4. CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The Foundational Text, c. 300, and Early Theorists, 650-1025

1.1 THE BASIS OF RASA THEORY IN DRAMA

Treatise on Drama of Bharata (c. 300)

As with virtually all foundational texts of the Sanskrit knowledge systems, we have no secure information about the author of the Treatise on Drama. The early grammarian Panini (fourth century B.C.E.) refers to a text called The Actor's Sutras, and the late fourth- century (C.E.) playwright Kalidasa knew of a "theory of drama," if not the Treatise.1 Some organized body of knowledge of the sort presented here had therefore long been in existence, but there is no way of knowing how much the Treatise overlaps with or draws from this older tradition. The text appropriates the authority of the sage Bharata, but he lived in time out of mind, and there is even uncertainty about the "text" itself. The extant manuscripts disagree about everything from the number of chapters to the readings of individual verses, and nothing approaching a critical edition has ever been attempted. While on formal grounds the compilation (and this is what it seems to be) can be vaguely assigned to the early centuries (perhaps third century) C.E., the material was clearly re-edited, and partly rewritten, at a later point in its history, most probably in Kashmir around the eighth or ninth century. From this time we have the first secure evidence of commentarial attention to the work, from the Kashmirian scholar Udbhata (c. 800), who is followed by a long and distinguished list of thinkers for the next two centuries. The Treatise is a vast and comprehensive account, in some six thousand verses (The Six Thousand is its traditional name) and thirty-six (or thirty-seven, or thirty-three) chapters, of the entire domain of dramaturgy, from the construction of the theater to the languages used in plays (their grammar, figures, intonation, and so on) and the singing, musical instruments, dancing, makeup, costuming, and physical movements of the actors. But in accordance with the declaration of the Treatise itself that "No part of the enterprise will succeed without attention to rasa," the discussion of rasa in the sixth chapter has attracted the most sustained attention of scholars, both ancient and modern. This discussion places in bold relief not only the signal importance of the Treatise for the history of Indian aesthetics but also the impediments to understanding that history entailed by the text's problematic transmission. Its celebrated Sutra on Rasa is the founding statement on aesthetics, and would be interpreted and reinterpreted for almost two millennia: the mid-seventeenth- century thinker Jagannatha discusses eight different readings of the aphorism that he viewed as constituting the whole history of aesthetic theory.2 In addition, all the basic components of the theory that later thinkers would have to deal with are listed, defined, and illustrated in the Treatise. But the reader will also confront at the very beginning of the selection the obscurity of many of the technical terms, and the inconsistencies, even contradictions (or what sometimes seem to us today to be inconsistencies and contradictions) left by the editing process. These are such that some scholars have come to view the rasa section in its current state as incoherent beyond repair.3

Although the Treatise is undoubtedly difficult, that extreme view is readily refuted by the very substantial sense we are able to extract from the text in the state we have inherited it. Moreover, as we develop a deeper understanding of the intellectual history of rasa subsequent to Bharata, we may, by an admittedly circular process, employ interpretation to identify some of the traces of later revision and the confusion it has left in its wake. A simple but striking instance concerns the number of rasas. There is no question that a ninth, the peaceful, is a later (perhaps much later) addition to Bharata's original eight,4 and although only a few manuscripts of the text include this addition, the eleventh-century commentator Abhinavagupta defended it, and consequently it appears in the printed editions that seek to reconstitute "Abhinavagupta's text." Abhinava protests too much, however, when he asserts that the manuscripts containing the peaceful rasa are "ancient," and he is forced to explain why, for example, other listings of eight rasas and their appurtenances-deities, colors, etc .- do not include the peaceful.5 If the uncertain history of the text makes it hard to understand what Bharata's view of rasa was, so too does the history of its interpretation, insofar as scholars have anachronistically read the ideas of later theorists back into the Treatise. This pertains particularly to the focal point of Bharata's rasa analytic. A half-century ago a leading scholar of Indian aesthetics was correct to note-and has been alone in noting-that in the Treatise "the words rasa and bhāva [emotion] are used in connection with the actor and the artist and not in connection with the spectator," and that any "historical approach" to these concepts must admit that they "describe the aesthetic situation, the art object outside, more than the subjective state of the critic."6 Although the scholar never worked out this historical approach, his intuition was correct, and the judgment about rasa fits with the overall objective of the Treatise: to provide guidance above all to actors. This objective is manifest in the work's repeated references to how the components of drama, and the rasas in particular, are "to be acted out," and it was clear to the work's contemporary readers. "The theory of drama," as Kalidasa put it, "is focused on performance." Given that subjective response is encoded in the very metaphor of "taste," rasa discourse must always have been concerned, at least implicitly, with "the subjective state," or the viewer's response. Nonetheless, the primary expository focus in the Treatise is the actor and, indissociably, the character the actor is representing. Although an explicit discussion is absent, no doubt because the matter was self-evident to all participants in the discourse, Bharata's language often clearly suggests that his analytic focus is on rasa in the character. The comic, for example, "is seen to exist for the most part in women and characters of low status," not in the response of the viewer.7 Moreover, Bharata's conception of the causal process-bhavas, or emotions, are the factors that 'manifest" the rasa-implies, or at least later is taken to imply, the preexistence of rasa in the character and hence the character's analytic primacy.8 And this is all in keeping with the perspective of the earliest commentator on the Treatise, Bhatta Lollata. One well-known passage in prose (most of the work is in verse) seems to speak against the assumption that Bharata himself shared the perspective of his first commentator: "Discerning viewers relish the stable emotions manifested by the acting out of various transitory emotions and reactions ... they feel joy and the like in doing so."9 Yet even this passage, although it represents a concern with viewer response that is hardly evident elsewhere in the sixth chapter, is consistent with the general model according to which rasa is located in, and belongs to, the character. Later authors certainly took this to be Bharata's view. As for the gustatory metaphor, it determines little in and of itself. "Taste" may be said to exist as such only when tasted (a kind of secondary quality), but it nonetheless can be considered a property of the object (a kind of primary quality).10 The commentarial tradition on the Treatise cannot have begun much before the early ninth century, with a now-lost work by Udbhata.11 All other commentaries, likewise produced in Kashmir, have also vanished; we know of them only from fragments preserved in the lone survivor, The New Dramatic Art, of Abhinavagupta (c. 1000, some of which are found also in his earlier Eye for Light on Implicature). This work often makes clear that the tradition of interpretation of the Treatise had long been broken, and for problematic passages Abhinava is trying to make the best of a bad situation. But although his ideas are sometimes palpably at odds with the natural reading of the text, he is a critically important guide through the work, something that becomes painfully apparent in the few selections offered here from the seventh chapter, where much of his commentary is missing. I therefore provide in the notes a number of his comments, while reserving for chapter 4 a translation of passages that showcase his own-for the most part, radically divergent-theories.