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Contents Kashmirs Contribution to Indian Aesthetics-I
Dr. S.S. Toshkhani
Editorial It is really very exciting to think that this small paradisal Valley nestled in the Himalays has
produced a succession of brilliant thinkers who have formulated most of the fundamental
Featured Articles concepts of Sanskrit poetics and have given us a whole body of aesthetic thought profound in
conception and impressive in volume and value. One cannot but be overwhelmed by the fact
Pakistan's Role in that almost all the major schools of Indian aesthetics were founded by Kashmiri theoriticians
International Terrorism -the Alankara School by Bhamaha, Riti School by Vamana, Vakrokti School by Kuntaka,
Dhvani School by Anandavardhana and Auchitya School by Kshemendra. Though the concept
Terrorism Update of Rasa was evolved by Bharata, and perhaps by thinkers even before him, it was only the
great Abhinavagupta who perfected it as an integrating \theory basic to the aesthetic
Survivors Speak philosophy of the Indians. Nor was the contribution of those Kashmiri rhetoricians any less
important who analysed, interpreted, elaborated and commented upon what the original
Kashmir News Network exponents propounded, thus providing the building blocks on which the Indian aesthetic
Press Releases thought stands today. Profound thinkers like Udbhata, Bhatta Lollata, Shankuka, Bhatta
Nayaka, Bhatta Tauta, Rudrata, Ruyyaka, Mahima Bhatta and others. The issues they raised,
Jammu & Kashmir News the solutions they provided, the views they propounded
provided grist to the great intellectual debates about the relation of aesthetic object and
Editor's Choice
aesthetic experience which raged throughout India for quite a long time. To understand the
full significance of the art-ideas introduced by the successive Kashmiri thinkers, we shall have
Doda's forgotten
to look at them in the overall perspective of the development of Indian aesthetical thought.
army As we know, it is in the Natya Shastra, the legendary Bharatas monumental treatise on
US AFTER 9/11: dramaturgy, that we find the first systematic exposition of Rasa-a concept central to Indian
None the Wiser aesthetic thinking. Supposed to have been written between the 2nd century BC and the 2nd
The bog of Baghdad: century AD, the Natya Shastra provides a deep insight into the psychology of aesthetic
Why India must experience. It conceives of the drama as the perfect synthesis between all arts and integrates
buttress the US?
in its form poetic text, histrionics, stage-craft, music, dance, painting and even architecture
into an organismic whole, with Rasa as its soul. There is no art, claims Bharata, no science,
CONGRESSIONAL
no craft, no skill that does not fall within the purview of drama. Na Tajjnana no tat shilpam N
REPORT ON 9/11: A
sa vidya na sa kala Na sau yogo na tat karma Natyesmin yanna-drishyate His well known
Critical Analysis formulation on Rasa in the Natya Shastra-vibhavnubhava vyabhichari bhava samyogad
rasanish-pattih-explains the aesthetic experience in terms of the prime stimuli or the leading
characters in a dramatic presentation, their behavioural features and the transient but
Archives
ancillary emotional reactions they evoke. Scholars have variously interpreted and translated
the Sanskrit terms vibhava, anubhava, sanchari bhava and rasa according to their individual
External Links perceptions of what these terms mean.
Terrorirsm Strikes in Thus, Dr K.C. Pandey translates vibhava as the emotive situation, anubhava as the physical
Jammu & Kashmir changes consequent upon the rise of an emotion, vyabhichari bhava as transient emotions
Complete Coverage and rasa as the aesthetic object. Raniero Gnoli prefers to use expressions like
Determinants, Consequents and Transitory Mental States for them, leaving rasa
of America's War on
untranslated. For the purpose of this paper, however, I have mostly used the equivalents
Terror
given by Krishna Chaitanya for these key terms for the essential constituents of the aesthetic
presentation which enables the aesthetic emotion to be experienced and relished. We shall
have to examine a few more concepts before Bharatas formulation becomes a bit more clear.
Contact Us The vibhavas or the primary stimuli arouse the conative dispositional factors abidingin human
nature, which cannot be exactly called instincts but could be described as innate sentiments.
In Sanskrit poetics these abiding mental states have been given the name sthayi bhavas. It is
the sthayi bhava or basic sentiment awakened by the union of vibhavas, anubhavas and the
vyabhichari bhavas that is finally relished as rasa. Put in simpler terms this means that when
the prime stimuli or determinants, their consequent behavioural pattern and the transient but
ancillary emotional reactions they evoke combine, the basic sentiment is activated and
develops into rasa or aesthetic emotion.
The Natya Shastra distinguishes eight abiding mental states that are latent in a mans
psychological organisation. These are Love (rati), Laughter (hasya), Sorrow (shoka), Anger
(krodha), Heroism (utsaha), Fear (bhaya), Disgust (jugupsa), and Wonder (vismaya). To
these a ninth one, Serenity (shama) was added later. The corresponding nine rasas are: the
Erotic (shringara), the Comic (hasya), the Pathetic (karuna), the Furious (raudra), the Heoric
(vira), the Terrible (bhayanaka), the Odious (bibhatsa), and the Marvellous (adbhuta). With
this background we can now proceed to understand how ideas which eventually crystallised to
form a cogent theory of rasa took off from this point of departure. Going back to Bharatas
formulation, the Rasa Sutra, we find that it contained two crucial words that lent themselves
to various interpretations, unleashing storms of controversy. These were samyoga and
nishpattih. There were other questions also that arose from Bharatas condensed but pregnant
statement. Where is Rasa located? Is the aesthetic experience subjective or objective? How is
it related to the other emotions or states of consciousness? Every participant in the great
debate that ensued took a stand on these on the basis of his own philosophical outlook.
Among the earliest to address these questions was Bhatta Lollata who lived in Kashmir in the
late 8th century or the early 9th. A contemporary of the great Shaivite thinker Bhatta Kallata,
Lollata approached those questions as a Mimansaka or grammarian. His works have
unfortunately been lost, but from what we learn from the Abhinava Bharati, Abhinavaguptas
commentary on the Natya Shastra, Lolatta took only the denotational sense of the word
nishpattih into consideration and interpreted it as causal origination. Rasa, he said, is an
effect of which the vibhavas or the aesthetic object is the direct cause. It resides in the
original historical character (Rama etc.) represented on the stage, as well as the
impersonating actor. The actor feels himself as the represented historical personage during
the duration of the enactment but remembers his real nature through the faculty of
anusandhana or recollection (realization, according to Gnoli).
The important question underlying all this discussion is as to how the poetic emotion is
transferred from life to art, and Lollatas answer is that the spectator relishes rasa or the
sentiment located in the character portrayed directly and not through emotional induction by
the aesthetic process of activating it. Abhinavagupta quickly rejects this view-point which
seeks to turn the sentiment or sthayi bhava into an object of perception. Pointing this out,
Krishna Chaitanya writes: Abhinava Guptas brilliant mind noticed at once that the literalism
of the Mimansakas would annex aesthetics to grammar and bring about as complete an
impoverishment in aesthetics as it had brought in philosophy. He saw that Lollata was
confusing aesthetic communication with intellectual discourse, the emotive symbol with the
denotative sign. Noting that the sthayi bhava, which abides as a potential reality and is raised
to the relishable state only through the configuration of stimuli etc. (vibhavadi), Abhinava
argues that it cannot be staticised as an object of perception existing at only one specific
conjunction of space and time. Mammata, an eleventh century Kashmiri aesthete, endorses
Abhinavas views by stressing that the object in art is a virtual and not a physical object.
It is a virtual object because the whole phenomenon is processual, the process involving the
activity of institution and emotion. Bhatta Lollatas theory, it seems, is totally unconcerned
with the spectators view-point. Shankuka, another Kashmiri and a younger contemporary of
Lollata, approaches the problem of how the spectator relishes rasa or the aesthetic
experience from the point of view of a logician, naiyayaka, which he actually was. Rasa, he
said, applying syllogistic reasoning, was not produced as an effect as Lollata claimed but
could be logically arrived at by the process of inference. Using the analogy of a forest fire he
says that just as it can be inferred from the smoke rising from above the top of a cluster of
trees, in the same manner the basic mental state can be inferred from the situation presented
by the stimuli etc. Dr K.C. Pandey calls Shankukas point of view psycho-epistemic. In
actual life, he points out explaining Shankukas view-point, the mental state of a man is
revealed by the visible effects of his feeling i.e. the consequents and their concomitant
feelings or the transitory mental state. The successful imitation by the actor of the characters
and their experiences is no doubt, Shankuka says, artificial and unreal or illusory but is not
realised to be so by the spectators who forget the difference between the actors and the
characters and inferentially experience the mental state of the characters themselves.
Shankuka, in fact, uses the analogy of a painted horse, chitraturaga, to bring out the beauty
of this imitation (anukarna) and holds that aesthetic experience, which is a peculiar form of
inference (anumana), cannot be classified under any known forms of knowledge.
Shankukas views, like those of Lollata, have been presented in brief by Abhinavgupta in his
famous commentary on Natya Shastra, the Abhinava Bharati, as Shankukas works too are
lost. The inference and imitation theories of Lollata and Shankuka, which hold the aesthetic
presentation to be the efficient cause (karaka hetu) or the logical cause (jnapak hetu)
respectively of the aesthetic emotion, were later demolished by Abhinava and the exponents
of the Dhvani or Suggestion School of poetics. But before we look at what they have to say in
the matter, let us try to appreciate the views of Bhatta Nayaka, a great aesthetic thinker who
lived in the late 9th century Kashmir and joined the debate to point out the inwardness of
the whole situation. Here again we have to rely upon the Abhinava Bharati as Bhatta
Nayakas work the Hridaya Darpana, too is not available. He rejects the idea that rasa or the
aesthetic emotion can be affected or inferred, and tries to extend the Sankhya concept of
bhoga or enjoyment to the field of aesthetics. Rasa, he posits, is neither atmagata nor
paragata nor is it tatastha vedya. That is, it cannot be perceived as located in the spectator or
as located in anyone else, whether it be the character portrayed or the actor portraying that
character. We can have no perception of rasa at all: rasah na pratiyate!. What Bhatta
Nayaka means in other words is that the spectator or the reader does not feel the sorrow or
the happiness of the character represented personally as his own because of the aesthetic
distance.
That is why even a tragic play or a poem does not cause any feeling of pain in him and he is
able to enjoy or savour its flavour too.Further,he says, ordinary spectator or reader can
never identify himself with the extraordinary virtues of such a great hero as Rama. What
happens actually is that he enjoys the aesthetic emotion through the bhojaka-bhojya
relationship. That is, through the relationship of the enjoyer and the enjoyed. Bhatta Nayaka,
thus, stresses the importance of bhavana vyapara or imagination, which, according to him,
comes into play as an aspect of aesthetic experience. Poetic experience, he maintains, has
another power besides abhidha or the detonational power which enables the sahridaya or the
aesthetically sensible person to see the characters presented in an aesthetic creation in a
generalised way, independently of any relationship with his ordinary life or the life of the
actor or the hero of the play or poem, as Gnoli puts it. This special power Bhatta Nayaka
calls bhavakatva, the power of generalisation. The protagonists in their generalised character
are perceived to rise above their specific contextal reference. Thus Ramas love for Sita
though particular becomes the universalised experience of love in general. Even pain is
transfigured into a sort of pleasure which can be savoured aesthetically. This universalisation
of the aesthetic object and subject through the power of bhavakatva frees them from all
limitations of individuality and is called sadharanikarana. The concept of sadharanikarna or
universily of the aesthetic experience is Bhatta Nayakas greatest contribution in the field of
aesthetic thought.
To explain the relation between the subject and object, Bhatta Nayaka posits another power
or function of languagethat of bhojakatva or enjoyment. It is by the virtue of this power,
according to him, that we relish the experience presented in a poetic creation, not at the
practical but at the aesthetic level. All practical considerations fade away due to the
predominance of sattva or innate goodness of human nature, a state of psychological poise
which makes us repose in our own consciousness. The other two potentialities described in
the Sankhya philosophy, rajas, physical dynamism and tamas, insensibility, are rendered
ineffective. Thus the bhoga or enjoyment of rasa is a process of delectation very much akin to
the state of self-sufficient blissful consciousness which one experiences on realising the
Supreme Reality (Brahman). Bhatta Nayakas another important contribution, therefore, is
that he brings the aesthetic experience at par with mystic experience. By stressing that it is
not determined by practical considerations but is a state of being, he makes it more internal
and contemplative, bringing the relisher face to face with the ultimate Universal Reality. In
his comment on Bhatta Nayakas formulation about universalisation of experience in
aesthetics, Abhinavagupta does not seem inclined to dismiss it altogether. In fact, he absorbs
his core contentions into his own aesthetic theory and develops them in accordance with his
own monistic outlook.
He admits that aesthetic enjoyment is similar to the joy that comes from realising ones
identity with Brahman, but he rejects his three-fold classification of the powers of language
on the ground that there is no need to staticise either the generalising function of poetry as
a separate power of bhavakatva or the appreciative activity of the reader or spectator as a
distinct, isolated power bhojakatva, as this only leads to unnecessary multiplication of
concepts. We shall refer to Abhinavguptas philosophy of aesthetics later. Suffice it to say
here that he accepted Bhatta Nayakas view that the aesthetic and the mystic experiences
spring from the same source and the bliss we derive from them is a state of independence
from all extraneous factors--a repose into our own self. But while the state of mystical
consciousness is marked by the complete disappearance of all polarities, the lysis of all
dialexis in the dissolving fire of God, to use the words of R.Gnoli in aesthetic consciousness
the feelings and facts of everyday life remain always present, even though they are
transfigured.
The fact put so succinctly by K.Krishnamurthy, is that so far as the idea of rasa is concerned,
Abhinavgupta takes over where Bhatta Nayaka leaves. As aesthetic thinking further
developed in India, it slowly moved away from the habit of analysing the creative process in
terms of dramaturgy alone and looked to pure poetics for further addition to its conceptual
armoury till Abhinavgupta synthesized both the traditions. It was Bhamaha, a Kashmiri, who
heralded the shift and developed Sanskrit poetics along scientific and independent lines. From
all available sources, Bhamaha was the first authority on poetics in the post-Bharat era with
an influence that was so strongly pervasive that almost all important theoriticians in the field
found it compulsive to refer to him. There is a difference of opinion about the time he
flourished, but Anandavardhana has quoted a sentence from him alongside another sentence
from Bana, which he considers older, than the latter. Bhamahas time can, therefore, be
safely placed between the 5th century and the beginning of the 7th.
(To be concluded)
Courtesy: Kashmir Sentinel
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