Sheldon Pollock, whose works in
several Sanskrit-related topics have been influential.
This paper has two main objectives: to summarize Pollock’s
perspectives on Rasa Theory, and to outline areas of study in modern
cognitive and computational aesthetics. The latter is motivated by his
discussion of the science and history of rasa (in Pollock (2012)). Insofar
as the first objective is concerned, only the main arguments related to
Pollockian claims are discussed. Lengthy quotations are avoided for
the sake of brevity (without, hopefully, sacrificing clarity).
At the outset, we have identified three broad themes for discussion:
the evolution of rasa, the formalisms used to describe rasa, and the
discussion of science and history of rasa. There are other themes that
merit investigation as well. In particular, it may be interesting to
discuss the aims of rasa and how the evolution of the types of rasa-s
and bhāva-s may contribute to changes in aims of rasa. Further, the
ways of depicting rasa and potential flaws in its depiction may merit
closer study. Both these aspects are addressed in Pollock’s writings.
We chose to focus on three themes of rasa evolution, formalism and
rasa-related science — in order to limit the scope of the paper.
The paper is organized into three sections. Section 1 discusses three
types of changes and their impact on societal and cultural constructs.
Section 2 describes the different frameworks under which rasa has
been described, and their implications. Drawing from cognitive neu-
roscience, computational aesthetics, reductionism and Pollock’s anal-
ysis, Section 3 discusses potential future work in the context of Rasa
Theory. The paper concludes with questions that may merit response
from traditional Sanskrit scholars to address Pollock’s analysis.
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the discussion of the two literary forms in Pollock (2012). At any rate,
based on the three reasons described above, Pollock (2012) asserts the
fundamental difference in the two forms of literature before turning
to the development of rasa.
If there is a fundamental difference in the literary forms, then their
rasa analysis must also be different. With its greater range of narrative
capability, Pollock (2012) argues that literature-seen can support rasa
development that literature-heard cannot. In particular, an increase
in the number of rasas is offered as a direct consequence of the
extension of literature-seen rasa to literature-heard rasa. The dispute
over the number of rasa-s is then described in the context of the
hypothesized extension in Rasa Theory.
Before turning to the implications of differences in the two literary
forms on Rasa Theory, it is instructive to read Bhoja’s comments in
context which is not provided in Pollock (2012). Bhoja considers
sāhitya to be more praiseworthy than word and meaning, and then
goes on to describe the relationship between the two. Seen in this
context, Bhoja’s comments may be seen as a discussion of difference
between the visible and beyond-visible entities. Seen in context, it is
difficult to arrive at Pollock (2012)’s conclusion that Bhoja recognized
a fundamental difference between the two forms of literature.
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Mīmāṁsā Framework
The Mīmāṁsā framework of Rasa Theory is largely credited to Bhaṭṭa
Nāyaka’s and Abhinavagupta’s rasa theories (Pollock (2009), Pollock
(2016)). The three elements of Mīmāṁsā Śāstra, viz., sādhya, sādhana
and itikartavyatā, for analyzing a scriptural statement are described as
follows: (1) what is to be produced by action, (2) whereby it is to be
produced, and (3) how it is to be produced. Based on the available
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analogy to rasa, and explains that rasa-s take the place of sentence-
level meaning, and vibhāva-s and other elements assume the role of
word-level meaning.
Pollock (2009) describes the above passage to motivate Bhaṭṭa
Nāyaka’s concept of bhāvanā. Modelled on the scriptural form
of bhāvanā, there are three components: literary expression, a
special type of reproduction, and its experientialization, i.e., abhidhā,
anyā bhāvanā and tadbhōgīkṛti. Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka uses abhidhā in
more expansive terms than its traditional usage (Pollock 2009:153).
He brings out a crucial difference between literary expression in
scriptural language and that in historical narrative. In the former, “the
Veda more important for how it says that what it says”, whereas in the
latter, “what it says is more important that how it says.” When both
word and meaning become secondary, and the aesthetic process has
primacy, we call it literature (Pollock 2009:154).
The literary expression is then conveyed through a special type of
reproduction so that the audience can fully participate in the literary
work. The special type or reproduction is referred to by several names
– bhāvakatva, anyā bhāvanā and sādhāraṇīkaraṇa. This then leads to
the third and final component of Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka’s model, bhoga or
the rasa experience. Also referred to as bhōgīkṛttva or [tad]bhōgīkṛti,
it signifies a complete experience of the various emotions involved
in the literary work. Pollock (2009) mentions the different types of
experience described by Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, Abhinavagupta and others.
Having thus described Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka’s Mīmāṁsā-based formalism,
Pollock (2009) then explores deeper connections of the formalism with
Mīmāṁsā. More specifically, the discussion turns to the location of
rasa, using Abhinavagupta’s characterization of the subject. The new
formalism of bhāvanā that we encounter is of an enhanced nature
which is located in the agent, rather than the language (Pollock
2009:160). At this juncture Pollock (2009) surmises that Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka
must have thought of the revolutionary idea of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa or
commonalization of experience to explain how rasa is conveyed to the
audience. It also chastises Abhinavagupta for being an “ungrateful
disciple” of Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka. With the concept of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa, the
problem of whether rasa is engendered, inferred or manifested in the
character is rendered moot, because rasa now becomes the subjective
experience of the reader (Pollock 2009:162).
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Memory
One of the important breakthroughs in neuroscience occurred in the
1970s when Milner showed that humans have two memory systems
— one that is accessible to conscious recollection and the other
that is not. Before long, a consensus evolved in favor of multiple
memory systems instead of a binary distinction (Squire 2004). Some
of these ideas of long-term, short-term and long-short-term models
of memory have shown resurgence in the field of neural networks
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Perceptual Organization
When presented with an image with incomplete details because
of degradation, occlusion and other factors, our visual system and
understanding allows us to perceive the underlying object. For
example, in Figure 1(a), we are able to readily perceive a triangle
even though there is no triangle drawn in the figure. In Figure 1(b)
we are able to perceive a vase or two faces depending on our visual
focus. These types of perceptual organization have been explained
by Gestalt’s principles in perceptual psychophysics (Goldstein 2009).
Gestalt’s laws describe principles of organization and grouping such
as continuity, symmetry and good form to explain what is perceived
as a whole object. They show that the mind understands visual stimuli
as a whole rather than as a sum of parts, using perceptual principles.
While Gestalt laws do not attempt to explain neural processes, they
provide a sound basis for describing perceptual organization.
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Empathy
The discovery of mirror neurons has revolutionized our understand-
ing of action and speech (Ferrari 2009). They seem to be crucial in
understanding how it is one’s perception of action that leads to his
actions. It provides the link between information-gathering and imi-
tation that allows us to learn new tasks. Moreover, it is possible that
it can have profound implications on our understanding of empathy
(Iacoboni 2009). Going further, Anderson (2012) showed that the
reaction of mating or fighting depends on the extent of stimulus, and
that the same set of neurons is responsible for the activation of either
of the two opposing behaviors. Supported by experimental evidence,
the study of mirror neurons has profound implications in how we un-
derstand the genesis of imitation, self-identify and empathy.
Keeping the current scientific understanding in context, it is difficult
to reconcile Pollock (2012)’s discussion of rasa in the context of karuṇa
rasa. Quoting Johnson, Pollock (2012) says that “pity is not natural
to man”, and argues that Buddhists invented compassion. Before
Buddhists, Pollock (2012)’s view is that the notion of pity in India did
not extend to compassion and suffering in the sense promoted by the
Buddha. Seen in the context of mirror neurons however, it is difficult
to accept Johnson’s word as the final word on our understanding of
pity, which is closely related to empathy.
Modern scientific understanding of empathy does not require us to
formulate a claim based on opinion of whether pity is natural or not.
Instead we can formulate more sophisticated hypotheses regarding
emotions such as empathy that can be tested by studying how peo-
ple react. Analysis of the elements of rasa that can be formulated in
the context of neural understanding of human behavior requires sig-
nificant cross-domain collaboration. The questions may be of interest
to both the scientific and Sanskrit communities because of their topi-
cal relevance.
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1. Rasa Theory: Changes and Growth 59
Conclusion
The contribution of Indian theorists to Rasa Theory has been described
in detail by Pollock. In the process, several insights are seen. Among
these, the role of Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka in changing the localization of rasa,
and the difference between Rasa Theory in drama and poetry are
noteworthy. An approach bias for change-based reasoning was shown
to be a repeatedly occurring theme amongst several — especially
revolutionary and radical changes. This approach runs the risk of
incomplete explanation of phenomena. Pollock has brought out
several aspects of rasa that deserve closer analysis to understand the
contributions of traditional Rasa Theorists and poets. Moreover, his
analysis motivates many questions that are worth exploring to provide
historical and scientific context to concepts in Rasa Theory. In this
concluding section, we list a few questions for future work.
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The Rasa Theory approach thus provides a good basis for further
exploration. In addition to the above historical analysis, it may be
interesting to pursue a computational theory approach of rasa theory
because the hierarchical description of rasa and its constituents lend
themselves to such a systematic analysis.
Bibliography
Anderson, David J. (2012). “Optogenetics, sex, and violence in the
brain: implications for psychiatry.” Biological Psychiatry 71, No. 12.
pp. 1081–1089.
Ferrari, P. F., Bonini, L., and Fogassi, L. (2009). “From monkey mirror
neurons to primate behaviours: possible ‘direct’and ‘indirect’
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Notes
1 Lehar (2003:52).
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Chapter 2
– Ashay Naik
(ashaydnaik@gmail.com)
Abstract
This essay explores the strategies employed by Prof. Sheldon Pollock
to distort the self-understanding of the Indian kāvya-śāstra tradition
by diminishing the importance of religious aesthetics, which forms
its core part, and directing the attention of readers toward a socio-
political aesthetic. He is also keen on separating Veda-s from kāvya.
While the tradition itself appears to have been more interested in
kāvya as the source of an aesthetic experience akin to the religious,
Pollock is more interested in reading it as an expression of social
power.
His principal target in this endeavour is Abhinavagupta. While the
kāvya-śāstra tradition reveres him as a central figure for his masterful
delineation of the process of rasa arising in the reader, Pollock seeks
to reduce his significance in a variety of ways. He criticizes the rasa-
dhvani school for their inattentiveness towards the sociality which
* pp. 63–88. In: Kannan, K. S. (Ed.) (2018). Western Indology On Rasa – A Pūrvapakṣa.
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Introduction
But the path of the critic of poetry must begin with poetry, not with theories
of society.
– An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry, Daniel H. H. Ingalls Sr.
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the former for the ostentatious reason that “we cannot understand
the past until we grasp how those who made it understood what they
were making, and why” (Pollock 2006:3) but it is evident that the real
cause is the opportunity it affords for suggesting a breach between
the Veda-s and kāvya. Furthermore, the kāvya-śāstra tradition has also
declared Vālmīki as the ādi-kavi (first poet) and the Rāmāyaṇa as the
ādi-kāvya (first kāvya).
Pollock exploits both these facts to accomplish a desacralization of
kāvya and its re-interpretation as a political aesthetic. Firstly, he
uses the traditional discourse on the different kinds of śabda (word)
to separate kāvya from the sacred Veda-s. Secondly, he depicts the
Rāmāyaṇa as a political text, and by following the tradition in regarding
it as the first kāvya, establishes the political nature of kāvya. However,
his argument does not hold water, and it is apparent that Pollock has
simply manipulated the tradition to suit his purpose. Distinguishing
kāvya and the Veda-s on the basis of śabda does not mean that they
are saying different things or addressing separate concerns. It simply
means that they employ different forms of expression: what the
Veda-s articulate as a direct command, kāvya conveys by means of
rhetorical speech. It does not follow therefrom that tradition viewed
the former as belonging to a sacred realm and the latter to a secular
realm.
For Pollock the beginning of kāvya means
“the first occurrence of a confluence of conceptual and material factors
that were themselves altogether new. These include new specific norms,
both formal and substantive, of expressive, workly [sic] discourse; a new
reflexive awareness of textuality; a production of new genre categories;
and the application of a new storage technology, namely, writing”
(Pollock 2006:77)
Now, when the tradition declares the Rāmāyaṇa to be the ādi-kāvya,
it does not make the claim that the aforementioned “conceptual and
material factors” specified by Pollock came into being. This is his
own assumption — his own pāramārthika-sat as it were — which he has
superimposed on the vyāvahārika-sat of the tradition.
To be fair, Pollock does refer to the traditional basis on which the
Rāmāyaṇa is revered as an ādikāvya but he does not take it seriously. It
is the śoka (piteous cry) uttered by Vālmīki in the form of a śloka (verse)
when he observes a hunter shoot a bird in the forest. That tradition has
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fully endorsed this view is obvious from the ninth century Dhvanyāloka
of Ānandavardhana:
It is just this [rasa] that is the soul of poetry. And so it was that, long ago,
grief [śoka], arising in the first poet [ādikavi] from the separation of the
pair of curlews, became verse [śloka]” (Ingalls 1990:113)
For one who claims to be serious about vyāvahārika-sat, this
explanation should be more than sufficient. But not for Pollock since
this explanation is completely disconnected from any kind of politics.
And so expediently he turns to pāramārthika-sat:
But this may not be the only kind of newness toward which the prelude
is pointing. The Rāmāyaṇa’s highly self-conscious assertion of primacy
may very likely be alluding to the fact that it was the first kāvya to be
composed in Sanskrit rather than some other form of language available
in South Asia. (Pollock 2006:78)
There is no basis for this assumption, and Pollock offers none.
Likewise, Pollock has issues with the vyāvahārika-sat i.e. the certitudes
of the tradition that śloka was Vālmīki’s invention when the
pāramārthika-sat is that the meter “antedates the work by a millennium
or more” (Pollock 2006:78). And so he reads “Vālmīki’s primacy in
terms of metrics ... as a kind of synecdoche for the formal innovations
of the work as a whole, and these are indeed substantial” (Pollock
2006:78). But if pāramārthika-sat is acceptable then that too agrees with
the tradition in this case:
In Piṅgala’s śāstra this [i.e. śloka] form is totally absent. In the Vedic
literature, this word has been used in different senses. Nirukta reads it as
the synonym of the speech, of the anuṣṭubh. In the Ṛgveda, it is a call, or
voice of the God, sound or noise. Later it is used in the sense of strophe.
In Rāmāyaṇa, it is a verse born out of sorrow, which has been echoed in
Ānandavardhana’s ślokaḥ śokatvamāgataḥ” (Mitra 1989:45)
The problem is that Pollock has not bothered to interrogate the history
of Sanskrit metrics in order to ascertain the novelty of the śloka in the
Rāmāyaṇa, as a form connected with aesthetic emotion, because he is
too fixated with studying kāvya politically. It is also for this reason
that he dismisses the orality of the text as fictitious. The very fact
that the text claims to have been composed mentally by Vālmīki, then
transmitted orally to Rāma’s sons, who then recited it before Rāma,
appears to him “nostalgia for the oral and a desire to continue to share
in its authenticity and authority” (Pollock 2006:78).
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The original literacy of the text is vital for Pollock’s narrative because
then the date of its composition, and accordingly the commencement
of kāvya (the text being the ādi-kāvya) can be located in the early first
millennium when, according to Pollock, Sanskrit writing makes its
first appearance. On the other hand, had it been orally composed, then
it could have been composed even a few centuries earlier, in which
case, the date of origin for kāvya would contradict Pollock’s narrative.
Thus, we see that with regards to both the Veda-s and the Rāmāyaṇa,
Pollock is merely exploiting the traditional understanding to bestow
legitimacy on his view of kāvya as a political aesthetic.
Therefore, of the variety of forms in which kāvya expressed itself,
Pollock is obsessed with only one of them — the praśasti. Inasmuch
as kāvya and praśasti are seen as products of the same cultural milieu,
there is no issue. But it appears that Pollock assigns to praśasti a
significance far beyond the position it obtained in the kāvya-śāstra
tradition, which was nearly zero. His reduction of kāvya to praśasti is
best expressed in the following passage:
The praśasti itself was intimately related to, even a subset of, a new form
of language use that was coming into being in the same period and would
eventually be given the name kāvya.
Pollock (2006:75) [italics mine]
However, in the kāvya-śāstra tradition, there is very little reflection on
praśasti as such and no direction that it could be composed only in San-
skrit, as was the case, for example, with the mahākāvya. For Pollock,
praśasti in the inscriptions and kāvya in the court, appear to be two
sides of the same coin, but it is not at all clear if the kāvya-śāstra tradi-
tion attached as much importance to the former. True, the linguistic
and aesthetic analysis of kāvya would have influenced the composi-
tion of praśasti-s, but the way Pollock presents the issue it would seem
that it worked the other way around, as if the study of kāvya was mo-
tivated by its application in, what would have been considered to be
its final and sole product, the praśasti. The point of such a projection
is, of course, to show that kāvya was all about politics, but this view is
not borne out by the tradition itself which conceives of other purposes
for kāvya — namely, the production of alaukika ramaṇīyatā, āhlāda and
saundarya, what could be understood as pure aesthetic delight or bliss-
ful beauty.
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2. Desacralization of the Indian Rasa Tradition 75
Valorizing Bhoja
In the great kāvya-śāstra tradition of India, there are two scholars
who attract Pollock’s greatest admiration: firstly, Bhoja, the author
of Sarasvatī-kaṇṭhābharaṇa and Śṛṅgāra-prakāśa, and secondly, Bhaṭṭa
Nāyaka, the author of Hṛdayadarpaṇa. In both cases, he laments that
the tradition has been most neglectful of these two scholars, and he
writes with the aim of restoring to them their deserved greatness.
One can read in this attempt a way of taking control of the
tradition. A rift is suggested by depicting some scholars as having
been unjustly ignored by the tradition. By valorising them and,
conversely, by downgrading the importance of those scholars, such
as Abhinavagupta, whom the tradition itself has considered as
significant, one can give a new direction to the tradition.
Evidently, Pollock revels in projecting discrepancies and breaches
within the tradition rather than emphasizing continuity and coher-
ence. For example, he (Pollock 1998:119-120) picks up on Sivaprasad
Bhattacharyya’s remark that “Bhoja’s discourse on rasa is the most de-
tailed and provocative we have, and the most unusual, differing often
essentially from both Bharata and those who follow him” but argues
that Bhattacharyya has not “acknowledged or ... recognized the depth
of this disagreement”, and adds further:
As for those who followed Bhoja in time, what neither Bhattacharyya
nor anyone else has clearly spelled out is just how fundamental the
differences between them are (Pollock 1998:119-120).
The kāvya-śāstra tradition is thus projected as lacking in sufficient
critical thinking — a lacuna that Pollock and scholars trained by him
will allegedly fill.
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Conclusion
There was a time when Indology used to be a record of the
Western experience of Indian texts and traditions, viewed through
the lens of what are now pejoratively termed as Christocentric or
Eurocentric categories. The scientific objectivity that it claimed for
itself is condescendingly dismissed now as Orientalism, the Western
imagination of India. The new intellectual orthodoxy of the post-
modern, post-colonial world idealizes emic studies and seeks to
understand native culture from the perspective of the native. The
contemporary Western scholar is interested in studying the cultural
artefacts of a tradition in the manner in which they were received by
the tradition. Now in the case of Sanskrit literature this process would
be influenced by Sanskrit literary theory.
However, the aspect of the production and reception of text that is of
interest to Western scholars, especially of the Marxist strain, is social
knowledge but it appears that the Sanskrit literary theory itself is more
interested in language philosophy and emotive experience. So the
question arises: what was the significance of the social-moral aesthetic
in literature? How effective was the “social effect” of texts? If it was
not a major concern for the Indians themselves, then the Western
analysis of the social reception of texts by the contemporary audience
is just Orientalism of a different kind.
That is, of course, what it really is but one needs to provide some kind
of a cloak for it so it can pass muster. This is what I think Pollock seeks
to accomplish by the recuperation of the socio-political in Sanskrit
literary theory. Now as he himself shows the social was always evident
in it from Bharata to Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja. The problem, however,
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2. Desacralization of the Indian Rasa Tradition 87
We thus find that, on the one hand, through the works of Pollock
and other scholars, the Indian rasa tradition is under pressure of
desacralization, while, on the other hand, it is being appropriated by
other sacred traditions for the spread of their religious discourse.
Bibliography
Chari, V. K. (1993). Sanskrit Criticism. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass.
Delmonico, Neal. (2016). Sacred Rapture: A study of the Religious Aesthetic
of Śrī Rūpa Gosvāmin. Unpublished dissertation, University of
Chicago.
Ingalls, Daniel H. H. (1965). An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry. Harvard
University Press.
— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan. (1990). The
Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta.
Harvard University Press.
Michelle Voss Roberts. (2012). “Tasting the Divine: The Aesthetics
of Religious Emotion in Indian Christianity,” Religion 42.4 (2012).
pp. 575–595.
Mitra, Arati. (1989). Origin and Development of Sanskrit Metrics. Calcutta:
The Asiatic Society.
Pollock, Sheldon. (1998). “Bhoja’s Śṛṅgāra-prakāśa and the Problem of
Rasa: A Historical Introduction and Translation.” Asiatische Studien
70, 1. pp. 117–192.
— (2001). The Social Aesthetic and Sanskrit Literary Theory. Journal of
Indian Philosophy 29, 1-2. pp. 197–229.
— (2006). The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture
and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
— (Ed.) (2010a). Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History. Delhi:
Manohar.
— (2010b). “What was Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka Saying? The Hermeneutical
Transformation of Indian Aesthetics.” In Pollock (2010a). pp. 143–
184.
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Chapter 3
– K. Gopinath
(kgopinath2@gmail.com)
Abstract
Prof. Sheldon Pollock opines that Indian thinkers have neither
attempted a robust theory for creativity nor did they have theory
across kalā-s. We arque here against this opinion by sketching a
computationally inspired theory of rasa (a work in progress), and
attempt to uncover Indic insights over the ages in support of the
theory. Finally, we illustrate it with examples from certain art forms.
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 An Initial Riposte
1.2 Outline of the Paper
* pp. 89–177. In: Kannan, K. S. (Ed.) (2018). Western Indology On Rasa – A Pūrvapakṣa.
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1 Introduction
In his Introduction to his A Rasa Reader, Pollock makes a far-reaching
remark:
“As for questions of creativity and genius (pratibhā), Indian thinkers
certainly were interested in them, but they never thought it necessary
to develop a robust theory to account for their nature or impact on the
work.”
(Pollock 2016:2).
Furthermore,
“There were separate cultural domains of poetry (kāvya), drama (nāṭya),
music (saṁgīta, consisting of vocal and instrumental music and dance),
and less carefully thematized practices, with terminology also less
settled, including painting (citra), sculpture (often pusta), architecture
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3. Towards a Computational Theory of Rasa 91
(for which there was no common term at all), and the crafts (kalā), which
could include many of the preceding when that was deemed necessary.”
(Pollock 2016:2)
The first quote raises issues of “lack” of robust theories in regard to
pratibhā, the second one laments that there “were” (note past tense)
disparate kalā-s, each incomplete in some way, implying that there
was nothing common at all amongst them or possibly amongst their
theories also.
The surprising aspect here is the certainty with which these opinions
are stated (“never thought it necessary”, “for which there was no
common term at all”, “there were separate cultural domains”, etc).
In addition, there seems to be a problematic translation of the word
pratibhā by Pollock as “creativity and genius” when used without
any qualification. Though definitely related to that sense, pratibhā is
probably more correctly translated as “flash of insight”, in the context
of rasa, sphoṭa and related areas (for example, Vākyapadīya (2.143, 152))
(Pillai 1971):
“When the word-meanings in a sentence are described (from out of the
sentence) and (thus) understood, a different flash of insight [pratibhā]
is produced (out of it). That (flash of insight) presented by the word-
meanings is described as the meaning of the sentence.” (2.143)
“That flash of insight [pratibhā] is considered to be of 6 kinds, as
obtained (1) by nature (2) by action (3) by practice (4) by meditation
(5) by invisible causes and (6) handed down by the wise.” (2.152)
Also, (Kaviraj 1966) says:
The word Pratibhā, which literally means a flash of light, a revelation, is
found in literature in the sense of wisdom characterised by immediacy
and freshness. It might be called the supersensuous and supra-rational
apperception, grasping truth directly, and would, therefore, seem to
have the same value, both as a faculty and as an act in Indian Philosophy,
as Intuition has in some of the Western systems. From a general survey
of the literature concerned and a careful analysis of its contents it would
appear that the word is used in two distinct but allied ‘senses’:
(i) To indicate any kind of knowledge which is not sense-born nor of the
nature of an inference. But as such knowledge may range over a wide
variety of subjects, it is possible to distinguish it again as lower and
higher. The phenomena of ordinary clairvoyance and telepathy are
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92 K. Gopinath
(ii) In the latter sense, however, the use of the term is restricted to the
Āgamic literature, where it stands for the Highest Divinity, understood
as Principle of Intelligence and conceived as female. In other words,
Pratibhā, otherwise known as ParāSaṁvit or CitīShakti, means in the
Āgama, especially in the Tripurā and Trika sections of it, the power of
self-revelation or self-illumination of the Supreme Spirit, with which
it is essentially and eternally Identical. The employment of the word
in the sense of ’guru’ (as in Abhinavagupta, Tantrasāra, p. 120) comes
under this second head.
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this paper) have been propounded and applied in the context of and
across various art forms; and many of these have mathematical/com-
putational aspects to it. Sādhāraṇīkaraṇa removes the specificities in
an observation that are observer-dependent so as to be “universal” as
far as possible12 . Here we are referring to portraying ideal rather than
physical likeness. Note that generalization, a related term, refers to
arriving at commonalities across several observations, a “bottom up”
approach.
Historically, theorization of rasa has proceeded through many steps,
taken by many thinkers over the centuries. Rasa has been held to be
experienced — through anusandhāna (“recollection”) or direct percep-
tion (Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa, a Mīmāṁsaka), by inference (Śaṅkuka); by a pro-
cess of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa (“generalization”)13 (Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka); through
vyañjanā (“suggestion”) (Ānandavardhana/Abhinavagupta); and so on.
Each of these has a direct computational analog: lookup, logical infer-
ence, abstraction and hierarchy/category formation, and layered de-
scription with even possibly “epigenetic” or “transcendental” proper-
ties.
Such thinking also interacted with a philosophical outlook such as
Sāṅkhya: it is opined here that aesthetic and mystic experience
both spring from the same source — given that when enjoying rasa,
both rajas and tamas disappear with only sattva remaining; the bliss
experienced is independent of outside factors (as one reposes onto
one’s own self) as the mystic experience is out of the world, while that
of aesthetic in the world.
A related area of research currently is “Affective Computing”; at the
“physics” level, it concentrates on the mechanics of how to make
emotions register through sensors (e.g., skin galvanic conduction) or
how to recognize emotions. Another related area of current research
in this field with practical applications is that of microexpressions:
the emphasis here is the “involuntary, fleeting facial movements
that reveal true emotions—[that] hold valuable information for
scenarios ranging from security interviews and interrogations to
media analysis” (Satya 2017). Nāṭyaśāstra has something to say here
(for example, we discuss in this paper the varieties of eye glances) but
from a rasa perspective.
Recent work in the area of affective computing use models such as
appraisal-derivation (Stacy 2010) that are similar in spirit to how
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3. Towards a Computational Theory of Rasa 99
Bharata surmised rasa-s are produced (see for example, journal articles
in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing). Two critical statements
in Nāṭyaśāstra are “vibhāvānubhāva-vyabhicāri-saṁyogād rasa-niṣpattiḥ”
(Chapter 6) and “ebhyaś ca sāmānya-guṇa-yogena rasā niṣpadyante”
(Chap 7). The first one is close to but not quite an equational
relation as niṣpattiḥ is not defined. We suggest that sādhāraṇīkaraṇa
is the final but implicit domain-independent operation on vibhāva-s
(usually translated as “antecedent events”), anubhāva-s (“consequent
responses”) and vyabhicāribhāva-s (“transitory emotions”) in whatever
way they are combined, before this final operation, in a domain-
specific way. A domain could be some art form; this could be
a base art form by itself or multiple ones together such as film
or nāṭya. Similarly, sādhāraṇīkaraṇa seems to be implicated in the
relation between bhāva-s and rasa as in the second statement (which
actually refers to “commonization”), i.e., rasa is the end result of
sādhāraṇīkaraṇa.
Sādhāraṇīkaraṇa is best understood as dimensionality reduction14 in
the most general mathematical sense: due to the limited number of
rasa-s available, the mapping is from the many bhāva-s and contexts
(for example, vibhāva-s) to one of the rasa-s using some function. While
this reduction, often called “data-fusion”, can use many techniques
(a serious subject of enquiry, for example, in machine learning or in
“big data”), one simple technique is that of projection where some
dimensions of the issue at hand are projected out or ignored (for
example, the femaleness of a character); a slightly more complex
one is regression. Depending on which dimension(s) are projected
out, we get different values but they are not arbitrary as they are all
related. Note that if regression is the model, depending on whether
regularization is involved or not, it can be idealization (“top-down”)
or generalization (“bottom-up”). We will not discuss this or more
complex approaches further. Note that Sādhāraṇīkaraṇa can effect
inference, hierarchy formation and other operations (listed earlier) in
the most general setting, and therefore the wide diversity of opinions
across thinkers on the nature of rasa.
In order to relate these ideas to current thinking in computational
linguistics processing, consider first a recent paper (Hovy 2015)
by E. Hovy (from Carnegie Mellon University) on how to model
sentiments of a text15 in a computer science/linguistics perspective
(“sentiment analysis”); it is instructive to be aware of what is currently
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Here the processing after the top layer is similar to the processing
of vibhāva-s, the next one to anubhāva-s, next is the lower subjective
“niṣpattiḥ” processing, 4th one is possibly related to the projections,
5th related to one sublayer of sādhāranīkaraṇa especially with respect
to sthāyibhāva-s, last one being the mapping of bhāva-s to rasa. We give
the same diagram below, redrawn with our annotations non-italicised.
Note the sequential processing in the original diagram for the model;
this may not be a necessary feature.
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Person Appraised
Emotion affect
environment variables
(bhāva-s)
relationship (vibhāva-s)
Affect consequent
Model (anubhāva-s)
Closed loop
Behavioral
Cognitive
systems model for nāṭya (§4.2), and end by giving some examples from
music in §4.3. Next we discuss computational thinking specifically
in the context of poetry (§5.1), music (§5.2), architecture (§5.3), and
briefly in some other selected areas (§5.4). We finally end with some
conclusions (§6). As to the wellsprings of Indic thinking, we then
briefly discuss computational thinking as an important source: first in
general (Appendix 1), followed by computational thinking in the Indic
tradition (Appendix 2).
As this paper is very much a work in progress, we hope that future
progress in this area find a computational perspective useful.
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lotus embodies creation – that springs from the bosom of the earth; the
Ananta (represented as a snake) symbolizes water – the most important
life-giving force from which all life emerges, evolves and then resolves;
the Swastika – represents the four-fold aspects of creation, motion and
a sense of stability; the Purnakalasha the overflowing pot symbolizes
creativity and prosperity; the Kalpalata and Kalpavriksha – the wish-
fulfillment creeper symbolize imagination and creativity; and, Mriga –
or deer – symbolizes desire and beauty.
Similarly there were a common set of gestures (mudra) by position
of fingers, hands, limbs; and by stance of images in paintings and in
sculptures. These varied mudras made explicit the virtues such as
wisdom, strength, generosity, kindness and caring etc. The objects
depicted in Indian art evoked an imagery or represented an idea that
sprang from the mind. That might perhaps explain the relative absence
of portraiture and even when it was attempted the emphasis was on the
ideal person behind the human lineaments rather than on the physical
likeness.
Another feature is the absence of the sculptures and other representa-
tions of rulers or rich patrons. And, hardly any sculpture or painting
bears the signature or the name of its creator. That might again symbol-
ize a move from particular to the universal. But, it surely baffled gener-
ations of historians.”
There is already a hint of sādhāranīkaraṇa of the Rasa Theory here;
we will discuss this in detail later. Additionally, while Pollock
concentrates on praśasti to emphasize feudal relations, here we have a
different perspective.
Furthermore,
“Indian figurative art is therefore not mere portraiture of the specific;
but is a symbol pointing to a larger principle. It is akin to the finger
pointing to the moon. For instance the image or the painting of
the Buddha could be seen as that of the Buddha the historical prince
Siddhartha Gotama and Sakyamuni. But, it is more than that. The
Buddha figure is the embodiment of all the compassion, pathos and grace
in absolute. Often, certain symbols surrounding the Buddha-image are
meant to amplify its message. For instance, the idea of reverence and
holiness could be represented sometimes by the surrounding vegetation,
flora, fauna, yakshis, gandharvas, and apsaras each playing a specific role
in building a totality; or it may be the single austere simple statement
of the still centre of peace and enlightenment suggested through the
symbols of the Buddha such as the Bodhi tree, seat, umbrella, sandals,
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footprints etc. The Buddha image is, thus, at once particular and
universal. The spirit and soul of the Buddha is contained in the body of
the particular but impersonalized form; the serene mood of compassion
it portrays is everlasting and universal.” Rao (2012)
This again hints at sādhāranīkaraṇa as an important overarching
principle. The sacred dimension is also an important common part
across various kalā-s. To quote from Stella Kramrisch (1928:3):
“Vajra said: The Supreme Deity has been described as devoid of form,
smell and emotion and destitute of sound and touch so how this form
can be (made) of Him? Mārkaṇḍeya replied: Prakṛti and Vikṛti (come
into existence) through the (variation in) the form of the Supreme Soul.
That form of Him(which is) scarcely to be perceived is called Prakṛti. The
whole universe should be known as the Vikrti (i.e., modification) of Him,
when endowed with form. Worship and meditation (of the Supreme
Being) are possible (only when He is) endowed with form. The best
position of the (Supreme) Soul (however) is to be imagined without form.
For seeing worlds (He) possesses eyes closed in meditation...
This concession being made, life in its entirety becomes fit for artistic
representation, and the realm of imagination is as close within the reach
of the artists, as nature that surrounds him, for tradition guides him in
the one case and observation checks and inspires him in the other.
Interestingly, the cross-kalā aspects are also very much on the table
for discussion:
Colour symbolism underlies not only the painting of statues which,
according to their sāttvika, rājasika and tāmasika aspects, had to be
painted white, red or dark, but was respectively selected for rasa-Citras,
the pictures of emotions, which, according to the Śilparatna, formed
a group by themselves, distinct from the realistic paintings that were
resembling what is actually seen in nature and looked like a reflex
in a mirror. Each rasa (emotion) had to be painted in its expressive
colour, the śṛṅgāra (erotic) was of śyāma hue, the laugh-exciting (hāsa)
of white colour, the pathetic (karuṇa) of grey colour, the furious (rudra)
of red colour, the heroic (vīra) of yellowish white colour, tho fearful
(bhayānaka) of black colour, the supernatural and amazing of yellow
colour and the repulsive (loathsome, vībhatsa) of blue colour.
Kramrisch (1928:19) (italics and diacritics as in the original)
Kramrisch says further (1928:206b):
The temple builder and the image maker were working on the same
foundation of a magical suggestiveness of form-connections. But the
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rules valid for both, apply to painting too, as far as they can be applied
there. ... This common basis of architecture, sculpture and painting – it
was shown that it primarily underlies dancing at times – is responsible
for a fusion of the various disciplines of sculpture and painting, for a
desperate attempt of visualizing what perhaps is beyond visualisation.
The Citra-sūtra concludes with an interesting observation (1928:62):
“In this treatise only the suggestions are given, oh king, for this subject
can never be described in detail even in a hundred years. Whatever has
not been said here should be inferred by other means...”
This observation may be alluding, among many others, to the need for
many guru-śiṣya paramparā-s to explore multiple possibilities given the
basic structures; this sociological aspect is also common across various
kalā-s due to the importance of mano-dharma in the Indic tradition.
Considering either Indic philosophy of grammar or Rasa Theory, there
are surprising similarities. In the Indic tradition, the intent (or
inner idea, sphoṭa) is said to be the primary cause and then comes
elaboration. In the context of vāk, it is elaborated as parā, paśyantī
(that which is seen by “seers”), madhyamā (“inner articulation”) and
vaikharī (“actually spoken”). In Rasa/linguistic theory, we have sphoṭa
that corresponds to the first two, dhvani that corresponds to the last
two. What is interesting is that the commonality arises from the same
source or perspective such as, for example, Kāśmīra Śaiva thinking
on the nature of reality. Furthermore, Mukund Lath (2016:103) in the
context of thought and music says
“...The idea of paśyantī vāk (and the word “vāk” here, can be plainly taken
to indicate both music and word-based language: both being sound-
based) suggests a level of meaning-consciousness that lies beyond the
ordinary levels of language usage, beyond, in other words, of vaikharī
(uttered, expressed language) and madhyamā (the unuttered flow of
language that keeps endlessly moving in our consciousness). We are in
the field of paśyantī when we are seeking to articulate an unexpressed
thought—or a rāga. We look for the right word or svara, which is
not there but which we reach through our meaning-seeking reflexive
consciousness. But what is the criterion of discrimination? The criterion
is the unexpressed, disembodied idea itself, for there can be no other.
And this search therefore leads us beyond paśyantī into parā: for the
sought idea—or rāga—is not a singularly existing “metaphysical” entity,
it lies in an ineffable field of an ever creative possibility. This is the parā,
the source, the seed or the nucleus of meaningfulness. We have no grasp
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“Where the hand is, the eyes follow; where the eyes go, the mind
follows; where the mind is, there the bhāva is; where there is bhāva,
there the rasa is”.
The anukartṛ (actor) uses his body (e.g., grīvā, bhrū) and cāri, karaṇa
(body postures) to emote the bhāva-s. The above śloka-s give a
vivid connection between the mind and body coordination so central
in a general theory of rasa. A reader or spectator may identify
himself/herself with the characters depicted so completely that
he/she may weep real tears but it is that of exquisite joy! To explain
such a phenomenon, a theory of rasa is needed; this is addressed at
length in the Indian tradition.
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definition:
When rasa-s come together, the rasa whose nature is prominent is the
sthāyibhāva, and the other rasa-s are sañcāribhāva-s.
Rasa is not ādhyātmika but at the same time it is not laukika.
Abhinavagupta extended the original 8 rasas of Bharata by adding
śānta rasa. Rasānanda or kāvyānanda/kalānanda is held to be different
from brahmānanda but more like śānta rasa; here ānanda is defined as
that sukha that is not duḥkha-sparśi-sukha (that which is untouched
by sorrow). Later, śānta rasa (Abhinavagupta) and bhakti rasa (Rūpa
Gosvāmin/Madhusūdana Sarasvati) have been held to be close to the
state of mokṣa. But Bharata’s rasa is in the domain of dharma (trivarga)
and not mokṣa25 !26
Bharata says: “vibhāvānubhāva-vyabhicāri-saṁyogad rasa-niṣpattiḥ”
which is typically translated as follows27 : rasa is said to be produced
(rasa-niṣpattiḥ) by a combination of the vibhāva (determinants), anub-
hāva (consequents), and vyabhicāribhāva (sañcāri or transitory states or
fleeting emotions). Some vibhāva-s are ālambana (supporting), some
are uddīpana (intensifying; usually environmental ones).
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For the recognition part, either the simpler iterative structures are
sensed and fused with earlier (emoted) sensations (“anubhāva-s”)
by the layman or the more complex probabilistic structures are
recognized “emotionally” by the sahṛdaya-s again given earlier
anubhāva-s. This aspect is more closely connected with the affective
component of rasa, the embodied sense.
Positing a recursive nature of reality (see Vatsyayan (1997), Chapter
4, for a discussion with respect to Nāṭyaśāstra), a computational/cog-
nitive style of thinking seems to have been the basis of much activity
in diverse Indic disciplines. The theory of rasa, in terms of affecting a
bhāva in the artists/creators or rasa in the spectators, or constructing
the art form in the first place, in turn has had a computational
perspective.
This is with respect to the wellsprings of pratibhā as well as to
understand the commonality across many kalā-s (domains); hence
if our argument is sound or well attested by examples in the Indic
tradition, Pollock’s imputations above can then be said to be colored
by his somewhat consistent negative thinking with respect to Indic
models notwithstanding his erudition or overt appreciation in some
instances.
Our main argument for the cognitive component is as follows. As
the Indic tradition fundamentally makes a distinction between an
actual emotion of being, say, in love or in pain or feel separation
(“bhāva”), and what is experienced through nāṭya or music or art,
one can say (at the start) that the latter (“rasa”) is a simulation of
the earlier one (“bhāva”). As we continue with the performance,
each such simulation (using “memory traces” of earlier bhāva-s) has
to be stitched together in a larger structure that represents/recalls
cognitive states (along with affective states). The notion of “dhvani”
builds these ideas further. Dhvani is a non-signifiable (or non-
translatable?) “suggestion” of a word, phrase, sentence, (more
generally) topic, or a situation constructed linguistically or in some
specific art form (but which is quite different from the various
alaṅkāra-s considered in poetics). However, one cannot list all the
dhvani-s or “suggestions”, even all the pertinent ones, of a given
text or performance. Abhinavagupta also says that some memory
traces may not be in the foreground consciousness but which may still
have an affective component. What is even more interesting is the
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Why Computational?
What then constitutes a computational (or equivalently a constructive
mathematical) model for rasa?
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(iii) How does the affective part arise in the first place? How
different is it from, for example, the cognitive part? ie. can
one explain the affective part as an epiphenomenon? Can rasa
also be modelled in a computational theory of mind? This is a
complex subject and we have discussed it in §4.1 primarily but
also touch upon it in many other sections.
(iv) Computational help in modelling rasa itself (“architecture”,
atomic units, levels of description, interconnections amongst
units and across levels, epi-phenomenonal aspects, etc.),
correspondence with neuro-correlates by experiments typically
attempted in computational neuroscience. The first part is
discussed in this section (§3) and the next (§4); the second part
is discussed in brief, descriptively if at all.
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microtones. Indian music specially deals with the space between tones
(viz, microtones). Even though there are many unifying principles
behind a rāga, ultimately each individual defines a rāga for himself
even after adhering to an accepted framework: how śruti-s are
handled is very individualistic within the narrow spectrum of freedom
available. The difference between a pure note and a śruti is a “dance”
between form and formlessness, or certainty and ambiguity. Instead
of svara being taken strictly as an interval (suitable for beginners?),
svara is seen by experienced musicians as a range that depends on
the context of, especially, the rāga, ie, it is seen as a melodic idea
rather than as an independent entity. With gamaka, for example, a
svara might cross multiple nominal svarasthāna-s; furthermore there
are instances where 2 equivalent svarasthāna-s (e.g., ri2 and ga1) are
disambiguated depending on the context of the rāga.
To further explicate the computational aspects in art forms, an
instructive example is the recent discovery of the basis of diversity of
recipes in Indian cooking (Jain 2015) where the researchers have found
that “in contrast to positive food pairing reported in some Western
cuisines, Indian cuisine has a strong signature of negative food pairing;
the more the extent of flavor sharing between any two ingredients,
the lesser their co-occurrence” with “spices, individually and as a
category, form[ing] the basis of ingredient composition”. Using
flavour as the “determinant”, they considered various molecules
involved in a flavour. Using an averaged measure of the shared
flavours (in terms of molecules) across all the ingredients, it has
been found that this measure in Indian cuisine is significantly lesser
than expected by chance. What this means is that if ingredients are
categorized by flavours in a multi-dimensional space, the ingredients
are chosen that are not local in terms of distance in that space (e.g.,
curds and pickles); contrarily, Western cuisine prefers locality (for eg,
milk and bread). For aesthetics, the question is then: is there a multi-
dimensional space for entities in each art form (or their combinations)
in terms of ontologically relevant features, along with a preference
model for composition of entities in terms of distance (e.g., near: local,
far: non-local, intermediate: semi-local)? We give such a model for
Bharata’s rasa model based on the description in Nāṭyaśāstra below.
It is interesting or curious that Bharata uses mixing of ingredients in
cooking to explain rasa-s!
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“The key to absolute pitch is early training – very early training [4 years
or younger!]... Those who learn it later... report mixed results... skill
tends to ebb away once practice ceases...” (Jourdain 2008:114)
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For example, the first one says that śṛṅgāra (its sthāyibhāva being
śyāma) through mimicry becomes hāsya whose corresponding sthāy-
bhāva being sita; colourwise, it is a change of the associated rasa colour
of light green (or black) to white. Independently, the text says that
śṛṅgāra and karuṇa (pathetic) seem related (especially in the context
of lovers) but one is of optimism vs despair of the other.
Next, the consequents for each rasa are listed in Nāṭyaśāstra as:
śṛṅgāra: defined negatively as without fear, indolence, cruelty or
disgust
hāsya: indolence, dissimulation, drowsiness, sleep, dreaming,
insomnia, envy
karuṇa: indifference, languor, anxiety, yearning, excitement, delu-
sion, fainting, sadness, dejection, illness, inactivity, insanity, epilepsy,
fear, indolence, death, paralysis, tremor, change of color, weeping,
loss of voice
raudra: presence of mind, determination, energy, horripilation,
trembling indignation, restlessness, fury, perspiration
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Each major kalā in the Indic tradition has a reasonably well developed
structural model. Pāṇini’s astounding success on codifying Sanskrit
grammar is likely to be the inspiration; for example, in the area of
linguistic analysis, after Pāṇini, there has been original progress in
the various layers or domains of phonetics, phonology, morphology,
syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Such a layered system was
possibly inaugurated by Pāṇini with his Māheśvara sūtra-s that is
based on sound phonological principles while his grammar discusses
formation of words using recursive rules. Using Pāṇini’s example
and deep insights, later śāstrakāra-s investigated higher layers such
as semantics (in “ārthika grantha-s” such as Vākyapadīya, Vaiyākaraṇa-
laghumanjūṣa, vaiyākaraṇa-bhūṣaṇa(-sāra)) and rasa (such as the use of
ideas in Vākyapadīya, to rasa in Dhvanyāloka). What is interesting is also
philosophical discussions on whether lower layer units combine to
give higher layer structures, whether higher level intention structures
lower level units, or whether there are epiphenomenal aspects
(anticipating the much later developments in computer science, for
example, of the concepts of synthetic and inherited attibutes of
attribute grammars47 ).
Ānandavardhana and Kuntaka discuss how literary texts signify
things other than the word meanings, somewhat comparable to the
discussion of abhihitānvaya vs (abhihita: “fixed” anvaya: connection
abhidhāna: saying) in Mīmāṁsā and related areas. Computationally,
this is the difference between the semantics of processing linguistic
structures strictly bottom up or “topdown” (or in a “loopy” way); this
is now at the rasa level instead of at the linguistic level. As V.S.Apte
(1957) says (in the entry on abhidhā in his “Practical dictionary”
(available online):
The abhihitānvayavādin-s (the Bhāṭṭas or the followers of Kumārilabhaṭṭa
who hold the doctrine) hold that words by themselves can express
their own independent meanings which are afterwards combined into
a sentence expressing one connected idea; that, in other words, it is
the logical connection between the words of a sentence, and not the
sense of the words themselves, that suggests the import or purport of
that sentence; they thus believe in a tātparyārtha as distinguished from
vākyārtha. The anvitābhidhānavādin-s (the Mīmāṁsaka-s, the followers of
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initially; but, the perception could improve as one tries to gain clarity of
the object. That is to say; the process of revelation could start from the
indeterminate stage and progress, in steps, to the determinate stage. At
each successive step, it gains increasing clarity. It begins from complete
ignorance, passes through partial knowledge and ends up in a complete
knowledge.
Thus, the position of Bhartṛhari is that the overcoming of error
is a perceptual process by progressing through degrees of positive
approximations. Even invalid cognitions can sometimes lead to valid
knowledge (say, as in trial-and-error). Initial errors or vagueness
could gradually and positively be overcome by an increasingly clearer
cognition of the word form or Sphoṭa. That is to say; the true cognition,
established by direct perception, could take place, initially, through a
series of possible errors; but, finally leading to the truth.
Bhartṛhari and Ānandavardhana are arguing for what is now called
a “Bayesian model” for the evolution of “meaning”. In the initial
stages, the meaning is the “prior” given by the abhidhā of the pada-s; as
other information trickles in, the meaning changes with an associated
probability distribution. The background, kāla, deśa, etc. of the hearer
or the experiences (anubhava) of the sahṛdaya decides the specific
distribution finally used.
A mathematical structure with a probabilistic generative model
such as a “Latent Dirichlet Allocation” (LDA), also called “graphical
models”, may be needed as a starting point (as it is only a “bag-
of-words” model, and ārohaṇa and avarohaṇa, for example, cannot
be handled directly) and interestingly, research literature supports
this view, at least in the rāga domain. Here, svara-s are like
words, musical phrases (e.g., sañcāra-s in Karnatic or pakaḍ-s in
Hindustani music) like sentences, and rāga-s topics51 . Furthermore,
each gamaka (ornamentation) can be seen to be a time series but
distributed in a range of adjacent svara-s. Recent research in
machine learning has shown how some context sensitive aspects
can be attempted to be included in extended LDA-based models. In
the case of Rasa Theory, a model would have to incorporate how
bhava-s are characterized as sthāyi, sañcāri-/vyabhicari-, and sāttvika,
as well as how ālambana/uddīpana vibhāva-s produce the bhāva-s
that finally become anubhāva-s. Given the extensive and detailed
psychosomatic modelling in texts like Nāṭyaśāstra, it is not easy
to come up with good validated models that correspond to the
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This section can be skipped by those who are not exposed to computer
systems notions of virtual machines and the like. In computer science,
we have the notion of a “virtual” machine (VM) that is emulated or
simulated by a more “physical” machine, as there can be many levels at
which this emulation or simulation notion can happen. The inputs and
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Let us consider music first. We first discuss the cognitive part. In the
earliest phase, Vedic chanting in Sāma Veda used 3 svara-s and it was
extended later in music to 5, 7, 12, 22, ... svara-s; these numbers Kak
points out, may be related to Meru-prastāra. There were obviously
deep connections with chandas/poetry and redundancy/checksums as
anti-entropy measures with various styles of chanting such as pada,
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krama, jaṭā, mālā, śikhā, rekhā, dhvaja, danda, ratha, ghana. Phonological
combinations (sandhi) have been devised taking into account what
is realizable given our human anatomy with respect to speech; they
result in lesser effort and so can be said to be euphonic. If iterative
or recursive structures are devised, “vibrational” sensations can in
principle be auditorily excited. Historically, for example, Mataṅga
discusses Ṣaḍja-grāma and Madhyama-grāma as two basic Grāma-s
(groups or clusters); grāma-s are collection of svara-s in consecutive
order. From these arise mūrcchanā, tāna, jāti and rāga. Mūrchānā-s
are a set of systematic rotations of the saptaka with an ārohaṇa and
avarohaṇa (so 7 for each grāma). These are described by Bharata earlier
also but something deeper in structure was felt to be needed; this sense
later resulted in the innovation of the rāga paradigm55 . From iterative
structures, the musical ideas turned to probabilistic ones56 .
A simplistic description for a rāga is as follows: choose an alphabet
of svara-s, use well established sañcāra-s or prayoga-s (“signatures”)
of the rāga, and follow rules of ārohaṇa and avarohaṇa to generate yet
more possible strings of svara-s as music. In actuality, there are many
more critical features such as aṁśa (prominent or jīva svara-s), alpatva
(svara-s that need to be present fewer in number), bahulatva (copious),
ṣāḍava/auḍava: 6 note/5 note sañcāra-s, antara mārga: the introduction
of note or chāyā of another rāga. Furthermore, only when the “jīva
svara-s” are rightly used, we can induce life into a rāga.
RN Iyengar has suggested that a rāga is actually a svara time series,
evolving in the space of ārohaṇa-avarohaṇa (scale) with the property
of ‘alpatva-bahulatva’ (Iyengar 2017). Furthermore, “The scale can be
nearly equated with the sample space of Probability Theory”. He also
points out that Śārṅgadeva actually gives many traces (sequences) of
svara-s for one rāga as an illustration; this has been discussed earlier.
Fundamentally, a rāga is not a static concept (due to notion of
manodharma-saṅgīta) and has a stochastic aspect. Iyengar and others
have pointed out that the time series of svara-s can be modelled as
a AR(1) process (AR: autoregressive (stochastic) process) with the
following 1st order simple model: Φ(n) = k ∗ Φ(n − 1)+ noise,
where Φ(n) is the svara at time unit n and k is a constant; many simple
songs taught to beginners (“pillāri gītam-s”) have been shown to have
this AR(1) property! More complex songs need many more terms as a
AR(p) process that depends not only on on the (n − 1) instant, but on
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3. Towards a Computational Theory of Rasa 147
syllable and then another 7 syllables away). Since alaṅkāra śāstra and
its connection with rasa has been discussed in the tradition widely, we
focus on other aspects, specifically the computational as it relates to
rasa. The choice of meters widely used could be connected with the
locality principle we discussed in the context of music; the locality
could be in terms of pitches62 as the poem is recited or in terms
of sequenced “chords” of gaṇa-s (but different from Western Music
chords!)
Because rasa is now married to function, there is a robustness in the
transmission of śloka-s written to various types of chandas that is not
possible in other traditions except in a rudimentary way. Advancing
the robustness further, in the Vedic domain, the generative aspect
interestingly has been further married to a functional notion, that
of resistance to local decay or destruction (reliability in short) either
when chanted orally or when written on fragile materials; this again
depends on a computational basis. Chanting styles (vikṛti-s) were
invented that introduced controlled amounts of redundancy such as
krama, jaṭā, mālā, śikhā, rekhā, dhvaja, daṇḍa, ratha, ghana, with the ghana
being the most complex (the sequence of syllables a1 a2 a3 a4, for
example, being chanted, 3 syllables at a time but sliding with one
syllable at a time, as a1 a2, a2 a1, a1 a2 a3, a3 a2 a1, a1 a2 a3; a2
a3, a3 a2, a2 a3 a4, a4 a3 a2, a2 a3 a4, an expansion by a factor of
11 with a corresponding increase in robustness with respect to local
decay). The repetition in these codes has a hypnotic effect when
chanted as those who have heard ghana pāṭha can testify. The Indic
imagination therefore approvingly quotes āśrama-s and such where
such recitations would continue “nonstop”.
Kashyap and Bell have investigated the robustness of such chanting
styles using coding theory and formulate Krama-māla style of chanting
as a “rate 1/4 linear block code over a finite Galois field”; they show
that with this code a text of 4n symbols can be corrected even with as
many as 2(n-1) errors under some assumptions (Kashyap 1998). While
requiring the preservation of the order of words, the errors to be
detected are the add/delete of a syllable/word in a word/sentence or
avoiding “long jumps”. To explain the latter, consider a set of syllables
A (in verse x) that is similar to a set B (in verse y) and we are chanting
of ...AC... ; ...BD... Now we can mistakenly chant say ...AD... or ...BC...,
ie “jump” across due to similarity between A and B. Specific styles of
chanting such as avichakra ratha handle these by appropriate coding.
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3. Towards a Computational Theory of Rasa 149
Note that Leonhard Euler was one of the first European mathemati-
cians to investigate the (simpler) knight’s Tour was but for the 8x8
board with H. C. von Warnsdorf in 1823 giving the first procedure for
completing the Knight’s Tour.
The theory of Śleṣa was developed extensively too, in ways that is
difficult in other cultural and linguistic systems (see (Bonner 2010)).
We do not discuss this further as its computational aspects are not
clear or formalizable as of now.
What is remarkable is that going in depth to understand the
wellsprings of poetry or chandas, Indic people realised that a surprising
combinatorial or algorithmic base, and the whole world benefitted
from these deep insights in combinatorics. But the Indic people’s
creativity was mostly cut short post 1200 C.E. while other cultures
benefitted from the transmissions of these ideas from India.
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3. Towards a Computational Theory of Rasa 151
the feasibility of this fitting into a given set of time units depends
on solving some integer linear equation; if there is no solution, one
has to creatively modify the structures by adding virāma-s or eḍupu-s
(silent time units) to balance the equation but without destroying
the aesthetic sense. Often, multiple solutions are possible, and they
provide the variety seen. Some are quite tricky: for example, sampūrṇa
khaṇḍa naḍe has 10 akṣara-s/8 units of tāla.
For a simpler example, consider 16 time units for a regular tāla like
ādi tāla. If caturaśra gati is used, each akṣara could be 1/4 th of a time
unit. If a moharā or muktāyi (both are reasonably complex pieces that
are repeated 3 times to exactly match multiple complete durations of
a cycle of tāla (“āvartana”)) is now attempted to be played in a different
gati (say, tiśra where each akṣara is now 1/3 rd of a time unit), some tālas
need adjustments; note that due to the “Vernier” principle, the time
keeping has to be sufficiently exact otherwise, unresolved differences
of 1/3 − 1/4 time units (1/12 th time unit) or its multiples will wreck
the experience. In the most difficult case, 1/7 − 1/9 = 2/63 time unit
accuracy is needed!
There are many tāla-s (such as Dhruva, Maṭhya, Jhampa, Aṭṭa, Eka) and
many variations with respect to time units and also gati. It is difficult to
remember the many sequences but experienced musicians remember
high level patterns but calculate some details on the fly! If they do
not have sufficient time to calculate, then they play known simpler
patterns till they can calculate the details right! A similar system
obtains in the Hindustani (northern) system where for example tabla
is used; it is not uncommon to see somewhat unusual beats of 10 and
half being played for half an hour!
“Pañcavādyam” a traditional temple art instrumental ensemble (tim-
ila, maddalam, ilathalam and iḍakka – percussion; kombu – wind instru-
ment) of Kerala. The performance is led by the timila and the “sense
of sacred” is generated by the pyramid-like rhythm structure with a
constantly increasing tempo coupled with a proportional decrease in
the number of beats in cycles.
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3. Towards a Computational Theory of Rasa 153
Note that working with series of pillars with 4, 8, 16, ... sides as
it approaches a circle or the more complex fractal series in temple
architecture may have provided the practical examples and also the
intuition to Indian mathematicians on how to understand infinite
sequences, with brilliant results such as Mādhava’s series for pi
(misnamed later as “Gregory” series) in the 13th century C.E., faster
convergent series for pi in the Kerala school of mathematics from the
14 century C.E., etc.
Temples also incorporate astronomical aspects (for example at
Konārak); this requires architectural planning with mathematical
precision. Boner says
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has this been understood. For example, mṛdaṅga and tabla are un-
usual and different from almost any other types of drums in other
parts of the world: it has a harmonic character which only stretched/-
stringed instruments usually have. The composite nature of the skins
as well as “karaṇi” (circular black part made of a metallic paste) play
an important part. CV Raman and Kumar discovered only 4 signifi-
cant overtones (Raman 1920); for example, f, 2f, 3f, 4f and 5f tones
are present but other harmonics and all non-harmonics suppressed to
a great extent. Other drums or stretched membranes elsewhere (in-
cluding kañjīra!) sound harsh as they abound in non-harmonics. In-
terestingly, there is similar surprise with vīṇā/sitār/tambūra where the
strings/curved bridge design along with a cotton thread between them
for finer control is used to get overtone rich sounds (Raman 1921). It
is not clear how our ancestors/artisans intuited them; even more sur-
prising is the black patch on the baayan (left side) of the tabla pair; it is
off-center! B S Ramakrishna discusses them in detail along with exper-
iments to explain the unusual harmonic nature of mṛdaṅga and tabla
(including the off-center patch of the baayan) (Ramakrishna 1994). Fur-
thermore, Gauthier, Leger et al. remark
“Raman also concluded that the first nine modes of vibration having the
lowest frequencies give a harmonic sequence of only five tones which
means that some of these modes are degenerate, i.e. have approximately
the same frequency. It is worth recalling that the theory of ordinary
drumheads does not predict even approximate degeneracies of any of
the modes or any harmonic relationships between them.”
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156 K. Gopinath
... [T]he following questions related to the evolution of the table and
mṛdanga arise: How did Indian artisans and musicians discover, more
than 2000 years ago, an optimal configuration for these drums among an
infinite number of possible configurations?” (Gaudet 2006:389)
6 Conclusions
In the above discussion, we hope to have convinced the reader that
Pollock may have been off the mark when he made a categorical state-
ment that Indian thinkers did not try to understand the well-springs of
pratibhā. We argue that this may be located in a computational model
for rasa; existing implicitly perhaps but all the same noticeable if seen
with the right perspective. We have only sketched an outline here.
Similarly, the charge of lack of anything common across the kalā-s may
also seen to be blunted by our showing that a computational thinking
across these domains also permeated their endeavours.
1 APPENDIX
Brief background on Computational Thinking
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2 APPENDIX
Brief Background on Computational Thinking in Indic
Tradition
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Notes
1 See also (Shulman 2008).
2 For example, the concept of rasa itself, as originally discussed by Bharata, was a
way of integrating different modalities of artistic experience necessary in a dramatic
performance (argued as such by (Lath 1984): “For Bharata, rasa was a principle through
which different, discrete fields of aesthetic activity, each with its own separate canons,
goals and conceptual schemes of discourse, could be combined into a single composite,
unified whole.”). Later, specific theories were developed and extended to literary texts
and other art forms over the centuries. Developments here suggest an analogy with how
disparate computer systems were made interoperable through layering techniques such
as the application layer (“intent”), transmission layer (“interconnect with whom/what
type: whether sustained, intermittent, or reliable”), IPlayer (“interoperability” across
modalities globally), data link layer (“local models of communication”) and physical
layer (“specific modality creation, processing”). Such layering models may help in
exploring all interactions across all systematically at an interoperable layer (“IP” layer)
if (approximate?) models are available in terms of some ontological entities appropriate
for the various modalities. This can be used to explain current preferences in some art
forms given some neuroscience based models of perception and also possibly find newer
possibilities not yet explored.
3 Note that we are not committing ourselves to any specific approach as such here; we
will discuss some of the possibilities in the section 4 where we give an outline of the
theory. Note also that we subsume cognitive aspects, being representational, ultimately
also as computational. Some technical terms such as “finite automaton”, “attractor”, etc
are used without explanation to limit the size of this article.
4 P. Nagaraj (private comm.) comments that “V Raghavan and other scholars have dealt
with this elaborately and brought out the philosophical aspects behind the tools for
evaluation. For example, classifying kāvya-s as vyaṅgya, guṇībhūtavyaṅgya (from Apte:
“charm of suggested sense is not more striking than that of the expressed one” with
further 8 subdivisions discussed in Sāhityadarpaṇa) and Citra-kāvya-s and considered as
uttama, madhyama, adhama. The philosophy of vyaṅgya/dhvani behind this formulation
is deep, wide and intricate.”
5 Notethat God itself is a Semitic concept. Even if its supposed equivalents in the Veda
and Hinduism are considered, God is Viśvakarman, the sculptor of the universe; kaviṁ
purāṇam anuśāsitāram (Bhagavadgītā 8.9) is one description of God.
6 Inaddition, it is said that Brahmā is said to be associated with mṛdaṅga, and Hanumān
is supposed to have competed musically with Nārada and actually won!
7 Also,
P. Nagaraj emphasizes performance approach to literature in his paper (Nagraj
1989); Sujit Mukherjee also has a similar perspective (Mukherjee 1981). In addition,
Velcheru Narayana Rao (2012) argues that Purāṇa-s have dual authorship: the author of
the text and the paurāṇika reading out with explanations during an oral performance.
8 See for example, (Vazquez 2011).
9 Note that we are not foreclosing other avenues of looking at it, such as an amalgamation
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10 Alternately,we can also assume the signification relation is nameable. To now discuss
Bhartṛhari’s paradox in the current computer science context in a very simplified way,
assume that a table T is possible for specifying the meaning of every word, speech act,
movement, etc, or in general any linguistic object broadly construed. Now consider the
meaning of T itself! This is not part of the original table and could not have been listed
before. Hence, the overall meaning relation is non-specifiable and non-computable.
This argument is similar to that of Udayana’s (10th century C.E.) with respect to jāti-s
(universals): there can be no universal of which every universal is a member; also
compare with the much later examples from Frege or Russell.
11 Hogan (1996:3)remarks that such Indic insights are valuable in current research: “the
theory of Abhinavagupta does not anticipate a currently developed sub-field within
cognitive science, but rather might serve to guide the development of such a sub-field.”
12 Asādhāraṇatā, however, has been described as transcendence by some, and therefore
not related.
13 Note that the recent affective computing models also has a “universal” layer (see
figure 1).
14 Any reasonably complex system typically has many entities each with multiple
dimensions; however, for some situations, only a few dimensions for each may be
sufficient for the full explanatory power being sought. This is an important step in “big
data” analysis. Typically matrix techniques such as SVD (singular value decomposition)
or machine learning methods such as clustering or even support vector machines (SVM)
are used but in this paper we just assume, for simplicity, multidimensional spaces
with simple projection operations for dimensionality reduction. Given that (recurrent)
sthāyibhāva-s are part of the Nāṭyaśāstra model as well as multiple modalities, deeper
models based on asynchronous stochastic control-theoretic approximate algorithms
(Tsitsiklis 1986) could also be appropriate but this is beyond the scope of this paper.
15 Due to the pressing needs of Internet giants such as Amazon, Google and Facebook,
current sentiment analysis often concentrates on whether a review of a product is
positive, or how to extract the types of sentiments across some text, or sometimes to
understand political trends. Aesthetic analysis is not important as of now!
16 Forexample, an interesting twist in the sentiment analysis research is recognising
irony: essentially, it can be modelled as parts of some sentences saying or implying the
“opposite” of the rest. For a detailed analysis, see (Joshi 2018).
17 For simplicity, we use the term “atomic” here but note that something as “basic”
as, for example, a svara can be quite complex to grasp in its various manifestations.
Furthermore, instead of the simpler notion of svara-s forming a rāga from the bottom up,
the complementary top-down view of a rāga structuring svara-s is very much a reality
in practice.
18 Three layers if abhinaya is also included as the bottom layer.
19 Equivalently, it gets attenuated and dies out whereas a sthāyibhāva does not.
20 “a person of attuned heart“ (a cultured person who is otherwise not preoccupied with
irrelevant or distracting thoughts). Those spectators who are able to enjoy the art form
are called śreṣṭha prekṣaka. However, as per Abhinavagupta’s seven obstacles, some may
not be able to enjoy the art form due to issues such as no sambhāvyatā, or deśa-kāla-
viśeṣāviśṭha or vyatīta or vaikalya, saṁśaya or apradhāna.
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23 It is humbling or sobering to realize that Śārṅgadeva has pindotpatti as the 2nd prakarana
of the 1st adhyāya in his Saṅgītaratnākara as nāda is produced in the human body, hence
the body has to be fully described first!
24 InIndic thought, we have manas (“supervisor” of the 5 karmendriya-s and 5
jñānendriya-s), citta (store of sense impressions), ahaṅkāra (I-am-ness), buddhi (decision
maker that may control manas, citta and ahaṅkāra). “Cognitive” here may be taken to
be all of these aspects as they deal with the representational aspects. In a computer
systems perspective, these are roughly the input-output (I/O) controller, persistent
storage, thread of control, and the code/algorithms of the core kernel. Only the network
aspect is not explicitly mentioned as it is possibly subsumed by the I/O controller.
25 The Veda-s also discuss soma-rasa; only the soma-rasa is close to śānta/bhakti rasa and not
“That which is known as the self-creator is verily the source of joy [rasa];
for one becomes happy by coming in contact with that source of joy [rasa]”
(Gambhirananda 2000:360).
Alternately, raso vai saḥ here has also been translated as “Truly, the Lord is rasa”.
Kṛṣṇa in the Gītā (7.8) says he is the rasa in water, pointing out the subtlety of rasa: not
easy to describe as it can only be experienced:
In the earlier thinking on rasa, like asat (asad vā idam agra āsīt | tato vai sad ajāyata
Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.7.1) or dharma, rasa is the seed, or alternatively the yoni, of
everything, given its identification with the self-creator or the Lord.
27 Note some similarity with Appraisal Theory in the technical area of affective computing
(Marsella 2010): “In appraisal theory, emotion is argued to arise from patterns of
individual judgement concerning the relationship between events and an individual’s
beliefs, desires, and intentions, sometimes referred to as the person–environment
relationship (Lazarus 1991) [vibhāva-s]. These judgements, formalized through reference
to devices such as situational meaning structures or appraisal variables (Frijda 1987),
characterize aspects of the personal significance of events. Patterns of appraisal
are associated with specific physiological and behavioural reactions [anubhāva-s].
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caused grievous harm while enacting ugra Narasiṁha. Similarly, in the 2010 movie Black
Swan, the actress starts identifying with the swan so much so she slips into “madness”
sprouting feathers, her arms become black wings as she finally loses herself and is
transformed into the Black Swan. Black Swan can be also interpreted as a Western
metaphor for achieving artistic perfection through realism (surprisingly of a phantasy!),
with all the psychological and physical challenges one might encounter, i.e. “the film
can be perceived as a poetic metaphor for the birth of an artist, that is, as a visual
representation of Nina’s psychic odyssey toward achieving artistic perfection and of the
price to be paid for it.” (Skorin-Kapov 2015:96).
33 Interestingly,some interesting conundrums in computer science (such as scheduling
in operating systems (OS), recovery of faults in distributed systems, assumption of
state by a survivor of the state of the failed unit, etc) are surprisingly related to this
same situation! For example, in highly available systems, failure in any part is masked
typically by a replicated functioning component elsewhere. On failure of one part of
a replicated set, its communications in flight at the time of failure may be redirected
to the functioning part in some designs. Now this part has to have two personas:
itself and that of the failed (emulated) one; each communication received has to be
disambiguated and posted to the correct persona. Otherwise, the system will not work
correctly. Similarly, there can be “mode confusion” in such systems when incorrectly
tagged data arrives and is acted upon wrongly. In dance dramas, this mode confusion
may also take place; not only at the actor level but also at the spectator level: a good
example is the worship/popularity of actors enacting Indic heroes such as Rāma. The
problem of scheduling in OS is related as when the same actor is expected to enact
one emotion and then another; this can be cast as the problem of “scheduling new
emotions”. The philosophical issue is whether there is an “inner controller” that directs
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the assumption of various emotions; this is feasible if there are independent multiple
threads of execution (and not multiplexed). If multiplexed, it is not feasible as an
independent inner controller cannot exist due to “anavasthā” (infinite regression)! The
basic problem is that if the inner controller also needs to get control of the execution to
do the scheduling (due to the multuplexing), we have not solved the problem as it is the
same recursive problem to get the control. This issue is also similar to the problem of
whether such an inner controller exists in deep sleep as argued by Yogin-s, Vedāntin-s,
Naiyāyika-s, and Buddhists (for details, see (Thompson 2015)).
34 Forexample, a reasonably complete theory of rasa is necessarily connected with the
issue of consciousness. Current theories of consciousness are widely divergent; for
example, “Computationalism” of Dennett (Dennett 1992) and “Integrated Information
Theory” of Tononi et al. (Tononi 2016) start from opposite ends. While the first “explains
away” consciousness as an epiphenomenon (and therefore rasa may also be completely
explained in a “bottom up” fashion), the latter takes consciousness to be a starting point
for explaining the connection between mind and body, just as in Vedantic thinking,
or later thinkers in the West such as Rene Descartes using a different perspective.
The latter Vedantic perspective is also closer to Indic thinking in the rasa domain as
intent/suggestion/sphoṭa and dhvani are in the picture. We will later also briefly touch
upon Orpwood’s theory of reentrant feedback circuits for explaining qualia as it is closer
to our modelling for rasa.
35 Note that denotational semantics attempts to model a program as a set of mathematical
objects using lattices, etc (e.g., Dana Scott) while concurrency may use topological
models for insights (e.g., Herlihy).
36 See,
for example,Youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUyx31f-
U3M. Accessed on 3rd January 2018.
37 There are also stories of complete virtual simulation such as in Bhāgavata where Brāhma
rasika in Indic music systems as locality (as defined by ārohaṇa/avarohaṇa but not too
close to avoid nearby dissonant svara-s) and various types of microtones (gamaka-s) are
employed extensively. Even today, meditative music is usually associated with rāga-s; an
informal poll of some acquaintances trained in the Western tradition of classical music
also confirms the immediacy and accessibility of rāga-s; also George Harrison says:
Indian music is brilliant and for me, anyway, (this is only personal) it’s
got everything in it. I still like electronics and all sorts of music if it’s
good but Indian music is just... an untouchable you can’t say what it is,
because it just is.
41 Notethat the Indic model has both the discrete and dimensional perspective as
understood in the current theories in affective computing (Gratch 2009:3): “Theories
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related to the number of different types of svara-s that can be used in a given rāga and
n the length of the non-sāhitya part under discussion.
51 Extensions can be attempted, possibly with just a different set of constants in the
generative models for some, but more details for others, for structures such as pallavi,
anu-pallavi, chiṭṭa-svaram, muktāyi-svaram, caraṇam, rāga-mālikā-s, kīrtana-s, etc.
52 Furthermore, there could be a meaningful “quantum neural computing” model as (Kak
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59 Fibonacci wrote a book, about 1202, that discussed Indian mathematics, translated into
Syriac/Arabic, as the basis; the name for the series was given only in c. 1870’s by Lucas
who proved (2127 −1) is prime using these numbers.
60 The recursive or iterative property of the series can be seen as follows by case analysis,
as either an anudruta coming first or the druta. First fix an anudruta as the 1st in the
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sequence; the remaining (M − 1) beats have P(M − 1) distinct possibilities. Next, fix
a druta as the 1st in the sequence; the remaining (M − 2) beats have P(M − 2) distinct
possibilities. The sum therefore gives P(M).
61 Interestingly, the process of coming up with a mnemonic for remembering the various
kaśakhenāgabhaṭāya tathakeveñarāghave |
ṣajethāḍhepacemeṭhe doṇasachalaḍephaṅe ||
The above verse gives the knight’s moves if numbers are attached to the consonants
as they appear in the varnamāla (see table below from G S S Murthy (private
communication)):
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67 “From The Alas inscription dated 770 C.E. tells us that the Kailasanath temple was
commissioned in 757 C.E. (or 773 C.E.) by Kṛṣṇa I, an uncle of the founder of the
Rāṣṭrakuta dynasty, Dantidurga. The construction work took about 150 years to
complete. ... While the entire temple complex looks like it is a cluster of temples
and pillars and sprawling halls, it was actually carved out by vertically excavating some
200,000 tonnes (or 400,000 tonnes according to others) out of a single, mammoth rock.
It cannot be emphasized enough that the real achievement is that the entire temple
complex was excavated, not constructed. Indeed, it does evoke a sense of awe when we
try and fathom what it must have taken in terms of mathematics, engineering, building
technology, craftsmanship, artistry, design, planning, and the entire project execution
when we recall that this “project” was executed over 150 years and spanned at least six
generations of experts in all of these fields.” Indiafacts http://www.indiafacts.co.
in/ajanta-ellora-grandeur-cultural-amnesia-part-1 (Accessed on 27th July
2017)
68 For details see Yanagisawa (2007), Waring (2012).
69 Note curiously that the limit of happiness saturating or overflowing at 1020 (Brahmā-
nanda) is just beyond the native integer capability of current 64-bit machines
(1018 <264 <1020 )!
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Chapter 4
– Charu Uppal
(ucharu@gmail.com)
Abstract
Rasa, meaning gist, is the essence that one feels while experiencing
an art piece, be it performative or static art. In the Indian context,
and as applied to both the performer and the audience, Rasa is
considered an alaukika (other worldly) experience. An integral part
of aesthetics, both Indian and Greek (although European performing
arts moved away from the original concept of Greek aesthetics), is
improvisation on the rules that are suggested for a clear structure,
which by definition is fluid and allows room for newness. Using Bharat
Gupt’s study of poetics and Nāṭyaśāstra, this paper will focus on the
similarities in Indian and Greek aesthetics, also highlighting when
and why the contemporary notion of aesthetics in European theatre
moved away from the Greek, which was more similar to the Indian
sensibility. There will also be a focus on the concept of hieropraxis
(art as worship, pleasing both people and Gods), which was common,
to Indian and Greek art forms. Finally, the paper will illustrate,
through examples of Bollywood and interviews with Bharatanāṭya
teachers (in Sweden), how improvisation, and newness is brought
into various aspects of performance arts, thereby challenging Prof.
* pp. 179–199. In: Kannan, K. S. (Ed.) (2018). Western Indology On Rasa – A Pūrvapakṣa.
179
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Introduction
Although the story of Indra and the ants, (from the Brahmavaivarta
Purāṇa) — where Lord Viṣṇu, in the form a young boy with blue skin,
visits Indra and convinces him to question his ego driven involvement
in the world – is quite well known, the story that follows is usually
forgotten. Humbled by Viṣṇu’s visit, Indira decides to renounce the
world and become a yogi and meditate on the lotus feet of Viṣṇu.
Indrāṇī, the beautiful wife of Indra, is upset by the news that Indra
wishes to renounce the world, and goes to a priest for counsel.
Understanding the dilemma of the queen, the priest says that he has
a solution which would be pleasing both to Indra and Indrāṇī. As both
approach Indra sitting on his throne, a symbol of power and authority,
the priest says,
Now, I wrote a book for you many years ago on the art of politics. You
are in the position of the king of the gods. You are a manifestation of
the mystery of Brahma in the field of time. This is a high privilege.
Appreciate it, honor it, and deal with life as though you were what you
really are. And besides, now I am going to write you a book on the art of
love so that you and your wife will know that in the wonderful mystery
of the two that are one, Brahma is radiantly present also.
(Campbell et al 1991:79).
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4. Rasa: From Nāṭyaśāstra to Bollywood 181
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182 Charu Uppal
movements, costumes and make up, role and goals of an art director.
The Nāṭyaśāstra even makes comments on musical scales, musical
instruments and how to integrate music with art performance.
Some scholars think that the Nāṭyaśāstra, whose dates are still debated,
may not be the oldest work of its kind, but definitely the one that
has survived (Schwartz 2004). The Nāṭyaśāstra that has influenced
various forms of arts in India, namely, dance, music and literary
traditions in India, is also known for propounding the Rasa Theory,
which stresses that although entertainment is a definite desired effect
of performance arts, it is not the primary goal. This paper tries
to establish how ‘rasa’ the core principle that defines ‘enjoyment
or pleasure’ received from experiencing an artistic performance (or
even eating a palatable meal), is, by nature, ever-present awaiting its
manifestation through participation in a special experience, and that
it must not be seen through the limited words such as aesthetic(s) or
performance or pleasure (Schwartz 2004, Cush et al 2012). In addition,
the paper establishes that sacredness is not unique to Indian texts,
and that even pre-Christian European drama had a strong element of
sacredness to it.
Before we move further, it is important to establish what constitutes
a Śāstra— in Nāṭyaśāstra. Though misunderstood to be a dictate,
Śāstra-s are an instrument of discipline (śāsana) and have been open
to amendments, additions and subtractions, and therefore not rigid in
their recommendations. Contrary to how some Western Indologists
have approached them, Śāstra-s are guidelines for managing and
creating through a particular art form or activity (Gupt 2006)4 .
Therefore, Śāstra has a lakṣya – a purpose directed towards a discipline
e.g. if one wants to learn about governance one approaches Arthaśāstra,
and if one wants to write poetry, one would consult Nāṭyaśāstra.
However, it is important that Śāstra-s be approached for their
usefulness with śraddhā. A text approached by śraddhā5 will be
approached for the value it has because until there is a belief in its
value, the text’s essence will not reveal itself to the learner (Gupt 2006).
Only those who have śraddhā and respect the texts have the adhikāra
to read analyze and comment on the Śāstra-s. Furthermore, Bharata
Muni gave instructions on who qualifies to be a critic. Other than the
knowledge of dance, music, customs and acting, a critic according to
Bharata Muni, must have an open mind, which Pollock shies from, as
he approaches the concept of ‘rasa’ with a pre-ascertained theory.
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4. Rasa: From Nāṭyaśāstra to Bollywood 185
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In fact, while the theatre of the Greek was reserved mainly for
big celebrations, the same in India was even performed for family
celebrations. Gupt equates Ramlila with Eidolon where a common
understanding was that the Gods were themselves present at the
performance as Divine spectators, making theatre a sacred viewing
(Gupt 2006). Obligatory theater going ended with the advent of
Christianity that considered drama an unholy, even a satanic act (Gupt
2006). Following that, drama and several other art forms gradually
faded from the cultural scene. The revival of theatre’s link to the
sacred happened after Europe came in contact with the traditions of
Asia and Africa (Gupt 2006:64). In fact, the entire genre of performance
studies was created only a few decades ago by Richard Schekhner,
who was inspired by the Indian tradition in the 1950s (Gupt 2012).
However, although ancient drama was not merely ritualistic or merely
religious, it came to be associated with worship (as such) because it was
performed only on religious occasions and often within the premises
of religious institutions. (Gupt 2006).
Like all architects he carried a thread to measure the land for the theater
building which was constructed anew each time a performance session
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4. Rasa: From Nāṭyaśāstra to Bollywood 187
was held. Besides the master director is called the acarya in the NS
[Nāṭyaśāstra], and he was most likely not the same as Sutradhara.
(Gupt 2006:70)
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188 Charu Uppal
Nāṭyaśāstra was written before any Indian plays were composed (Gupt
2006). Perhaps Pollock uses his understanding of Greek Poetics where
there is a clear distinction between drama and poetry, to question
how Nāṭyaśāstra can comment both on poetry and drama. Gupt (2006)
even disagrees with the notion that poetry may have come to India via
Alexander, because he states that other than the possibility of mimesis
(which might have developed into anukaraṇa) there are no signs of
influence of poetics on Nāṭyaśāstra, or vice-versa.
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4. Rasa: From Nāṭyaśāstra to Bollywood 189
sympathize with (others’) sorrows, who suffers with those who suffer,
and who has all these nine qualities in himself.
(as cited in Rangacharya 1966:74)
Bharata does not consider a person lacking imagination, is inebriated,
is easily distracted or is not interested in drama and merely
accompanying another spectator, an ideal audience. Therefore, a
spectator according to Bharata must be able to ‘lose himself in the
characters on the stage, their joys and sorrows (Rangacharya 1966:74).
Such detailed and well thought out definitions and explanations form
the basis of Rasa Theory, which makes it relevant for the evaluation of
art in all times.
Rasa and Rasa Theory: What is ‘Rasa’? ‘Rasa9 ’ is the term that Dewey
lamented did not exist in English, a word that combines both the
‘artistic’ and the ‘aesthetic’ (Thampi 1965). Primarily derived from
a reference to cuisine and concept of taste, ‘rasa’ can mean essence,
gist, or flavor. Bharata Muni uses the word as an ‘extract’, since it is
‘worthy of being tasted (Gupt 2006:261)10 and considers it paramount,
for without rasa no other purpose of an art is fulfilled (Rangacharya
1966).
How do we use a word used to describe a dish to critique a dance
performance?
Just as a result of mixing of various spices and herbs to create a
dish, a taste is produced in the one who consumes it, Bharata Muni
says that rasa is produced by mixing of various bhāva-s (emotions)
expressed in a performance in the consciousness of a spectator. The
moment(s) between when a person consuming a meal, finishes his
meal, sits in silence in contemplation of what he/she has experienced
and before he/she expresses enjoyment – is rasa (Rangacharya 1966).
The experience of Rasa is similar to a ‘waking up’ of a feeling that
has always existed, that though belongs to the consumer of the meal
alone, does not reside anywhere in any of the spices, and may not be
experienced the same way by the one who made the meal or any other
consumer of the meal. ‘Rasa is both a state of being of the spectator and
a climatic state’ (Baumer and Brandon 1993:211).
While the later authors have tried to complicate this aspect
(Rangacharya 1966), in reality the concept of rasa is quite simple,
something that tries to grasp the experience, resulting from subjective
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190 Charu Uppal
Śṛṅgāra Love
Hāsya Humor
Karuṇa Compassion
Raudra Horror
Vīra Heroic
Bhayānaka Fear
Bībhatsa Awesome
Adbhuta Wonder
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the aesthetic experience is... self luminous and self conscious, devoid of
all duality and multiplicity... ‘in art, the purified state of undifferentiated
experience was rasa or ananda’. Thus rasa becomes ‘a state of
consciousness’ akin to the bliss of an enlightened soul.
(Schwartz 2004:17)
Infact, the oft quoted ‘follow your bliss’ of Joseph Campbell, implies
that our true selves are revealed to ourselves in following what
brings our soul to the level of a divine experience. Kapila Vatsyayan
states that “Indian art is not religious, neither is there a theology
of aesthetics, but the two fields interpenetrate because they share
the basic world-view in general that of moksha and liberation in
particular.” (as cited in Schwartz 2004:17).
While Pollock states that it is the viewer who makes the ‘judgment’12
on rasa, it is important to note that ‘rasa’ is an experience, not a
judgment, nor evaluation. Basically, Pollock believes that rasa need
not be visible, but since it cannot be located it must not exist the
way it was understood. It is not clear why Pollock finds it hard to
understand, because even to a school-teacher, after having taught for
several years, it is apparent that the essence of understanding of a
class lecture often rests on the prior reading/ effort /work, attention,
interest in class, and understanding level of each student, which is
reflected accordingly in the ‘aha moments’ in the class. What if
rasa is explained as a state of consciousness? The following section
discusses the debates about the universality of rasa, and how recent
scholars have tried to explain it in terms of a mental state that cannot
be located but only experienced, although it is reflected in certain
physical changes.
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4. Rasa: From Nāṭyaśāstra to Bollywood 193
the resulting Sanskrit play and its performance consequently are wholly
different in kind from, say a Greek tragedy.
(Baumer and Brandon 1993:211-212)
For a non-Indian to experience rasa, a ‘cultural conditioning’ is a
pre-requisite, as prescribed by Nāṭyaśāstra. However, other scholars
consider rasa universal, equating it with ‘aesthetic joy’ (Raghvan and
Shanta Gandhi, as cited in Baumer and Brandon 1993:212). Regardless,
Baumer and Brandon (1993) highlight that rasa being associated
with emotions rather than intellect is (wrongly) denigrated in the
West, because there is an enormous difference in say emotions
derived/experienced from soap opera and rasa—for, the process is
crude in Western soap opera, it is marvelously refined and artistic in
India (Baumer and Brandon 1993:212).
Gupt (2006) however, compares rasa to catharsis, which he says is not
mere relief, but should be
regarded as restoration to a state of pleasure not generally experienced
[while] the process of rasa emergence requires the removal of
obstructions [...].Katharsis and rasa, with their separate points of
emphasis, both begin with purification and end in delight.
(Gupt 2006:272-73)
It is this experience of catharsis that is so accepted in appraising
Western art performances that can be likened to rasa in the Indian
context, implying that a similar concept was elucidated in both the
West and the East. In fact, Richard Schechner has developed a
performance theory combining the East and West concepts called,
‘rasa aesthetics’ which considers it from the point of view of changes,
which occur in the nervous system.
However, Mason (2015) not only considers rasa to be alive and
universal, but also disagrees with the new theory of ‘rasa aesthetics’
as proposed by Richard Schekner, because he stresses that ‘rasa’ and
‘aesthetics’ have little in common.
Rasa is a conscious state having its own unitary and subjective quality, as
well as its own content determined by memory and knowledge. Based
on precepts of neural Darwinism, as articulated by Edelman, we can
articulate rasa as a state of consciousness that arises from the contingent
interactivity of brain systems, intentionality and attention. There is no
rasa for a person not paying attention. (Mason 2015:103)
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4. Rasa: From Nāṭyaśāstra to Bollywood 195
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196 Charu Uppal
Bibliography
Baumer, R. V. M., and Brandon, J. R. (1993). Sanskrit Drama in
Performance. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publication.
Campbell, J., Moyers, B. D., and Flowers, B. S. (1991). The Power of Myth
(1st edition). New York: Anchor Books.
Cush, D., Robinson, C., and York, M. (2012). Encyclopedia of Hinduism.
New York: Routledge.
Chakravorty, P. (2004). “Dance, Pleasure and Indian Women as
Multisensorial Subjects.” Visual Anthropology, 17(1). pp. 1–17.
Daboo, J. (2009). “To learn Through the Body: Teaching Asian Forms of
Training and Performance in Higher Education.” Studies in Theatre
and Performance, 29(2). pp. 121–131.
Ganti, T. (2013). Bollywood: a Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. New
York: Routledge.
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4. Rasa: From Nāṭyaśāstra to Bollywood 197
Gupt, Bharat (2006). Dramatic Concepts Greek & Indian: A Study of the
Poetics and the Nāṭyaśāstra. New Delhi: DK Printworld.
— (2012). Lectures for Kalashetra. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=zR2nCmB3AMo. Accessed on 20th November 2016.
— (2015). “Re-establishing Śāstra-s”. In IndiaFacts. http:
//indiafacts.org/re-establishing-Śāstra-s-indian-
education/. Accessed on 20th November 2016.
Kumar, C. B. (2014). “The Popularity of the Supporting Cast in Hindi
Cinema.” South Asian Popular Culture, 12(3). pp. 189–198.
Mason, D. (2015). “Brat Tvam Asi: Rasa as a conscious state.” In Nair
(2015). pp. 99–112.
Nair, S. (Ed.). (2015). The Nāṭyaśāstra and the Body in Performance:
Essays on Indian Theories of Dance and Drama. New York:
McFarland.
Pollock, S. (2012). “Vyakti and the History of Rasa.” Vimarsha, Journal
of Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan (World Sanskrit Conference Special
Issue), 6. pp. 232–253.
Rangacharya, A. (1966). Introduction to Bharata’s Nāṭya-Śāstra. Bombay:
Popular Prakashan.
Malhotra, R. (2011). Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western
Universalism. Noida: Harpercollins India.
— (2016). “Rajiv Malhotra explains the challenges of understanding
Sheldon Pollock.” Swarajya. Online Edition. Accessed on 24th May
2016.
— (2016). The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred, Oppressive
or Liberating, Dead or Alive? India: Harper Collins.
Radhakrishnan, S. (1918). The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore.
Macmillan.
Schwartz, S. L. (2004). Rasa: Performing the divine in India. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Thampi, G. M. (1965). “ Rasa” as Aesthetic Experience. Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism. pp. 75–80.
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Notes
1 Nāṭyaśāstra— where words were extracted out of Ṛgveda, music from Sāmaveda, abhinaya
out of Yajurveda and rasa out of Atharvaveda and combined them with muthoi or Itihāsa to
complete the fifth Veda called Nāṭya Veda (Nāṭyaśāstra: 1:11-19 as cited in Gupt 2006:70).
2 These sentences follow the above quoted lines ‘It disengages the mind from its
imprisonment in the web of customary associations and routine ideas. The secret of
all art lies in self-forgetfulness. The poet or the artist sets free the poet or the artist in
us. And this he can do only if his artistic creation is born of self-forgetful joy. The true
artist lifts himself above the worldly passions and desires into the spiritual mood where
he waits for the light. (Radhakrishnan 1918:122).
3 The complete version contains 12000 verses. (as per Śāradātanaya)
4 Lectures
given at the Kalakshetra. 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
bzVIrxjXIPo
5 Śrāddha,
the ritual of acknowledging ancestors, is conducted because ancestors are
considered worthy of respect and value.
6 Pollock’sself-assurance is evident in several of his writings, e.g. within the first two
paragraphs of his article of 2012, ‘Vyakti and the History of Rasa’, he lays out a problem,
and establishes himself correct in his position, merely by stating, ‘my account was
correct’. He also self-cites himself in many of his papers proposing one idea and then
taking them as if they were already proven valid merely by their publications.
7 First,
while in the Abhinava-bhāratī it is found at the end of Abhinava’s review of the
ideas of Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, it is not self- evident that the verse is to be attributed to him.
(Pollock 2012:242). It is of course entirely possible that a verse from Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka’s
work could have been circulating anonymously and found its way into the Vyaktiviveka
(indeed, he may have taken it from the Abhinava-bhāratī itself, though I know of no
evidence that he had access to this work). (Pollock 2012:242).
More tellingly, we might wonder why Abhinavagupta should quote the verse
immediately after citing two other verses from the work of Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka if it were
not by the same author. (Pollock 2012:242).
Regardless of whether or not we ascribe the verse to Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka (though I think we
should), or accept as genuine the reading saṁvedanākhyayā given in the manuscripts of
the Abhinavabhāratī (though I think we must), the verse would still appear to be the first
instance of the migration of the idea of vyakti from its linguistic sense of manifestation
of a latent meaning in the text, to its psychological sense, the revelation of a new
consciousness in the viewer/reader. (Pollock 2012:244).
8 What remains troubling in this tentative reconstruction of mine is that the Indian
tradition seems to have only rarely gestured toward, and never fully acknowledged,
the transmutation of vyakti from a linguistic into a psychological phenomenon. The
most telling case, I believe, is that of Ruyyaka (c. 1150 C.E.). In his commentary on the
Vyaktiviveka he sets out to justify precisely what Mahima Bhaṭṭa had sought to refute,
namely, the applicability of vyakti to the notion of rasa.
9 In
Ayurvedic terminology, the word rasa was used to denote the vital juice that the
digestive system extracts from food and which is later converted into blood, flesh, bones,
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4. Rasa: From Nāṭyaśāstra to Bollywood 199
marrow, fat and sperm (Suśruta Saṁhitā, XIV, as cited in Gupt 2006:261).
10 Rasaḥ kaḥ padārthaḥ, ucyate āsvādyatvāt (Nāṭyaśāstra 6:31) (as cited in Gupt 2006:261).
11 bhāva, abhinaya, dharma, vṛtti, pravṛtti-s, sidhi-s, svara, ātodya, gāna and raṅga.
in the text by which rasa is made manifest in the character, and why this mechanism
cannot be comprised under the normal verbal modalities of literal or figurative
signification (abhidhā, lakṣaṇā). Like all his predecessors he shows no interest whatever
in rasa as an epistemological problem let alone in the subjective aspect of rasa, that
is, the question of how the viewer/reader experiences it, though of course it is the
viewer/reader who is always the one making the judgments about the successful or
unsuccessful manifestation of rasa on the basis of his antecedent reactions. (Pollock
2012:235).
13 Those universal elements that account for the infinitely unique and yet commonly
understood phenomena of art derive from, according to philosopher Mark Johnson, a
common human ‘grounding of metaphors in bodily experience’. (Johnson 2007:259), as
cited in Mason (2015:102).
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Chapter 5
Abstract
The paper will take a close look at Prof. Sheldon Pollock’s depiction
of the evolution of the idea of rasa in the context of the Sanskrit
tradition. The “fundamental difference” between “literature seen”
and “literature heard” that Pollock uses almost as an axiom in his
essay “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard” (2012) will be disputed in this
paper. In his essay, Pollock tries to show that this differentiation had
already occurred by the beginning of the eleventh century or even
earlier. However, the present exercise will problematize this position
by drawing the reader’s attention to the liminal nature of what has
been known as “sāhitya” in pre-modern India. Pollock’s axiomatic
assertions are challenged on various grounds, including the non-
scriptocentricity of sāhitya. The distinction(s) between the Western
category ‘literature’ and the Indian category ‘sāhitya’ underlines the
epistemological differences existing between these two locations. The
paper argues, with copious examples taken from both Pollock’s essay
as well as original Indian sources, that the cited (2012) article of Pollock
is essentially an exercise in peddling Western universalism.
* pp. 201–225. In: Kannan, K. S. (Ed.) (2018). Western Indology On Rasa – A Pūrvapakṣa.
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Introduction
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5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 203
technical terms from the Sanskrit tradition on the part of the Western
scholar. To give a few clichéd (yet dangerously misleading) examples
of the kind of domestication that the Western scholar of Sanskrit often
resorts to, it would suffice to draw the readers’ attention to their
usage of the terms ‘classical’ and ‘literature’ while translating the Indic
terms mārga/śāstrīya and sāhitya, in a manner which I believe is not
inadvertent. There are evidentiary reasons to believe thus, as it has
been a favourite design of the Orientalists of the past and the Neo-
Orientalists of the present (whose cause he has championed) to label
Sanskrit as a ‘classical’ language and hence jumping to the conclusion
that the entire scholarship and canons written in that language to be
‘classical’ — dispensing it something of the stature of Classical Greek
or Classical Latin.
Such a presumption blocks the view of every new entrant to the
discourse who wishes to understand the matter and contribute to the
debate. It is not only a gross injustice to the multitude of people who
use the Sanskrit language on a daily basis for a plethora of purposes —
both religious and secular, it is also discourteous to the Constitution
of the Republic of India which has regarded Sanskrit as one of the
scheduled languages as described and declared in its Eighth Schedule.
Thus, this paper seeks to address the implications (which, through
their reiterations via various channels of dispensing such products
of negative knowledge, turn into insinuations) of claiming the pres-
ence of apparent discontinuities and incoherence in the evolutionary
course of the grand narrative of rasa by Pollock (2012). In a way, this
may help in setting the records of the discourses in aesthetics prevail-
ing in India since antiquity in Sanskrit straight, and dismantle the vi-
cious propaganda around the alleged disharmony of Indian traditional
ideas and indigenousness of Sanskrit and saṁskṛti.
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204 Sreejit Datta
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5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 205
The above śloka from the first chapter describing the origins of the
dramatic arts (or rather the Nāṭya-veda) when roughly translated into
English reads:
“The Great Indra and the other gods said to the Grandsire (Bhagavān
Brahmā): we wish such an entertainment that will be both for the eyes
and the ears simultaneously (1.11). Since the Veda-s are not for the
ears of the śūdra-s, therefore do create a Fifth Veda that will be for the
perusal of all the (four) varṇas (1.12)”.
Of special significance to the purpose of this exercise is the use of
the words ‘dṛśya’ and ‘śravya’ in the last pāda of the first verse and
the reappearance of the word ‘saṁśrāvya’ in the first pāda of the next
verse. Since Pollock is particularly anxious to draw a dividing line
between dṛśya and śravya by distinguishing between his hypothesized
types of rasa as “Rasa Seen” and “Rasa Heard”, respectively, it becomes
necessary to draw his attention to what the text has to say in this
regard. By maintaining an irrefutable equivalence between the role
of the ‘dṛśya’ and the ‘śravya’, the Nāṭyaśāstra clears its stance at the
very outset of its discourse between the sages and Bharata on the
dramatic art and the concepts pertaining to the field of aesthetics by
drawing the equivalence between the twin aspects of “the Seen” and
“the Heard”. The next verse again emphasizes on the śravya aspect of
the Veda-s, which are collection of hymns — poems and prose passages
— with regard to the prohibition of the śūdra-s hearing them. If the
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206 Sreejit Datta
Nāṭya-text did really distinguish between the two types posited of rasa,
then the prescription of the gods led by the Great Indra would not be
inclusive of both kinds of the arts — dṛśya and śravya. Instead, I believe,
they would be dismissive of the spectacular aspect that requires a lot
more work in terms of depiction, as it includes the stage preparation,
props, dresses, backdrop, painting and a lot of other branches of
the dramatic art. It would be pertinent to mention here that the
Nāṭyaśāstra would, from this juncture, move on to the descriptions
and prescriptions regarding stagecraft, props, dresses and make-up in
Chapters 2 (prekṣā-gṛha-lakṣaṇa), 3 (raṅga-devatā-pūjā) and 23 (āhārya-
abhinaya) respectively.
Pollock’s comments on the historicity of the Nāṭyaśāstra at this point,
will be relevant to our discussion. In the preface to his book, he states:
“The Treatise on Drama [i.e. the Nāṭyaśāstra; it is worth noting how Pollock
tends to translate even the titles of well-known, Sanskrit works] was
undoubtedly revised, possibly in Kashmir in the eighth century, but the
work as a whole is as much as five centuries older. It therefore must come
first, despite the likelihood that its earliest commentators knew nothing
of some ideas it advances in the form we now have it.” (Pollock 2016)
reveals that Pollock either grants that during the long stretch of
time from no earlier than the third century C.E. till no later than
the eleventh century C.E. there was a general agreement among the
Sanskrit critics in India about the equivalence of what he calls “Rasa
Seen” and “Rasa Heard”, or he ignores the period in his proposed
effort to “reconstruct[ion] of the history of the extension of aesthetical
analysis from the dramatic to the non-dramatic” (Pollock 2012:189).
He himself observes (in footnote 1) on Nāṭyaśāstra 1.11, adding “[b]ut
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5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 207
note that Nāṭyaśāstra 1.11 speaks of drama itself as both dṛśya and
śravya.” (Pollock 2012:189)
Now, in order to problematize the timeline, provided by Pollock,
during which the Sanskrit tradition allegedly differentiated between
the two types of rasa-s, we need to mention certain sources which
are considered no less canonical within the same tradition, but
fall within that disputed timeline of the evolution of the tradition
and contradicts Pollock’s claims. The first such example is from
Nandikeśvara’s Abhinaya-darpaṇa, which is a product of a school of
thought that predates the Nāṭyaśāstra. According to Ramakrishna Kavi,
this formidable rival of Bharata came before Bharata in time. Some
have even conjectured Nandikeśvara to be Bharata’s guru. Swami
Prajñānānanda has quoted Alain Danielou to mention that Indian
and Western scholars have placed Nandikeśvara’s school of thought
between the fifth and second centuries B.C.E.; even though the final
penning of this treatise was believed to have been completed only after
that of the Nāṭyaśāstra. (Prajñānānanda 1961) See Abhinaya-darpaṇa
35–36:
# 207
208 Sreejit Datta
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5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 209
# 209
210 Sreejit Datta
# 210
5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 211
And,
“Nothing can be produced without a cause, and the effect is but the
cause reproduced.”
– Swami Vivekananda (See “Soul, Nature, and God”)
The Brahman is avāṅmanasa-gocara (not accessible to either speech
or mind; “yato vaco nivartante | aprāpya manasā saha |” i.e. “from It
[Brahman] speeches and the mind return without getting anything”
— Taittirīyopaniṣad 2.4) and hence its experience is independent of the
function of the sense-organs. Now, if the experience of the Brahman
has been equated with the experience of rasa, then it may be deduced
that the experience of rasa is also independent of the functions of the
senses.
Pollock hardly attaches any importance to these aspects of the
rasa analysis carried out by most traditional luminaries of Indian
aesthetics. He hardly addresses these issues and as a consequence,
his analytical vision gets narrowed down, compelling him to conclude
that “the concept of rasa was extended from literature seen to
literature heard” or that at some point in the history of the Sanskrit
tradition there occurred a “[shift in the] ontology of rasa where it
moved from the seen to the heard.” (Pollock 2012:191)
This approach negates even the slightest possibility of taking a
dialectical method of finding the ‘truth’ about rasa, something which
Pollock hints at by asserting the need to show that “the Sanskrit
tradition differentiated between the two types of literature, or better
yet, that it drew an opposition indicating that analysis applicable
in one domain might not be automatically applicable in the other.”
(Pollock 2012:189)
# 211
212 Sreejit Datta
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5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 213
# 213
214 Sreejit Datta
# 214
5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 215
# 215
216 Sreejit Datta
rasa-bhāva-samutpannāvasthānukaraṇaṁ tu yat |
layamāna-samārabdhaṁ tan nāṭyam iti kīrtitam ||
(Saṅgīta-dāmodara 5.12)
# 216
5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 217
# 217
218 Sreejit Datta
between Bhagavān Viṣṇu and the twin asura-s Madhu and Kaiṭabha,
the asuras had hurled insults at the Great God. Hearing such verbal
insults and offensives, Brahmā asked the Lord if this is what is known
as the Bhāratī vṛtti, that which comes forth from the spoken words and
thrives therefrom. Brahmā then implored the Lord to kill the asura-s.
The Great Madhu-sūdana replied in the following manner:
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5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 219
This can be roughly translated into English as: “From the Ṛgveda comes
the Bhāratī vṛtti, from the Yajurveda the Sāttvatī, from the Sāmaveda the
Kaiśikī and from the Atharvan comes the remaining one (Ārabhaṭī)”.
It is noteworthy that the Ṛgveda, which is hailed as the source of the
Bharatī vṛtti, is a Veda that is a compilation of mantra-s sans tunes
— they are meant to be recited aloud with the help of the udātta,
anudātta and svarita svara-s — unlike the Sāmaveda, which consists of,
in the most part, mantras from the Ṛgveda but set into tunes. This
implies that the spoken word is of paramount importance and can be
recognized as a characteristic marker of the Ṛgveda. By associating
the Bhāratī vṛtti with the Ṛgveda the Nāṭyaśāstra clarifies its position
on the equivalence drawn between the Seen and the Heard. This
recurs throughout Nāṭyaśāstra— to emphasize the śravya aspect of
performance while offering didactic discourses on the dṛśya aspect. No
artificial distinction between the Seen and the Heard aspects of rasa is
therefore encouraged.
The notion of vṛtti is closely intertwined with the idea of application
in the dramatic arts. It can be said, with some confidence, that the
knowledge of vṛtti is imparted by the Nāṭyaśāstra in order to draw the
# 219
220 Sreejit Datta
# 220
5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 221
Enough has been said about the sonic form of rāga-s so far; now
the godly form of rāga-s will be expounded one by one. They are
understood to be the forms (rūpa) of rāga-s which are illuminated by
sweet tones and letters; and forms are twofold: sonic (nādātma) and
godly (devamaya).
The nāda form evidently represents the śravya and the deva form, the
visual aspect of the rāga-rūpa. Such coupling of the two aspects side by
side within theoretical paradigms for the discourse on rasa, in almost
every application of the Rasa Theory (in the fields of drama, poetry,
music, dance), weakens any basis for such hypothetical assumptions
as “the Sanskrit tradition differentiated between the two types of
literature, or better yet, that it drew an opposition indicating that
analysis applicable in the one domain might not be automatically
applicable in the other” (Pollock 2012:189) taken for granted in Pollock
(2012).
Conclusion
Even Pollock has acknowledged that the reconstruction of a single
and linear historical narrative of Sanskrit literary tradition is hard to
achieve in the light of the revisions and contributions of authors later
in the day to a text that had already seen the inception of its literary
life (Pollock 2016:16). If this is seen in the light that his understanding
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222 Sreejit Datta
and approach to the discourse, like everybody else, has evolved over
time and he has acknowledged the futility of attempting a linear
historiographical approach for Sanskrit literary-aesthetic traditions;
some important questions still remain to be answered. First among
them is: what about the inseparability of aesthetic concepts with their
metaphysical-philosophical counterparts in the Sanskrit tradition?
Viśvanātha Kavirāja, Ānandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, Śubhaṅkara
— almost all the stalwarts of the tradition who have been almost
unanimously placed between ninth century C.E. to sixteenth century
C.E. (and not later) by international scholarship have drawn our
attention to the connection of the aesthetic with the metaphysical, the
spiritual.
Why, then, is Pollock steadfast on a strategy of translation that
exercises maximum domestication into the Anglo-US universe of
ideas, semantics, words and terminologies? Is he not aware of the
dangers of such strategies with respect to cultural misrepresentation,
negation of cultural differences and criticality of otherness? In
continental sociology and literary criticism, adoption of such
strategies for translation has already been brought to question and
they have been severely criticized for suppression of knowledge
systems other than the West’s own worldviews and historicism; some
eminent sociologists such as Michel de Certeau, whose works I have
drawn upon in this essay, have even gone so far as to call such
stratagems in the name of translation and interpretation as “violence”
brought upon specific (non-Euro-American) epistemologies.
It is up to those scholars living in the tradition, or in the words
of Shri Rajiv Malhotra, the “insiders” (Malhotra 2016), to ponder
over these vital questions relating to the present, past and future of
the academia in the field of Sanskrit studies and perhaps, to raise
pertinent and pointed questions about the work of Neo-Orientalist
scholarship, if not to provide concrete answers — and build the
Uttarapakṣa of this discourse which has historically been heavily
skewed in the direction of the Pūrva-pakṣin, i.e. the typical Western
Sanskritist, who uses the postmodernist, deconstructivist, feminist,
or psychoanalytic framework to read and interpret traditional Indian
texts. Upon scrutinizing works such as Pollock (2012) one gets a
feeling that rendering śravya and dṛśya as two inherently separate
categories growing independently of each other, is characteristic of
the Western mind which has always sought to make sense of the
# 222
5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 223
Bibliography
Abhinaya-darpaṇa. See Ghosh (1934).
See Coomaraswamy and Duggirala (1917).
Bandyopadhyaya, Haricharana. (1978). Baṅgīya Śabdakoṣa. Vol. 1 & 2.
New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Bandyopadhyay, Dhirendra Nath (2000). Samṣkṛta Sāhityera Itihāsa.
Kolkata: Pasćimabaṅga Rajya Pustak Parshat.
Banerji, Sures Chandra. and Chakrabarti, Chanda. (Ed.) (1980). Bharata
Nāṭyaśāstra. Calcutta: Nabapatra Prakāśana.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. and Duggirala, Gopala Kristnayya (1917).
The Mirror of Gesture: Being the Abhinaya Darpana of Nandikésvara.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Dhvanyāloka with Locana. See Ingalls (1990).
See Krishnamoorthy (1988).
Ghosh, Manomohan. (Ed.) (Trans.) (1934). Nandikeśvara’s Abhinaya-
darpaṇam: A Manual of Gestures and Postures Used in Hindu Dance and
Drama. Calcutta: Metropolitan Printing and Publishing House.
# 223
224 Sreejit Datta
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5. “From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard”: A Criticism 225
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Chapter 6
– Shankar Rajaraman
(tryaksha@gmail.com)
Abstract
Any Pūrvapakṣa of Western Sanskrit scholarship needs to take
multiple approaches. Each of the available approaches has its own
place in the larger picture. Critiquing Western understanding of
Sanskrit Kāvya literature is one such approach. In this paper, I
examine 20 examples of mistranslations, followed by two of faulty
editing, and one of misanalysis by Western Sanskrit scholars. I also
suggest a method of classifying the mistranslations under different
heads based on the probable causes underlying them. I conclude with
a short discussion on how Western Indologists must approach Sanskrit
Kāvya literature.
Introduction
In his four-tier model of critiquing Western Indology, Malhotra (2016)
explains Tier 4 as pertaining to a study of how specific Sanskrit
verses are analyzed by Western Indologists vis-a-vis traditional
Sanskrit scholars. He calls upon traditional scholars to play a
* pp. 227–249. In: Kannan, K. S. (Ed.) (2018). Western Indology On Rasa – A Pūrvapakṣa.
227
# 227
228 Shankar Rajaraman
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6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 229
Examining Mistranslations
In this section, I shall examine the English translations of 20 Sanskrit
verses selected randomly from CSL series publications. These transla-
tions can be classified thus on the basis of the type of their flaws:
(a) getting the narrative wrong;
(b) being unfamiliar with the Indian cultural ethos;
(c) being unfamiliar with complementary bodies of knowledge that
Sanskrit kāvya-s draw upon;
(d) getting the semantics wrong — at the levels of individual words,
compound words, sentences/phrases
(e) failing to spot one or more puns that are important for making
an overall sense of a Sanskrit verse.
In any given instance, more than one reason may also operate. In some
cases, I shall focus on explanatory notes rather than translations per se.
I take such notes to be the logical extensions of translations because
firstly, they reveal how the translator has understood the meaning of
a verse over and above what he/she has translated; and secondly, how
they proceed to fill gaps in the reader’s comprehension of a verse.
# 229
230 Shankar Rajaraman
# 230
6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 231
(Mallinson 2006:127)
According to this translation, the women who are hiding have lotuses
in their hands (this is what Mallinson understands from the Sanskrit
# 231
232 Shankar Rajaraman
# 232
6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 233
# 233
234 Shankar Rajaraman
# 234
6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 235
# 235
236 Shankar Rajaraman
“vibudha-ripu-vadhū-varga-sīmanta-sindūra-sandhyā-mayūkha-
cchaṭonmārjannoddāma-dhāmādhipa”
(Prabodha-candrodaya, 4.32, Kapstein 2009:180)
# 236
6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 237
# 237
238 Shankar Rajaraman
According to this verse, the bakula blooms when women spit mouthfuls
of wine on it and the campaka when women smile.
According to Doniger’s notes, however, “the bakula —, said to blossom
when a beautiful woman sprays it with water from her mouth”
(Doniger 2006:482) and “the campaka-s — enjoy the mouthfuls of wine
the women have sprayed on them and they blossom when the women
smile on them” (Doniger 2006:483).
# 238
6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 239
# 239
240 Shankar Rajaraman
# 240
6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 241
maṅgala-kalaśa-dvayamaya-kumbham
adambhena bhajata gajavadanam |
yad-dāna-toya-taralais
tila-tulanālambi rolambaiḥ ||
# 241
242 Shankar Rajaraman
flows out of the temples of an elephant in rut, but also “the ritual water
that is poured into the hands of one who receives dāna, gifts”. The
punning use of dāna in these two senses is very common in Sanskrit
literature (e.g., “dānaṁ dadaty api jalaiḥ sahasādhirūḍhe”, Śiśupāla-vadha
5.37). What the poet wants to convey is that the frontal lobes of Lord
Gaṇeśa are like two vessels filled with the ritual water for dāna (that
happens to be the ichor) and the bees clinging to it are like sesame
seeds mixed with this water. Hardy’s ignorance about the second
meaning of dāna, the culturally prescribed use of water during the
ritual of dāna, and the ingredients that are mixed with this water –
have all contributed towards making his translation ineffective. It
is important to note that a common Sanskrit word for ichor is mada
or mada-jala. When a poet, such as Govardhana, with a penchant
for puns, employs dāna (that is more commonly understood as gift
and less commonly as ichor) in place of mada, the translator should
immediately suspect that there is a pun lurking underneath.
20. Hardy (2009:124) glosses over a pun in verse no. 293 of
Govardhana’s Āryā-saptaśatī with the result that his translation makes
no sense. The verse and its translation are given below:
Translation: “O house-wife, what good is that bad son, born to you under
an unfavorable asterism, who, like Mars, has reduced his own family to
coals” (Hardy 2009:125).
“Ku-putra” is not just a “bad son” but also the planet Mars, who is
referred to as “the son of Ku, Earth”. Similarly “aṅgārakavat kṛtaṁ”
is not just “reduced — to coals” but also “made into one that has
aṅgāraka” (Aṅgāraka is yet another name for Mars).
Since the translator doesn’t provide any notes that enlighten the
reader about these other meanings of kuputra and aṅgāraka, readers
are left in the dark as to what makes the poet compare the bad son
to Mars. The comparison is based not on any concrete attributes
common to both but on mere wordplay.
The translation also seems to imply that what is common to the bad
son and Mars is that both reduced their family to coals. However, there
is nothing in Hindu mythology to suggest that Mars brought about a
destruction of his own family. Even if such a story existed, comparing
# 242
6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 243
two people on the grounds that both reduced their families to coals is
hardly poetic.
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244 Shankar Rajaraman
Examining Misanalysis
Here I shall examine Tubb’s analysis of Bāṇa’s verses in the Śaśivadanā
meter as part of the article “On the boldness of Bāṇa” (Tubb 2014:308-
354). Tubb considers Bāṇa’s verses as “based on the (21-syllable)
Śaśivadanā meter” (Tubb 2014:335) which they no doubt are. The
pattern of long and short syllables in this verse is as follows:
UUUU_U_UUU_UU_UU_U_U_ (“U” stands for short syllable and “_”
for long syllable). This is the famous Campakamālā meter in which
many Kannada and Telugu poets have composed their verses.
There are two points which Tubb raises in his article:
Point one:
Verses that are ascribed to Bāṇa in anthologies (e.g., Subhāṣita-ratna-
koṣa), for example, the following verse —
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6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 245
Conclusion
Translators desire to communicate through their translations a
hitherto hidden cultural world to their audience. However, the extent
to which they themselves are familiar with that world and can make
sense of happenings in it, plays an important role in determining how
effective their communication will turn out to be. Literary texts in
a classical language such as Sanskrit describe a cultural world whose
continuity with contemporary times is scarcely visible even to an
Indian, let alone, a Western, Sanskritist. Western Sanskrit scholars
are in a sense twice as disadvantaged as their Indian counterparts
in understanding and appreciating this cultural world since they are
removed from it both spatially and temporally.
As my examination of mistranslations demonstrates, Western scholars
often err in their translation of Sanskrit verses because they are
# 245
246 Shankar Rajaraman
Bibliography
Apte, V. S. (2005). The Student’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass.
Brockmeler, J. (2012). “Narrative Scenarios: Towards a Culturally
Thick Notion of Narrative”. In J. Valsiner (Ed), The Oxford
Handbook of Culture and Psychology (pp. 439–467). New York: Oxford
University Press.
Bronner, Y., & Shulman, D. (2009). “Self-Surrender” “Peace” “Compas-
sion” & “The Mission of the Goose”: Poems and Prayers from South
India by Appayya Dikshita, Nilakantha Dikshita & Vedanta Deshika. New
York: New York University Press, JJC Foundation.
Doniger, W. (2006). The Lady of the Jewel Necklace and The Lady who
Shows her Love by Harsha. New York: New York University Press,
JJC Foundation.
Dvivedī, Dr. Pārasanātha (Ed.) (Trans.) (1996). Nāṭyaśāstra of Śrī Bharata
Muni (Part 2 of five parts) with the Commentaries Abhinava-bhāratī
by Śrī Abhinavaguptācārya & Manoramā (Hindi Commentary of the
Editor). Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University.
Goldie, P. (2004). The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, & the Mind. United
Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Hardy, F. (2009). Seven Hundred Elegant Verses by Govardhana. New York:
New York University Press, JJC Foundation.
Kale, M. R. (1928). The Priyadarsika of Sri Harsha-deva. Bombay: Gopal
Narayan & Co.
Kapstein, M. T. (2009). The Rise of Wisdom Moon by Krishnamishra. New
York: New York University Press, JJC Foundation.
# 246
6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 247
Notes
1 The full verse is:
# 247
248 Shankar Rajaraman
sakala-kalāḥ kalpayituṁ
prabhuḥ prabandhasya kumuda-bandhoś ca |
sena-kula-tilaka-bhūpatir
eko rākā-pradoṣaś ca ||
It has been translated as
They alone are capable of accomplishing the encyclopedia of arts and skills and of
displaying all segments of the moon, the lotuses’ friend: the king who is the crest-jewel
of the Sena lineage and the early morning of a full-moon day.
8 The full verse reads:
gaṅgā-vīci-pluta-parisaraḥ saudha-mālāvataṁso
yāsyaty uccais tvayi rasa-mayo vismayaṁ suhma-deśaḥ |
śrotra-krīḍābharaṇa-padavīṁ bhūmi-devāṅganānāṁ
tālī-patraṁ nava-śaśi-kalā komalaṁ yatra yāti ||
The translation reads:
The lush land of Suhma, bathed on its borders by Ganga’s waves and festooned with
# 248
6. The West on Our Poems: A Critique 249
garlands of mansions, will be astonished at your arrival. Palm fronds as slender as the
sliver of the new moon serve as ear ornaments for the king’s harem there.
9 The verse reads:
tribhuvana-ripu-kaiṭabhoddaṇḍa-kaṇṭhāsthi-kūṭa-sphuṭonmārjitodātta-cakra-sphuraj-jyotir-
ulkā-śatoḍḍāmaroddaṇḍa-khaṇḍendu-cūḍa-priya! prauḍha-dordaṇḍa-vibhrānta-manthācala-
kṣubdha-dugdhāmbudhi-protthita-śrībhujāvallarī-saṁśleṣa-saṁkrānta-pīna-stanābhoga-
patrāvalī-lāñchitoraḥ-sthala! sthūla-muktā-phalottāra-hāra-prabhā-maṇḍala-prasphurat-
kaṇṭha! vaikuṇṭha! bhaktasya lokasya saṁsāra-mohacchidaṁ dehi bodhodayaṁ deva! tubhyaṁ
namaḥ!
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Chapter 7
रसॄसमथ नम ्
– रा. गणेशः
(avadhaniganesh@gmail.com)
अपयामदु ाकारामामपयायतमािताम ।्
ूपे सकलाादां िनलां रसभारतीम ्॥
पूवप ीिठका
तिददं ‘रसााय’1 संित कचन म2 सारासारिववेचनाथ समायोजनम ् ।
तथािप नाािभर ैक मीमांसन े मनः ूवततते राम ् । यत ईशा आेपिवेपा
बहोः कालादार वतमाना एव िवगित । नेदमपूव िकिािभनवम ् । अ
नाऽ कादीयानदीयिवभेदपदेशोऽिप लगित । यतः परा ु
ु िह रसानमािनकतां
ु
लोपतां सखःखाकतां च कथयिः कथाकृ िः कीयं मूलेदं पािडमिेव
भारते देश े ूादिश न ैकधा । अतोऽऽ न कािप जनपपातपाितमास ु िलते । अिप
च वैदिे शकै ः कै िासंृतिवाग ैगिलैः पौनःपे ु न भारतीयाष संृतेजवातभु तू -
मानपारं िनजामहैरमहण ैवा म ु ििन राकतु कृ ता कू टपररा । तऽभविः ूेा-
िवू ट ैः ूाचायिहिरयणमहोदय ैः पूवम वे सेपसरं ु समथ च समथ नं धािय
रसपार । तदऽाािभरनसं ु धये िमित पिरकरोकः —
* pp. 251–266. In: Kannan, K. S. (Ed.) (2018). Western Indology On Rasa – A Pūrvapakṣa.
251
# 251
252 रा. गणेशः
ु
भौताः पदाथाः ूानमानाां ाय इित िनितम ् । िक भावानामभौतं
ु
सूितितिमित हेतनु ा भौतायोऽऽ न ूसते । भावानामभौतं त ु तेषामभावायािप
न कते । यतः संवदे निवोऽयं ूसः । अतो िह न ैते भावाः परोाः ।
तिह िकमविशत इित िविचिकते चेदपरोा एव भावा इित िनगमनम ् ।
ु
के चनाधिनकिवािनन आयावा अिप कान मिमिव ुिासायिनकूिबया
इित । ािददं तं वाऽतम ् । अनेन नााकं मतं ूितहते । यतिमदं
न कदाावेष ु बते ु । ााम रित-हास-बोध-िवयोाहािदभावूपः
कािचिासायिनकी िबया । परमास ु तेनान ेन ूीितवा भीितवा शािवा दािवा न
जायते । अतः संवदे नपिरिधबाा ये के ऽिप वैािनकवावािवारा मानषसं ु दभष ु
्
न मनागिप पिरणमीलम । तािददमवधेय ं यौतािदिवषयान ेन वाऽान ेन
भावूपे न िकिपचीयते न िकिाऽपचीयत इित परमाथ ः । ूायेण लोके
ु
भव-भावयोरशाीयानदारसाय ु
ण धीमोऽिप जनाः े शमनभवि परेष ु च
ु
े शमनभावयीित सवथा शोचनीयम ्।
# 252
7. रसॄसमथ नम ् 253
उदाहरणपानां काानां वा तथ ैव च ।
पमाऽहतः कुया तिाषणम ्॥
के वलं णभषू ाणां िविचऽाकृ ितिवितः ।
न कोऽिप कुते िवांपादानगहणम ॥ ्
# 253
254 रा. गणेशः
ु
यथा वेदाशा िनिवशषे साविऽकानभवपारं , अारोपापवादूिबयािनपणं
तऽातमावाऽय मीमांसनं िनिधेन िविधना नामधेन िवषा
कृ ािमना च तितजेन ौीसिदानेसरतीािमचरणेन धािय तथ ैव
िचरनेन मिु ननािप तऽभवता भरतेन महानयमौपिनषिदको नयः ूगतया समाकिलतः
कीये नाााये । नाऽ कािचाजडता, िवासाभासाभासता, हेाभासिषता
ु
क सरिणः ूवितता । के वलं सवापचेयूमाण ैरेव सकलमिप समनितम ।् तथा —
अा-लोक-शााूमाणिऽतयाितम ्।
कलामीमांसनं काय सदायबमो सौ ॥
ु
अऽािभनवगपादैः ीकृ तिमदमेव टीकायाम ् । के णािप िप मिहो
ाावसरे । अ ुचरण ैरवदातकीितिभः कृ मूितमनीिषिभः ूबे सिगदं
ूबोिध8 । तवमा कयामेदां नाम संवदे नं, लोक ु लोमानो
लोक एव येशकालूितितः, शां तावदेतयोः समाहारपं ान-िवानसमितं
यिु पररान
ु ु
भव िनूचिनपणम ्।
रू ीणां सरिणमेव समाकल कलयामेिदयमऽोपलिः —
पूवस
अवाऽयनी ैव सिदानवेदनम ्।
ान ु यथ ैवाे रसािप तथ ैव िह ॥
िकानो रसाे ुराकलाबमैः ।
िनिमहत एवायं तो ॄासहोदरः ॥
ु नयसिभम ्।
वबोििचनं चािप ौ
# 254
7. रसॄसमथ नम ् 255
ु
अारोपापवादाां सधीमिः ूवतत े ॥
िनसविवानं पनव ु दानीितवत ्।
न ेित न ेित बमेण ैव रसपयवसािय िह ॥
ु पररा ।
यथा वेदािवायां जीव
तथा सािहिवायां महाकिवपररा ॥
# 255
256 रा. गणेशः
े वे काानां च कलानां च पदेशो भूिर ँयत इित न ैके ष ु ूिसेष ु सूेष ु िवौतु एव ।
वेद
तथा चाऽ परमानपारं िनरितशयपेण जागतित न संशयः । अररायामिप
वेदानां कामूलं तऽ तऽ ूापि िविका (एकोऽभूिलनात...् इित पे)-भवभूित(उर-
रामचिरते)-राजशेखरािदिभः । अवाोऽरिव-गणपितमिु न-कपािलशाि-वासदेु व-
# 256
7. रसॄसमथ नम ् 257
भारतीयकलाशाूानानां पररा ।
मूमापनमाहाािासाहा िचरनी ॥
ु
न के वलं रसदशन परमलार-गण-रीित-माग -वबता-िन-औिचादीिन सवायिप
ु
कातािन किव-सदयसंवदे निवशािन यथाायं ानमहीित सिनितम ु ् । यत
एतेषां तानां ूितपादनपूवम वे ास-वाीिक-कािलदासादयो महाकवय इित मािनताः
ु तािभः पिरकनािभः ूेकतया िवमृा अिलतान ेेव ूितिताः ख!
पनरे
ु
यथा लारमागण ‘उपमा कािलदासे’ित, गण-रीादीनां वना ‘वैदभिगरां वास’
ु
इित, वबोिपथेन वबतापरमाचाय (‘कके कािलदास’ इित कृ मूितमहोदय लेख
उे ः) इित, िनसरया िनधरर ु (“कािलदासूभृतयो िऽाः पषा वा महाकवय”
इानवधनः) इित, औिचपा परमौिचकारीित (“पठे मािल कािलदास-
कृ तूबािन”ित ेम े ः) इित मत ैं वहिः ूान ैः िकमा िनते?
अाािप ताेतािन रसौिचवबतापेण सवूकाराणां काािदकलानां
ु
गण-दोषिवमश न े ारमीमांसन े च समथािन सीपोिदतकृ ितार न ैके षां
िवषां रचनािप सामीित सूचियतमु लम ्।
‘रसााय’ िववेचनम ्
वयिमदान दयेकृतपूवप ीिठकाः ौीमतां पोाक ् महोदयानां ’रसााय’म ूाािव-
कावलोकन ेन ूतंु ूकं िनवतय ामः । अऽ तेषां कृ तेः ूाािवकमाऽपरामशनाथ हेत-ु
िधा । तेषां ोपिवचारबामिाग एव िनििमेकः; अपर ु ूतूब ु
गाऽपिरिमितः ।
# 257
258 रा. गणेशः
ु चनमपु िे तूाय-
स दोषः कथयित भारतीयसौयमीमांसायां काेतरकलानां सषमािववे
मेविे त9 । िक नायं ोदमोऽिभूायः । यतः —
# 258
7. रसॄसमथ नम ् 259
# 259
260 रा. गणेशः
# 260
7. रसॄसमथ नम ् 261
# 261
262 रा. गणेशः
ढसंशयाना िवषा रसः कृ ितगतो वा पाऽगतो वा सदयगतो वेित पन ु संशीितम ु ाप-
यित20 । तिददमािभः पौनःपे ु न ीकृ तम ् । ह! पन
ु परापतित ूकारारेण
ु ाटनाथ म ।् उं िह महतः शा शतशतािवृत िनमाणाय-
िपशािचके यं सम
काल िविवधािन िचनािन महीयसािप िववेकेन ीकायािण परीािण िनािण च ।
तदा ायत एवेदं तं यिववा गायनो वा नटो वा िचऽिशी वा कलािनमाण-
िचकीषायां यदा ूेिरताबिह तदा बािमदं जगदारमानिवृीः कोऽिप
सदय इव िविवधकलािवशेषाितमु िन वय तािजकलारचनायां मो भवित ।
अििप काले तदा तदा कतृ ने भोृ ेन ातृने िवमशकेन च ैवं बभूिमकामयेन
ु
भावेन मेव िनमाण ं पिरशीलयनशीलयामिप लोक-लोकोरभावनामनभवित ु ।
तादविसते सित ताय (का-िचऽ-िशािदष)ु ूय ु मान े वा (आशक ु िवता-गीत-
नृािदष)ु सदयिसं समाादयित । सवते षे ु रेष ु कारियऽी-भावियऽीूितभयोः
पयायपातीिन कटाािण यिप ूिवलसि तथािप सदय एव सममसमाादनसंभवः ।
यतः कलाकृ देकः ीयकलाूेरणावधौ िनमाणावधौ वािप यिद रसानं समनभवित ु
सदया ु नूनमसाका एव त कलाकृ तो िनमाणने सवदा सवऽ च ादमाादयेयःु ।
अन ेनािप िविधना ायते ययतो रसः सदयिनो यतः कलाकृ दिप मूलततः
सदय एव । संिदहानाः के चन मेरदयोऽिप ीयभावियऽीूितभाालािवदेव
िकलेित । तदऽााकं समाधानं कलािविद े अिप ूितभे ः । िक सदये
तावदेकैव । अनयोः सामानािधकरयाावियऽीित ेकैव ितित । अतः सवऽिप
सदयाः । अ सदयेन परमाथ त आाद एव िचरं ाित सोिेकपी;
न त ु रजःशमयी िनमाणशििरपु गते । इदमेव भारतीयसंवदे नसारं यदाादः
साधनापेया वरिमित । सविमदमऽ सिमेवम ्—
# 262
7. रसॄसमथ नम ् 263
# 263
264 रा. गणेशः
-
रैत ं कयतां ूयोजन ैकलोपानां साितशाियिन सािभावेऽिप रजोिषतकतृ
ु मेव । तिददं पयतो ॄिनराकरणमेव, ूतु
भोृ -मदाहारािरणां रसवैम
िनजानारणमेव भवतीित पौनःपे ु न ूितितमािभः । यिद िवि
सौय िशव चािप भारतीयाषभाव िवरोिध िकमि चेिददमेव रसिवेषणं
ु
ाभासभावनं ु
समाजसधारणाभासरहारिव लिसतिमित िनपयामो यथा —
रसाादनसंारः शन ैनवना ।
ु
िं िविवधां सूत े तऽ का पिरदेवना ॥
परानमाऽेण सवसताऽितः ।
िसतीित यं वे ं रसाज एव िह ॥
नीितः सामािजकी रीिताा वािप यया ।
ु ते ॥
रसान न ािप कम वायम
यथा ॄ समानां कमणामु रं तथा ।
ु
रसानोऽिप सवासां ीनािमित िितः ॥
ु
कदािचदौिचं रस न ैितक-सामािजकमौमागदशनबता ु
सान ेन धीमता पन-
रल िशरँछेदाय इवा त कृ पणतामिप कथयित25 । परं न कारणािन
ु
िववृणोित । िकादिवकलिनयावदौिचं सवासामिप ीनां परमायतनिमित ।
यतो दशनशाेष ु िववेक इव सािहिवायामौिचम ् । अत एव यथा नाि-
कािकािदभेदानितिर सवायिप दशनािन िनािनिववेकािदकं िचनौेयां
मोोपायेन ीकुवि तथा समाालािरकूानाौिचानौिचिववेकम ।्
िववेकमती न ैितक-सामािजकािदमौानां को वाः ूबलतमो िवते िवानदडः?
तादिभयोगोऽयमपा एव । तथा —
ु
कायकारणभावानां ीनां तथ ैव च ।
्
भूिमका ौिचती ेकाऽनयालं िववेिकनाम ॥
# 264
7. रसॄसमथ नम ् 265
Bibliography
Bhat, Narasimha P. (2003). Bhāratīya ṛṣiparaṃpare mattu Saṃskṛ-
tasāhitya. (in Kannada). Mangalore.
— (2013). Bhāratīya saṃvedane — saṃvāda. (in Kannada). Udupi.
— (2016). Kāvya-mīmāṃse – Hosa Hoḻahugaḻu. (in Kannada). Mangalore.
Ganesh, R. (2013). “Bhāratīyakāvyamīmāṃse hege Bhāratīya”. (in
Kannada). Ayana, (Dr. T. Vasantha Kumar Felicitation Volume). Udupi.
— (2014). “Art Experience: A Classical Approach.” Pratipitsa. pp. 88–
120.
— and Ravikumar, Hari. (2016). “The Bhagavad-Gita Before the Battle”.
The Rediscovery of India. Available at <https://archive.org/
details/TheBhagavadGitaBeforeTheBattle>.
Hiriyanna, M. (1954). Art Experience. Mysore: Kavyalaya Publishers.
Krishnamoorthy, K. (1982). “Pramanas: Criteria in Indian Aesthetics.”
New Bearings of Indian Literary Theories and Criticism. Ahmedabad: B.
J. Institute of Learning and Research.
# 265
266 रा. गणेशः
Notes
1 A Rasa Reader.
2 Pollock (2016).
3 Hiriyanna (1954).
4 Bhat (2013).
5 Bhat (2016).
6 Bhat (2003).
7 Ganesh (2013).
8 Krishnamoorthy (1982).
9 Pollock (2016:24).
10 Pollock (2016:24).
11 Ganesh (2014).
12 Pollock (2016:24).
13 Pollock (2016:24).
14 Pollock (2016:24).
15 Pollock (2016:28–29).
16 Pollock (2016:29).
17 Pollock (2016:30).
18 Pollock (2016:32).
ु
19 इुीरगडादीनां ु ारं महत ्। तथािप न तदाातुं सरािप शते॥ (१.१०२).
माधय
20 Pollock (2016:34).
21 Pollock (2016:37).
23 Pollock (2016:39–40).
25 Pollock (2016:54).
26 Pollock (2016:54–55).
27 Pollock (2016:48).
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# 268
Our Contributors
(in alphabetical order of last names)
Naresh Cuntoor
Dr. Naresh Prakash Cuntoor is a Senior Research Scientist, Intelligent
Automation Inc., Rockville, MD, US. He has an M.S. and PhD from
the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of
Maryland. His research interests include human activity recognition,
scene understanding, perceptual organization and computer vision
for robotics applications. He pursues Sanskrit with keen interest and
is a volunteer for Samskrita Bharati, USA.
Sreejit Datta
Sreejit Datta is currently pursuing his PhD in Comparative Literature
at the Centre for Comparative Literature, Bhasha Bhavana, Visva
Bharati, Shantiniketan. He is an accomplished musician and has been
obtaining training since the past 15 years without a break. He was
awarded the Young Artiste Scholarship in the category Hindustani
Light Classical Music (with a specialization in Rabindrasangeet,
Tagore’s songs) by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India for
a two-year advanced training in his chosen field in the year 2010.
R. Ganesh
Shatāvadhānī Dr. R. Ganesh is an Engineer and Metallurgist by
training, a Sanskrit and Kannada poet, and a practitioner of the
traditional art form of Avadhāna known for extempore poetry. He has
performed more than 1000 Avadhāna-s till date. A scholar in Kannada
and Sanskrit, he gives discourses on Indian culture and Classical Indian
269
# 269
270 Our Contributors
K. Gopinath
K. Gopinath is a Professor at Indian Institute of Science in the
Computer Science and Automation Department. His research interests
are primarily in the computer systems area (Operating Systems,
Storage Systems, Systems Security and Systems Verification). He
is currently an associate editor of IEEE Letters of Computer Society
(2018-); previously he was also an associate editor of ACM Trans. on
Storage (2010-2017). His education has been at IIT-Madras (B.Tech ’77),
University of Wisconsin, Madison (MS’80) and Stanford University
(PhD’88). He has also worked at AMD (Sunnyvale) (’80-’82), and as a
PostDoc (’88-’89) at Stanford. He is also interested in understanding
the Indic contributions in the area of computer science and more
broadly in S&T.
Ashay Naik
Ashay Naik is a software developer at Matific Ltd. and has just released
his first book Natural Enmity: Reflections on the Niti and Rasa of the
Panchatantra [Book 1]. He has a Masters in Information Technology
from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia and an
Honours in Sanskrit from the University of Sydney, Australia.
Shankar Rajaraman
Shankar Rajaraman is an allopathic doctor, a psychiatrist, and
an award-winning Sanskrit poet. His Sanskrit works include
Bhārāvatāra-stava (in praise of Śiva), Nipuṇa-prāghuṇaka (a Bhāṇa on
a contemporary theme), Vaidyopahāsa-kalikā (a satire on doctors)
and Devīdānavīya (illustrating citrabandha) for which the Karnataka
Samskrit University awarded him with the Professor M. Hiriyanna
Sanskrit Works Award in 2013. Citranaiṣadham, his recent work,
illustrates gomūtrikābandha throughout. He has been awarded the
Badrayan Vyas Samman for the year 2016 and Bannanje Puraskara for
# 270
Our Contributors 271
the year 2017. He has translated across Sanskrit, English and Kannada.
His doctoral thesis is a confluence of psychology and Sanskrit poetics.
Charu Uppal
Charu Uppal, is a Senior Lecturer at Karlstad University in Sweden.
Her research, which generally follows under the broad umbrella of
media studies focuses on the role of media in bringing about social
change, identity formation and mobilizing citizens towards cultural
and political activism. Her work has appeared in journals such as
Journal of Creative Communication, International Communication
Gazette and Global Media and Communication.
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# 272
Index
273
# 273
274 Index
# 274
Index 275
# 275
276 Index
# 276
Index 277
# 277
278 Index
Kāvyādarśa 262 M
Kāvya-prakāśa 27, 214 machine learning methods
Kepler, Johannes 160 170
Khajuraho 152, 157 Mādhava series for Pi 153
Kirātārjunīya 93 Madhusūdana Sarasvatī 111
Knight’s Tour problem 148 madhyamā 108
Knuth, D. E. 146, 174, 176 Māgha 20, 233, 245
Koch, Christof 120 Mahabalipuram 125
Konarak 153 Mahābhārata 22, 125, 187, 253
Kosambi, D. D. 69 Mahavīra-carita 78
Kramrisch, Stella 18, 107, 119, Māheśvara sūtra-s 132
152 Mahimabhaṭṭa 47, 57, 198
Krishnamoorthy, K. 257, 260, Mālatī-mādhava 239
265, 266 Malhotra, Rajiv 19, 24, 95, 116,
krodha 110, 111 183, 184, 215, 222, 227
Kṛṣṇa 94, 171, 240 Mallinātha 17, 93, 94
Kṛṣṇa I 177 Mallinson, Sir James 25, 26,
Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda 209 228, 231, 235, 237, 239
Kṛṣnamiśra 25, 235, 236, 243 Mammaṭa 47
Kṣemendra 59, 257 maṇḍala 21, 154
mano-dharma 95, 108, 119, 135,
Kubera 238
140, 143
Kuntaka 118, 132, 174
mārga 203
Mason, David 183, 193–195,
L 199
laghu 146 Mataṅga 143
lakṣaṇā 21, 133, 174, 199 matrix techniques 170
Lakṣmī 237 Megha-dūta 123
Lalleśvarī (Lal Ded) 113 Melakarta 125, 149, 150
Lath, Mukund 17, 95, 96, 108, Menon, Sangeetha 123
169 Meru Prastāra 142, 149
laukika 64, 111, 181, 183 micro-expressions 98
laya 94, 144 Mīmāṁsā 40, 46, 48–52, 58, 60
layering model 169 Mīmāṁsā schools
Levi, Sylvan 17 Kumārila 49
“literature heard” 201, 203, Prabhākara 49
204, 206, 211 mirror neurons 56, 175
“literature seen” 201, 203, 206, misinterpretation
211 techniques of
Locana 133, 256 desacralization 15, 84–86
# 278
Index 279
# 279
280 Index
# 280
Index 281
# 281
282 Index
# 282
Index 283
# 283
284 Index
Finis
# 284
# 285
# 286
# 287
# 288