A Rasa Reader

Classical Indian Aesthetics

Sheldon Pollock

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231540698
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama

From the early years of the Common Era to 1700, Indian intellectuals explored with unparalleled subtlety the place of emotion in art. Their investigations led to the deconstruction of art's formal structures and broader inquiries into the pleasure of tragic tales. Rasa, or taste, was the word they chose to describe art's aesthetics, and their passionate effort to pin down these phenomena became its own remarkable act of creation.

This book is the first in any language to follow the evolution of rasa from its origins in dramaturgical thought—a concept for the stage—to its flourishing in literary thought—a concept for the page. A Rasa Reader incorporates primary texts by every significant thinker on classical Indian aesthetics, many never translated before. The arrangement of the selections captures the intellectual dynamism that has powered this debate for centuries. Headnotes explain the meaning and significance of each text, a comprehensive introduction summarizes major threads in intellectual-historical terms, and critical endnotes and an extensive bibliography add further depth to the selections. The Sanskrit theory of emotion in art is one of the most sophisticated in the ancient world, a precursor of the work being done today by critics and philosophers of aesthetics. A Rasa Reader's conceptual detail, historical precision, and clarity will appeal to any scholar interested in a full portrait of global intellectual development.

A Rasa Reader is the inaugural book in the Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought series, edited by Sheldon Pollock. These text-based books guide readers through the most important forms of classical Indian thought, from epistemology, rhetoric, and hermeneutics to astral science, yoga, and medicine. Each volume provides fresh translations of key works, headnotes to contextualize selections, a comprehensive analysis of major lines of development within the discipline, and exegetical and text-critical endnotes, as well as a bibliography. Designed for comparativists and interested general readers, Historical Sourcebooks is also a great resource for advanced scholars seeking authoritative commentary on challenging works.

Notes

PREFACE

1. Preeminently Ingalls et al. 1990.

2. In the first category are KM, KD, Bhaktirasāyana; in the second, Agnipurāṇa (now known to be a late, probably eleventh-century, compilation), and Candrāloka, among others. BhP occupies a place apart: unlike the Agnipurāṇa, it was occasionally cited, but it is both derivative and too diffuse to properly excerpt.

3. The now-standard edition shows these traces everywhere. Chapter 6, for example, ends, “Such are the eight rasas” (6.83); Abhinavagupta had a different text before him (“There are thus nine and only nine rasas,” he comments ad loc., ABh 1.335.8).

4. After long clinging to the translation “reproduction,” I was convinced by Andrew Ollett of the greater applicability of this term. For an extended consideration (sometimes at odds with the analysis offered here), see Shulman 2012.

5. An onomatopoeic word, “making the sound chamat,” a smacking of the lips that seems especially apposite for “aesthetics,” or “feeling” (for a Shaiva etymology see IPVV v. 3 p. 251). No one before Ananda had used the term, and he only once (DhĀ 4.16).

6. See Dhanika on DR 4.4cd–4.5ab, below.

7. Literally, “the erotic deceived” (SKĀ 5.56–58; ŚP pp. 1172–73; RAS p. 276).

8. For the eighth-century southerner Dandin, ūrjasvi is slightly deprecatory (“haughty declaration”); for the ninth-century northerner Udbhata, it indicates a moral lapse (the “impulsive”).

9. The New Dramatic Art 3.273.

10. For the former see Shridhara on KP 4.30; for the latter, NŚ 1.111.

11. Nyāyasūtra 1.1.17; for Bhasarvajna see Nyāyasāra p. 12.

12. The rasa raudra exemplifies the difficulty. It is typically translated, vaguely, as “rage” or “the furious”; NŚ 1.313–314 indicates that “the violent” is closer to what is intended (see Abhinava ad loc.: “ ‘Raudra is based on anger,’ and the domain of anger is, generally speaking, unlawful action,” and RAS 2.131: “The locus of raudra is savages [krūrajana]”).

13. The editions of the ŚP and KP principally used here are continuously paginated.

INTRODUCTION

1. Feagin and Maynard 1997, compare Korsmeyer 1998. Many of their questions derive from Beardsley 1981 [1959].

2. Treatises on painting simply list the rasas and their associated colors (see for example Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa 3.30).

3. Shri Shankuka fragment #1a, below; on music and rasa, DhĀ pp. 405, 417; VV p. 100, Anantadasa (p. 72), SRĀ 7.1351 (“The learned hold that the principal element of the triple symphony is rasa”). Thus, while classical Indian aesthetic theory may well apply to all the “fine arts,” it never was in fact applied before the modern period (contrast M. Hiriyanna in Raghavan 1975: xv, among many others).

4. Bhatta Tota’s definition of creative imagination would be invoked repeatedly (see fragment #1, below).

5. Pollock 2014.

6. The term rasaśāstra is found only once (in Jiva Gosvamin p. 110 [65.17], below), and may be peculiar to the Bengali Vaishnava tradition.

7. For this assessment of what is currently missing in literary theory, see Harpham 2005: 24.

8. For Weber, see Gerth and Mills 1946: 340–43; the ideological reading is found in Eagleton 1990: 3. Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Arts (1835) is structured, deeply if with no self-awareness, by the inequity of colonial judgment. For Arnold’s assertion a generation before Weber (1880), “Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry,” see Muldoon 2006: 349.

9. Neill 2003: 423.

10. Additional detail and argument are offered in Pollock 1998a, 2001c, 2010, 2012a, 2012b.

11. See DhĀ pp. 87–88.

12. DhĀ p. 498.

13. NŚ 7.2.

14. KĀ 1.51.

15. Bhatta Tota fragment #4; Bhatta Nayaka fragment #5.

16. Especially problematic is the absence in the rasasūtra of the key term “sta...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• English Translations Of Sanskrit Titles
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: An Intellectual History of Rasa
• One: The Foundational Text, c. 300, and Early Theorists, 650–1025
• Two: The Great Synthesis of Bhoja, 1025–1055
• Three: An Aesthetics Revolution, 900–1000
• Four: Abhinavagupta and His School, 1000–1200
• Five: Continuing the Controversies Beyond Kashmir, 1200–1400
• Six: Rasa in the Early Modern World, 1200–1650
• English-Sanskrit Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index