OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/10/2019, SPi 45 IN GOOD TASTE THE AESTHETICS OF RASA H orror movies are a rather puzzling form of entertainment. Lots of people don’t enjoy them at all, and those who do enjoy them might be hard pressed to explain why. After all, in everyday life you wouldn’t thrill to the sight of innocent teenagers being chased by an axe-wielding psychopath. Why, then, do horror movie fans like watching it happen on a screen? You might respond that they know it isn’t real. But this only makes it more puzzling. Why should unreal danger provoke any emotional response at all? The same questions could be raised about other genres, such as the romantic comedy. We know that Jennifer Aniston and that handsome actor whose name escapes us at the moment aren’t really falling in love, yet we are swept away by their flirtation and growing intimacy. How do fictional representations manage to solicit such emotions in us, like fear and romantic yearning, yet without generating exactly the same emotional responses we would have if we were really being pursued by an axe-wielding psychopath, or by Jennifer Aniston? These questions were central to ancient Indian writings devoted to aesthetics. The key text of this tradition is entitled Na ̄ṭya-s ́a ̄stra (Treatise on Drama), and ascribed to an author named Bharata.1 Probably compiled in the early centuries AD, the Na ̄ṭya-s ́as̄ tra is a very lengthy work. It offers detailed instructions on theatrical performance, covering everything from the construction of the theater space to the gestures of the actors and the metrical features of the texts they recite. Because dramatic performances involved poetry and also music, Bharata has much to say about these arts. So later theorists on the aesthetics of literature and music draw from him; for music there was another early work called the Dattilam, roughly contemporaneous with the Nat̄ ̣ya-s ́a ̄stra.2 Unlike the modern-day horror movie, ancient Indian dramas were not out to surprise you with their plot twists. The audience would typically have been familiar with the plots of the stories they were going to see. While there was some variation from performance to performance, the real theatrical art lay in the effective, and affecting, presentation of those stories. The key idea in Bharata’s explanation of the OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/10/2019, SPi desired result is rasa, an aesthetic response elicited by the drama.3 Though rasa is intimately associated with emotion, it is not just the same thing as an emotion. Rather, it derives from emotion (). Originally, an emotion or feeling (bha ̄va) was felt by the poet who authored the piece. It is then represented (bha ̄vayan) by actors through good dramatic technique; thus erotic love, for instance, is conveyed by sidelong glances and gestures that the skilled actor must learn to master (). The poet may play with a wide range of emotions, provoking some of them only in passing to create briefer aesthetic effects. But the most important are the eight “emotional dispositions (sthaȳ ibha ̄vas)” around which a whole drama can be built, reactions we are apt to feel when stimulated in the right way. Bharata says that mere “transitory” emotional effects (vyabhica ̄ra) serve to heighten these eight emotions, like attendants surrounding a monarch (). Corresponding to the dispositions are eight kinds of rasa: Emotional dispositions Erotic love (rasi) Mirth (hāsya) Sorrow (s ́oka) Anger (krodha) Energy (utsa ̄ha) Fear (bhaya) Disgust ( jugupsa ̄) Astonishment (vismaya) Rasas _ r̄ a) Erotic (s ́rnga The comic (ha ̄sya) The pathetic (karuṇa) The furious (raudra) The heroic (vı ̄ra) The terrible (bhaya ̄naka) The odious (bı ̄bhatsa) The marvelous (adbhuta).4 Bharata compares these rasas to the overall “taste” of a mixed beverage (–), alluding to the basic meaning of rasa which is the “savor” or “nutritive juice” in food. We encounter it with that meaning in ancient Indian medical works, in fact. To see how this may work, consider a horror movie like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Bharata’s analysis would be that all the aspects of the film, from the disturbing music to the smallest details of Anthony Perkins’ uncanny performance as the motel owner, are designed to evoke a continuous feeling of dread or fear in the viewer. Moments evoking disgust or surprise (like the famous reveal of the motel owner’s mother) would only serve to build up that core feeling so as to achieve the rasa of “the terrible,” which is the goal of the entire piece. Hitchcock would have this in mind in his construction of even more innocuous scenes, not only in the more famous moments of violence in the film—even if these are indeed, in every sense of the word, well executed. Of course ancient Indian dramas did not center on murderous motel owners. Even when aiming to provoke the rasa of the terrible, OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/10/2019, SPi they sought to impart moral instruction, and thus played a social function not usually associated with Hollywood horror films.5 It is a matter of consummate artistry to produce rasa. In light of the word’s literal meaning, we might compare it to the skilled chef who uses just the right balance of ingredients to get the right overall savor for the dish. As the later aesthetician Kuntaka puts it, “only when its natural charm is imparted by the beauty coruscating with the innate artistry of the poet and enlivened by the full complement of aesthetic elements can even a fully proper rasa convey its deepest beauty to the reader, who is transported by the play of the fantastic and whose heart then overflows with rasa the way a moonstone is liquefied by moonbeams” (). But even when the dramatic conception and acting are top notch, the rasa will result only for an audience member who is equally proficient. Extending the analogy between rasa and the savor of food and drink, Bharata says that the skilled audience member is like the connoisseur, with a fine appreciation of drama that is, so to speak, in the best possible taste (). His commentators say that the goal of the audience is to achieve “sympathy of the heart” with the actors on stage, so as fully to experience the emotion that can give rise to rasa. The commentators do not, however, agree as to whether this is the only legitimate goal of drama, or of poetry more generally.6 Some authors suggest that rasa could be a mere “ornament” of a literary performance, as in a poem whose main purpose is flattery (). The ninth-century Kashmiri literary theorist Ā nandavardhana uses this idea to explain why a piece might evoke two rival emotions, for instance sadness and erotic longing, which would seem to impede the production of a single overall rasa. Only when a single rasa predominates is it the ultimate aim of the poem as a whole. Others argue that rasa can never be a mere ornament (), and that all poetry worthy of the name must have rasa as its main purpose and ultimate result. Attention is also given to the various factors that may impede the successful production of rasa. There is a long discussion of this in another aesthetician, a critic of Ā nandavardhana named Mahimabhaṭtạ .7 He complains, for instance, about poets who use redundant expressions, giving the example “[he who] cuts the necks of his evil enemies with the extremely fierce blow of the front end of the drawn, sharpened sword held in [his] hand.” As Mahimabhaṭtạ remarks, why not just say “[he who] cuts the necks of enemies with a sword”? Another potential flaw is the use of puns that don’t quite work. The pun, or perhaps better “double-meaning,” was almost as important an element in Sanskrit literature as in this book series. This device, called s ́leṣa, could exploit ambiguous meanings of words or even of whole sentences, and might be used to reveal the complexity of a literary character.8 So it wasn’t a matter of getting cheap laughs, like our play on the word “executed” a few paragraphs ago. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/10/2019, SPi The idea of rasa appears not only in commentaries on the Nat̄ ̣ya-s ́as̄ tra and works on Indian poetics, but also in treatises on music.9 The ancient music theorists don’t discuss specific compositions, such as you could write down in sheet music, but focus instead on melody types called jat̄ is, which were associated with certain moods _ gives us a nice example of the and emotions.10 One early theorist, named Matanga, way that ideas from literary theorists penetrated into discussions of music. He borrowed the poetic concept of “suggestion (dhvani),” the idea that an aesthetic performance could evoke or express something without alluding to it explicitly. And if you think about this, it makes a lot of sense. If you are trying to make the audience appreciate sadness, it is downright counterproductive to have a character say something like “I’m sad now.” Or just think of how you may be taken out of the story of a movie if the director selects a song for the soundtrack whose lyrics too obviously refer to the desired emotional effect. The Indian literary aestheticians were aware of this. It was especially the aforementioned Ā nandavardhana who devloped the idea of “suggestion” to explain how rasa can be evoked by poetry.11 In so doing, he appropriated a term found in the grammatical tradition: Bhartṛhari had said that uttered sounds are dhvani and make manifest linguistic meaning (sphoṭa). Taking inspiration from this idea, Ā nandavardhana argues that dhvani is a special function performed by poetic language. The poet’s art avoids explicit reference to the emotion he wants to produce, and instead implicitly “suggests” that emotion to the listener, thus eliciting the desired rasa. He gives the following example: “wander confidently, monk; the dog [that frightened you] has been killed by a lion.” His point may be this: the literal meaning is that the frightening dog is gone. And this literal meaning still stands, even when we correctly see the point of the verse, which is that the monk should be more frightened than ever—now it is a lion and not a dog that is on the loose. That is the “suggestion” or unstated meaning.12 Another example would be saying that a village is on the River Ganges, which conveys its full significance only to someone who knows that this makes the village a holy place. For Ā nandavardhana suggestion is distinct from the function played by words when they have their straightforward meaning, and neither is it an example of metaphorical language. After all, he argues, poetic language can retain its normal meaning while evoking rasa, whereas the normal meaning has to be given up when we turn to metaphorical or other kinds of nonliteral interpretation. His example is that when we do say that a village is on the River Ganges, we don’t imagine a floating village. Instead we transfer the meaning of the word “on,” and understand that the village is arrayed on the bank of the river rather than the river itself. By contrast, poetic suggestion leaves meaning straightforwardly intact. It is something additional OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/10/2019, SPi that is conveyed by the language only implicitly, which as Ā nandavardhana says “shines above the parts [of the poem] like a woman’s charm.”13 It is crucial that the poet can express himself in this indirect way, since as we just said it would ruin the effect if the poet tried to convey rasa directly. Ā nandavardhana adds that the meaning conveyed by the poem, at least for the skilled audience member (sahṛdaya), is the same as the one originally experienced by the poet. He recalls a story about a poet by the name of Vālmı ̄ki, the supposed author of the great epic Rāma ̄yaṇa (). While bathing, he witnessed a hunter killing one of a pair of birds and heard the mate’s plaintive cry. Vālmı ̄ki himself cried out in a spontaneous verse (s ́loka), which came from divine inspiration. This fits with older ideas about the poet as a kind of religious intermediary, like the so-called “seers” who passed down the Vedas. It was thought that poets benefitted from a special, unbidden inspiration or illumination (pratibha ̄), and that they are distinguished from others who enjoy visions simply because the poets actually set down the visions in words.14 In an echo of such religious associations, Ā nandavardhana explains that the poet may choose any primary meaning he likes in his quest to evoke rasa by means of suggestion. “In the boundless world of literature,” he says, “the author is sole creator god: the whole universe takes on whatever form he wills” (). The resulting poem becomes a means of conveying to the listener the rasa originally felt by the poet in his moment of inspiration—to taste what he tasted, as it were. According to Ā nandavardhana rasa is really an effect of language, like the meaning of the words (thus it is called an artha, or “meaning”). But for one of his most important commentators, the tenth-century author Abhinavagupta, the rasa experienced and conveyed by the poet is an emotion that is universal in character.15 He would say that in the story of Vālmı ̄ki, the dead bird and its mourning mate are simply the occasion that inspires the poet to experience the generalized feeling of sorrow.16 Likewise, the audience member who experiences rasa is not having the relevant emotion in its everyday sense. As we said before, you are not yourself in love with the characters in a romantic comedy, nor are you afraid for your own safety while watching Psycho. You experience feelings of romance and of fear, yet these feelings are not directed at any particular object. This may remind us of ideas about detachment and liberation we’ve seen elsewhere in Indian philosophy. And it seems to have reminded Abhinavagupta of the same thing. By this period, the eight canonical types of rasa found in Bharata have been joined by a ninth one, called “tranquillity (s ́an̄ ta).” For Ā nandavardhana this is the rasa intended by no less a work than the Mahab̄ ha ̄rata, which like any good poem has as its sole aim and motif the production of an emotional response or rasa. Abhinavagupta links the rasa of tranquillity to philosophical notions of liberation: OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/10/2019, SPi “this enjoyment [of rasa] is like the bliss that comes from realizing [one’s identity] with the highest brahman, for it consists of repose in the bliss which is the true nature of one’s own self.”17 What about the emotional involvement and experience of the performers who actually portray characters in a theatrical drama? This was a much discussed issue in Indian aesthetics, and for good reason. Consider again Anthony Perkins in Psycho. We know that he is not really a murderer, only an actor playing one, yet we emotionally respond to his performance with fear and revulsion. How does Perkins provoke this response without actually having murder in his heart? Bharata already mentioned that the actor’s role is somehow to express a particular psychological state without actually being in the very same state as the character being portrayed (). Later commentators tried to understand the phenomenon in greater depth. One idea was that the actor simply imitates the character at the surface level, by means of gesture and so on, which invites the audience to make an “inference” about the intended emotion. The actor’s sidelong glance signifies that he is in love, and we as skilled viewers can interpret it as such, even though we are aware that he is just acting. As one text rather nicely puts it, we as the audience think that the actor is the character, but not that the actor is really the character (). But this attempt to explain dramatic portrayal as a kind of imitation met with opposition.18 One complaint was that the inference being made would in fact be fallacious. Consider yet again the example of inferring from smoke that there is fire on the mountain. The inference is a bad one if it is not really smoke that we see but something that merely looks like smoke, such as low-hanging mist (). Likewise, if the sidelong glance is only an empty imitation of how a lover would look then it would be mistaken to infer that a feeling of love is present. Besides, the actor is not merely an empty vessel, who is quite literally going through the motions. He has his own psychological states which must somehow be connected to the aesthetic effect. Some authors thus took the contrary approach, saying that the actor identifies himself completely with the character being portrayed (–). Thus the emotion felt by the character would be recreated on stage. But this idea, too, met with skepticism. How would the actor be able to continue performing while in the throes of the powerful emotions he is representing? In the eleventh century, the aforementioned Mahimabhaṭtạ made a rather convincing proposal that avoids such problems (–). Referring us back to Bharata’s statement in the Na ̄ṭya-s ́a ̄stra that rasa is “manifested” because of the “aesthetic features” of a theatrical performance, he pointed out that such aesthetic features simply do not exist in everyday life. You see an actor on stage as a representation of the character, and not as the character who is truly undergoing the events in the drama. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/10/2019, SPi As Mahimabhaṭtạ puts it, “since aesthetic elements are factitious, whereas cause and effect are real, the former pertaining to literature and the others to the world, the former differ from the latter in both their natures and their objects.” When we see a terrorized victim in a horror movie, we do not make an erroneous inference from this “fake” representation to a real feeling of fear, like someone inferring real fire from fake smoke. Rather, we experience it as a properly aesthetic representation, and the inference we make is to a properly aesthetic emotion, which is precisely the “savoring of rasa.”19 We ourselves can infer something from this whole debate: that the ideas of the philosophical schools were not confined only to those schools. The wider intelligentsia of Indian society were aware of them, and found ways to apply them in new and surprising contexts. Much as the terminology and conceptual apparatus of the Sanskrit grammarians was appropriated by the philosophers, these literary thinkers and aestheticians appropriated philosophical terms and concepts. Discussion of rasa took its initial cue from Bharata, and was sustained for an extraordinarily long time; we have followed the story for the better part of a millennium, and could have gone further still. As that discussion developed, it became increasingly sophisticated in philosophical terms. The later authors continued to take the Nāṭya-s ́a ̄stra as their touchstone text, but connected it to ideals of detachment and liberation, and notions originally explored within philosophy of language. Whatever we make of their judgments concerning aesthetics, these literary scholars were right about one thing: the richness and fruitfulness of the theories put forth by the Vedic schools.20
