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 Rasa Reader's conceptual detail, historical precision, and clarity will appeal to any scholar interested in a full portrait of global intellectual development.
SHELDON POLLOCK is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of Sanskrit and South Asian Studies at Columbia University. His publications include The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006); and World Philology (2015). He is founding general editor of the Murty Classical Library of India, recipient of the Padma Shri award from the Government of India, and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The world of classical Indian literary theory is vast and complex, and it had long seemed to me that any attempt to produce a historical reconstruction of even a part of it, such as the discourse on aesthetic experience, was foolhardy. Given that this theory is among India's most luminous contributions to humanistic knowledge, however, and that there is so little of it, in translation or in exposition, that one can confidently recommend to students and general readers, the attempt seemed worth making. I first tried assembling a small team to produce a Rasa Reader, distribut- ing the different chapters to different specialist scholars. My colleagues were per- fectly willing-but their schedules were not. When months of delay had turned into years, I decided to take on the task alone. After half a decade of work on it, I can affirm that my initial cautions were fully justified.
The Rasa Reader is the first in a new series of historical sourcebooks that aims to make available to a contemporary reading public-students, comparativists, and interested generalists no less than specialists-translated and annotated texts from the major scholarly disciplines of classical India, arranged in such a way that the principal arguments and disputes can be observed in their historical development. That no such works exist, whether dealing with Indian aesthetics or rhetoric, hermeneutics, logic, or anything else, is a result, as series contributors are learning, of the serious difficulties involved on every front.
In the case of classical Indian aesthetics, the original works have often been very poorly transmitted (a trait that distinguishes this field from the others), and even when the integrity of the texts is assured, some of them can be obscure to the point of impenetrability. The arguments are often complex in themselves and pre- suppose knowledge of many different disciplines-hermeneutics, logic, philosophy of language, psychology-and deep familiarity with literary texts, some of which have vanished. The thought world the Western reader is entering here is remarkably sophisticated and subtle, and even those inside the tradition were sometimes con- fused or simply uncomprehending: this Reader's jungle of endnotes is testimony to both the text-critical and the interpretive challenges the materials present. Making sense of the conceptual shape of this world, moreover, requires confronting very real intellectual-historical and theoretical problems. And this is to say nothing of the challenges of translation. The unhappy history of English versions of Sanskrit technical writings demonstrates how enormously difficult it is to achieve clarity. consistency, and accessibility, to say nothing of readability. Even after engagement with core questions of Indian aesthetics for almost twenty years and continual work on this book for five, I am sometimes uncertain whether I have come much closer to resolving some basic problems than when I first encountered them, or to giving them an English form that does the original justice.. Let me address some of these matters in a little greater detail, starting with the texts I have included in the Reader and how I have structured it.
Although it is painful to think of the many extraordinary works of classical Indian aesthetics that have been lost, fragments are sometimes quoted by later authors, and a large number of complete works have indeed been preserved. As for the fragments, I have assembled all available for a given author and ordered them as coherently as possible; the arrangement and some attributions remain speculative. From the major works, I have tried my best not to omit any significant argument from fifteen centuries of discourse (save in the rare case where an outstanding translation has recently appeared).' I have not suppressed material that is sure to seem perplexing (here Bhoja is exemplary), in order to illustrate the very real conceptual challenges that confront us, or even material I am unsure I understand myself (Abhinavagupta presents numerous instances), in the hope that others may learn from my shortcomings and do a better job. Some texts were excluded, either be- cause of space constraints or because I view them as redundant. The word "classical" in the subtitle of this book refers to a tradition of theorists who grappled with the problem of rasa in Sanskrit. The reception of this theory within other South Asian traditions-its acceptance as the basis for Brajbhasha poetics, its complex inter- action with Sufi mysticism in Avadhi poetry, its relation to the very different conceptual orientation of classical Tamil poets-is outside the scope of this book (and the competence of its author).
In gauging the contributions of what, for reasons I will specify momentarily, we may call Indian aesthetics, it would seem prudent to put the empirical horse before the theoretical cart and ask first what the thought world of classical India actually looked like, and only then to see how, if at all, it might align with present-day conceptual categories. The series in which this book appears, however, is intended not only for specialists but also for generalists and comparativists, who not unreason- ably would want to know at the outset something about how their own thought world maps against what they are about to encounter.
To this end, it makes sense to begin by clarifying what we mean by "aesthetics" and asking how it has come to be what it is today. To address the first question, it is less helpful to know what people now abstractly take "aesthetics" to mean than to see what they pragmatically do with it. We can gauge something of this pragmatic understanding by looking at a contemporary overview of the subject, like a recent Oxford anthology. This consists of six sections of readings; the titles of four are: "Why identify anything as art?": "What do artists do?"; "Can we ever understand an artwork?"; and "How can we evaluate art?" These are all questions no Indian thinkers before modernity, at least none who wrote in Sanskrit, ever systematically raised, not because of their incompetence but because of their different cultural presuppositions and conceptual needs. For one thing, there was no unified sphere with a particular designation we could translate by the English term "art." There were separate cultural domains of poetry (kavya), drama (natya), music (samgita, consisting of vocal and instrumental music and dance), and less carefully thematized practices, with terminology also less settled, including painting (citra), sculpture (often pusta), ar- chitecture (for which there was no common term at all), and the crafts (kala), which could include many of the preceding when that was deemed necessary. In these separate domains there was never any dispute, at least overtly, about what was and was not to be included, though sometimes works passed into and out of a given category, according to historically changing reading or viewing practices. Furthermore, almost everything outside the literary realm, let alone the cultural realm, remained outside classical Indian aesthetic analysis (including nature: though Shiva was a dancer, God in India was generally not an artist). There are exhaustive normative descriptions of painting and music technique, but these comprise no systematic aesthetic reflection. Painting is referred to only once in all our texts, in a celebrated analogy on imitation framed by Shri Shankuka around 850 and repeated down the centuries.? Music is mentioned only a handful of times in passing, and although a celebrated musicological treatise does frame rasa as its central aesthetic problem, what it of fers is standard literary rasa;' the question whether music can be narrative or programmatic, or why and how we respond emotionally to it at all-questions that intrigue contemporary aesthetics-was never asked. Indian aesthetic theory was founded upon representation of human emotion in the literary artwork and our capacity not just to find the representation "beautiful" but to get inside it.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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