Rasa
-- The Key Concept of Classical Indian Aesthetics
Indian classical drama is organized according to rasa as much as according to plot. Imagine that you are watching a monster movie or a slasher film. You are definitely scared. However, is the fear you are feeling the same as if you were really in that situation? Most people would say, "no." The same could be said of the erotic feeling you get when watching a romantic comedy -- it is not quite the same as when you are alone together with your boyfriend or girlfriend. These fictionalized emotions which we experience through poetry and art are called rasa Aristotle was getting at this idea when he talked about the emotions of pity and fear as essential to tragedy. The Indian theoretician Bharata, however, went much further, positing eight "stable" rasas and 33 "transient" ones:
We won't worry about the transient emotions.
Rasa--roughly translated: "emotive aesthetics"--is the most important concept in classical Indian aesthetics, having pervasive influence in theories of painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, and drama. The rasa theory seeks its principle of definition of literature, not in any peculiarity of the linguistic medium, or in any special semantics of poetry, but in the kind of meaning that literature purports to communicate. It argues that the presentation of emotions is the proper object and domain of poetic discourse.. The emotions presented are not to be equatedRasa is thus the ultimate criterion of literariness. Literature is not, in the ultimate analysis, a type of language use but a type of meaning--emotive meaning. The most valuable contribution of the rasa theory to literary criticism is its emphasis on the context of meaning being the determinant of style. Rasa cuts across generic boundaries.
Rasa = "aesthetic relish" Rasa is the relishable quality inherent in an artistic work--its emotive content. Every work is supposed to treat an emotive theme and to communicate a distinct emotional flavor or mood (tragic, comic, erotic, etc.) Rasa= the art of emotion, contemplative enjoyment of "universalized" emotion. Rasa as used by Chari most generally signfies "the poetic emotion"--a supramundane experience, quite distinct from ordinary modes of knowledge.
Emotions have their logic: (Bharata - sixth century)
1) Emotions are manifested in poetry by a combination of situational factors. In drama, this can include event, character, language, lighting, costume, gesture, music, etc.
2) There is a specific number of emotions.
3) Some emotions are permanent, irreducible mental states, while other are fugitive and dependent.
4) A poetic composition is an organization of various feeling tones, but it invariably subordinates the weaker tones to a dominant expression
5) Feeling tones are brought together in a poem, not indiscriminately, but according to a logic of congruity and propriety.
Emotions are caused by their objects, manifested by their expressions, and nourished by other ancillary feelings.
The rasa theory implies that there are a number of specific emotions, each with its distinct tone or flavor. Poetic works treat a specific number of emotions as their subject matter. Psychic states, attitudes, and reactions are the stuff of poetry, their representational content. There are nine basic (primary, durable) emotional states (41 altogether): erotic love; comic laughter; grief; fury; heroic spirit; fear; wonder; revulsion or disgust; and quietude or serenity. Only these basic emotions can be developed into distinct aesthetic moods.
Rasa is concerned with the effect which poetry and theater produce on the reader/spectator. The Sanskrit critics speak of art as an object of enjoyment rather than as a medium for transmitting inspired visions of ultimate reality. Aesthetic experience is simply the apprehension of the created work as delight, and the pleasure principle cannot be separated from aesthetic contemplation. This delight is regarded as its own end and as having no immediate relation to the practical concerns of the world or to the pragmatic aims of moral improvement or spiritual salvation.
The language of feelings is not a private language; it is more a system of symbols, a language game that is understood by those who have learned its conventions and usages. Emotions treated in a poem are neither the projections of the reader's own mental states nor the private feelings of the poet; rather, they are the objective situations abiding in the poem as its cognitive content. Rasa is understood as residing in the situational factors presented in an appropriate language. A poet chooses a theme because he sees a certain promise for developing its emotional possibilities and exploits it by dramatizing its details. The representational emotion, or rasa, is the meaning of the poetic sentence.
The rasa experience brings its own validity and does not demand any external proof by other means of knowledge. The sensitive reader who apprehends the emotive situation does not do so in a neutral frame of mind but is drawn into it owing to the power of sympathy. We experience the mood as a vibration of the heart. It is not enough that emotions are inferred in others or that emotive meanings are understood from words of the poem in the way that factual statements are understood; they must also be found delectable. Otherwise, there would be little incentive to contemplate a work of art, much less to seek a repetition of that experience.
Poetic apprehension is a form of feeling response because it induces a repeated contemplation of the object. When an emotion is rendered delectable through a representation of its appropriate conditions in poetry, it attains rasahood. Rasa theory would be opposed to a purely cognitive view that argues that poetry is a mode of knowledge and contemplated as a pattern of knowledge and that valid cognitive knowledge rather than emotional thrills is the proper aim and mode of existence of poetry. For rasa, poetry mirrors the psychic states that are already known to us and dramatizes them or presents them as something experienced--a type of recognitive knowledge, because it most generally presents what we have already known before but would like to experience again. Rasa theorists see no harm in admitting that poetic presentations, being emotive statements, can and do also arouse feeling responses in the readers and that these responses are felt as a vibration in the consciousness. The poet, text, and reader are all bound together in a common matrix. This assumption is vital to any conception of emotive aesthetics--affective reference. The values a poem communicates are emotive not cognitive. What is the relevance of "affective reference" to critical discourse?
It is easier to define the nature and type of a discourse by its context than by its linguistic form. It is in these terms that the rasa theory conceives of the nature of literature. the purpose of literary discourse is neither the statement of universal truths nor the prompting of men to action, but "evocation." In poetry, both words and meanings directly contribute to the aim of rasa evocation are subordinated to that activity. No poetic meaning subsists without rasa. Since the evocative function is thus a necessary condition of all language that deserves the designation of poetry, it follows that all elements found in poetry, such as ideas, images, figures, and structural features are subservient to this function.
Figure, meter, rhyme, and plot do not rest in themsleves since they can be understood only through rasa, which is the final resting point of all poetic discourse. The delineation of emotions depends not on any special linguistic operation or structuring but on there being an emotive situation. In literature, the presented emotions are generalized and freed from all particularities of time, place, and person so that the reader will view them in a detached frame of mind.