Sāhitya: Poetics

Why does a sad play leave us strangely satisfied? Two thousand years of Indian thinkers asked what beauty in words actually is — and answered with rasa, ornament, style, suggestion and fitness. Tamil asked the same question in its own way.

The map of the śāstras gave poetics a single tab. It deserves a whole room. Sāhitya — literally “togetherness”, the fitting-together of word and meaning — is the Sanskrit science of literature: what makes a poem a poem, how a play moves an audience, and what exactly the audience is enjoying when it weeps. Its answers were argued for fifteen centuries, mostly in Kashmir, and they still shape how a Bharatanāṭyam dancer is taught to show love, grief or wonder on a Brickfields stage tonight.

Bharata and the rasa-sūtra

The root text is the Nāṭyaśāstra, the “treatise on drama”, attributed to the sage Bharata. It is an encyclopaedia of the stage — theatre architecture, gesture, costume, music, metre, the types of play and character. Historians generally think it was compiled over several centuries, reaching something like its present form between about 200 BCE and 200 CE. The text itself tells a grander story: the gods asked Brahmā for a pastime that could be seen and heard by all, including those barred from the Veda, and he made a fifth Veda from the four.

जग्राह पाठ्यमृग्वेदात्सामभ्यो गीतमेव च ।
यजुर्वेदादभिनयान्रसानाथर्वणादपि ॥ jagrāha pāṭhyam ṛgvedāt sāmabhyo gītam eva ca,
yajurvedād abhinayān rasān ātharvaṇād api He took recitation from the Ṛgveda, song from the Sāman chants, acting from the Yajurveda, and rasa from the Atharvaveda. Nāṭyaśāstra, chapter 1 (the origin of drama)

The text’s own account That is the tradition’s charter for drama as a Veda open to everyone; as history, it tells us how highly its authors rated their art. Bharata’s central idea comes in chapter 6, in one compressed sentence that later critics called the rasa-sūtra:

विभावानुभावव्यभिचारिसंयोगाद्रसनिष्पत्तिः । vibhāvānubhāva-vyabhicāri-saṃyogād rasa-niṣpattiḥ Rasa arises from the combination of the causes, the outward signs and the passing feelings. Nāṭyaśāstra, chapter 6 (the rasa-sūtra)

Every word is technical. A vibhāva is a cause or setting of emotion — the beloved, the moonlit garden. An anubhāva is the visible result — a glance, a tremor, a sigh. The vyabhicāri-bhāvas (Bharata lists thirty-three) are transient feelings that flicker across the main one: anxiety, eagerness, shame, memory. Underneath runs a sthāyi-bhāva, a durable emotion such as love or grief. Bharata compares the result to food: as a person of taste enjoys a dish made of many spices, so the cultured spectator savours the emotion made of all these ingredients. That savour is rasa.

Watch it happen in a famous scene. Tap through:

The nine rasas

Bharata names eight rasas, each grounded in its own durable emotion:

शृङ्गारहास्यकरुणरौद्रवीरभयानकाः ।
बीभत्साद्भुतसंज्ञौ चेत्यष्टौ नाट्ये रसाः स्मृताः ॥ śṛṅgāra-hāsya-karuṇa-raudra-vīra-bhayānakāḥ,
bībhatsādbhuta-saṃjñau cety aṣṭau nāṭye rasāḥ smṛtāḥ The erotic, the comic, the compassionate, the furious, the heroic, the fearful, and those called the disgusting and the wondrous — these eight are known as the rasas of drama. Nāṭyaśāstra, chapter 6

Later critics added a ninth, śānta, the peaceful — hence the familiar navarasa. Tap each to see its root emotion and an example:

Bharata also gives each rasa a colour and a presiding deity, and lists eight sāttvika-bhāvas, involuntary bodily states — perspiration, trembling, tears, hair standing on end — that the actor must learn to show. This is a theory built for performers.

Ornament, style and the soul of poetry

For several centuries after Bharata, the theorists of written poetry (kāvya) looked less at emotion than at language. Their question was: what makes a sentence poetic? Bhāmaha (perhaps 7th century) gave the definition that named the whole field:

शब्दार्थौ सहितौ काव्यं गद्यं पद्यं च तद् द्विधा । śabdārthau sahitau kāvyaṃ gadyaṃ padyaṃ ca tad dvidhā Word and meaning, joined together, are poetry; it is of two kinds, prose and verse. Bhāmaha, Kāvyālaṅkāra 1.16

Sahita, “joined together”, gives sāhitya. Bhāmaha and Daṇḍin (c. 700, whose Kāvyādarśa, “Mirror of Poetry”, travelled further than any other Sanskrit poetics) catalogued the alaṅkāras, “ornaments” — simile, metaphor, hyperbole, puns and dozens more. Daṇḍin also described two regional styles, the clear Vaidarbha of the south and the dense, sonorous Gauḍa of the east. Around 800, Vāmana made style the essence: “rītir ātmā kāvyasya — style is the soul of poetry” (Kāvyālaṅkārasūtra 1.2.6). His rītis were three: Vaidarbhī, Gauḍī and Pāñcālī.

Kālidāsa (most historians place him around the 4th–5th century CE, in the Gupta age) was the touchstone for all of them. A popular verse sums up the critics’ verdict: “upamā kālidāsasya — for simile, Kālidāsa.” Popular verse

Dhvani: what is not said

In 9th-century Kashmir, Ānandavardhana changed the subject. His Dhvanyāloka, “Light on Suggestion”, opens:

काव्यस्यात्मा ध्वनिरिति बुधैर्यः समाम्नातपूर्वः kāvyasyātmā dhvanir iti budhair yaḥ samāmnāta-pūrvaḥ The soul of poetry is suggestion — so the wise have taught before… Ānandavardhana, Dhvanyāloka 1.1 (first line)

Words, he argued, have three powers. Abhidhā is literal denotation. Lakṣaṇā is secondary meaning, used when the literal one fails: “a village on the Ganges” must mean on its bank. But a third power, vyañjanā, suggestion, carries something further — that this village is cool, pure and holy, which the words never said. Poetry lives in that third power: dhvani, “resonance”, like the hum that lingers after a bell is struck.

His favourite example is a Prakrit verse in which a woman tells a wandering holy man that he may roam the riverbank freely now, because the dog that used to bother him has been killed — by the fierce lion that lives in the thicket there. Literally, an invitation; suggested, a firm “keep away” from her trysting place. Suggestion can carry a fact, a figure of speech, or — the highest kind — a rasa. And Ānandavardhana finds the origin of poetry itself in suggested feeling:

काव्यस्यात्मा स एवार्थस्तथा चादिकवेः पुरा ।
क्रौञ्चद्वन्द्ववियोगोत्थः शोकः श्लोकत्वमागतः ॥ kāvyasyātmā sa evārthas tathā cādikaveḥ purā,
krauñca-dvandva-viyogotthaḥ śokaḥ ślokatvam āgataḥ That very meaning is the soul of poetry — as long ago, for the first poet, the grief born of the parting of a pair of cranes became verse. Ānandavardhana, Dhvanyāloka 1.5

The story is Vālmīki’s, from the opening of the Rāmāyaṇa: seeing a hunter kill one of a mating pair of birds, the sage cried out — and his cry came out as the first śloka. Śoka, grief, became śloka, verse.

Abhinavagupta: whose emotion is it?

Bharata never said where rasa happens. In the character? The actor? The audience? Four answers came down to us, the last of them winning:

Production. Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa held that rasa is the character’s emotion — Rāma’s love for Sītā — intensified, and attributed to the actor who imitates him. The objection: then the audience is only watching someone else’s feeling. Why should that move us?

Abhinavagupta wrote the great commentaries on both Bharata (Abhinavabhāratī) and Ānandavardhana (Locana), and he was also a master of Kashmir Śaivism. For him aesthetic relish was a glimpse, through art, of the wonder (camatkāra) of consciousness itself. Not every later critic shared his metaphysics; most kept his account of rasa.

More rivals for the soul of poetry

वक्रKuntakaStriking speech

In the Vakroktijīvita (c. 1000), Kuntaka argued that the life of poetry is vakrokti, “crooked” or striking expression — the poet’s turn of phrase, as opposed to how anyone would say it. He traced it at six levels, from the choice of sounds up to the shaping of a whole work. Modern readers often hear in him an ancestor of “defamiliarisation”.

उचितKṣemendraFitness

Abhinavagupta’s pupil Kṣemendra (11th century), in the Aucityavicāracarcā, made aucitya, propriety or fitness, the enduring life of a poem that has rasa: the right word, ornament, metre and feeling for this character in this situation. A heroic speech in a lover’s voice fails, however clever.

प्रकाशMammaṭaThe textbook

Mammaṭa’s Kāvyaprakāśa (11th century) fused the schools — dhvani at the top, ornament and quality in their places — and became the standard classroom text, with scores of commentaries.

गङ्गाJagannāthaThe last great theorist

Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja (17th century), poet at the Mughal court of Shah Jahan, opened his Rasagaṅgādhara with a fresh definition: poetry is “a word that conveys a delightful meaning”. Sharp, independent, and often polemical, he is usually counted the last major Sanskrit poetician.

Śānta and bhakti: can peace or devotion be a rasa?

The ninth rasa was a real fight. Opponents said drama is action and emotion; how can the stilling of all emotion be staged? Defenders — Abhinavagupta above all — replied that peace is the ground from which every other rasa arises and to which it returns, and that the Mahābhārata as a whole leaves its reader in śānta. Some manuscripts of the Nāṭyaśāstra contain a passage on śānta; many scholars think it was added later.

Devotion raised the stakes. Mammaṭa classed love for a deity as a bhāva, a feeling, not a full rasa. In 16th-century Vṛndāvana, Rūpa Gosvāmī turned the whole system on its head. In his Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu (“Ocean of the Nectar of Bhakti-Rasa”), love for Kṛṣṇa is the one true durable emotion, and the classical rasas become its forms: five primary — peace, servitude, friendship, parental love and erotic love (mādhurya, treated at length in his Ujjvalanīlamaṇi) — and seven secondary, such as wonder and compassion. The devotee is not a spectator but a participant in Kṛṣṇa’s eternal play. Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava

How other schools read this
  • Abhinavagupta: devotion belongs within śānta, the rasa of liberation; it needs no separate category.
  • Mammaṭa and the classical poeticians: devotion to a god is a bhāva — beautiful, but not a full rasa.
  • Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (an Advaitin, 16th century): in his Bhaktirasāyana, bhakti is indeed a rasa — the melting of the mind into the form of the Lord.
  • Bhoja (11th century) had gone the other way: for him there is really only one rasa, śṛṅgāra, understood as a deep self-awareness that underlies all the others.

For a practising Hindu this is not academic. The bhakti of the Āḻvārs, Mīrābāī and the bhajan singer is, in Rūpa Gosvāmī’s terms, rasa — taste — and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa calls itself the ripe fruit of the Veda, to be drunk “again and again” by those who know how to savour (1.1.3).

The Tamil way: akam, puṟam and tiṇai

Tamil built its own poetics, independently and early. The third book of the grammar Tolkāppiyam (its date is much debated; parts are often placed in the early centuries CE), the Poruḷatikāram, “the book of subject matter”, divides all poetry into akam, the inner world of love, and puṟam, the outer world of war, kings and fame. Love poetry is mapped onto five landscapes, each a tiṇai, with its own season, hour, flower, bird, music — and mood:

மாயோன் மேய காடுறை உலகமும்
சேயோன் மேய மைவரை உலகமும்
வேந்தன் மேய தீம்புனல் உலகமும்
வருணன் மேய பெருமணல் உலகமும் māyōṉ mēya kāṭuṟai ulakamum / cēyōṉ mēya maivarai ulakamum / vēntaṉ mēya tīmpuṉal ulakamum / varuṇaṉ mēya perumaṇal ulakamum The forest world loved by Māyōṉ, the dark-mountain world loved by Cēyōṉ, the world of sweet waters loved by Vēntaṉ, the world of wide sands loved by Varuṇaṉ… Tolkāppiyam, Poruḷatikāram, Akattiṇaiyiyal

Māyōṉ, the dark one, is Viṣṇu–Krishna; Cēyōṉ, the red one, is Murugan, lord of the kuṟiñci hills.

⛰️KuṟiñciMountains · union

Lovers’ secret meeting, at midnight, in the cool season. God: Murugan.

🌳MullaiForest · patient waiting

A wife waits for her husband’s return, at evening, in the rains. God: Māyōṉ.

🌾MarutamCroplands · lovers’ quarrels

Infidelity and sulking in the prosperous river towns, at dawn. God: Vēntaṉ (Indra).

🌊NeytalSeashore · anxious pining

Waiting by the sea for a lover who is late, at sunset. God: Varuṇaṉ.

🏜️PālaiWasteland · separation

Hard journeys, elopement, parting, under the midday sun. Pālai has no land of its own: it is forest or hill parched by drought.

A five-line poem from the Kuṟuntokai shows the method. Nothing in it says “mountains”, yet the red earth and the rain place it in kuṟiñci, the tiṇai of union:

யாயும் ஞாயும் யாரா கியரோ
எந்தையும் நுந்தையும் எம்முறைக் கேளிர்
யானும் நீயும் எவ்வழி யறிதும்
செம்புலப் பெயல்நீர் போல
அன்புடை நெஞ்சம் தாம்கலந் தனவே yāyum ñāyum yār ākiyarō / entaiyum nuntaiyum emmuṟaik kēḷir / yāṉum nīyum evvaḻi aṟitum / cempulap peyalnīr pōla / aṉpuṭai neñcam tāmkalan taṉavē What was my mother to yours? How was my father kin to yours? How did you and I ever meet? Like rain falling on red earth, our loving hearts have mingled into one. Kuṟuntokai 40, by Cempulappeyanīrār

The meaning that matters is carried by the landscape, not stated: the Tamil critics called this uḷḷuṟai, “what dwells within” — a cousin of dhvani, centuries before Ānandavardhana. The Tolkāppiyam also lists eight meyppāṭu, bodily-shown emotions, which closely parallel Bharata’s eight rasas; whether one borrowed from the other is debated. Later, Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa was itself adapted into Tamil as the Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram. For more on this literature, see Tamil Sacred Literature.

On stage today: dance and music

Poetics never left the theatre. Bharata’s four kinds of abhinaya — through the body, the voice, costume, and the inner state (sāttvika) — are still the grammar of Indian classical dance, together with the gesture-manual Abhinayadarpaṇa attributed to Nandikeśvara. In Bharatanāṭyam, the padam and varṇam are pure rasa-work: the dancer becomes the heroine pining in neytal mood for her lord, and the audience, ideally, becomes the sahṛdaya. Many dance teachers drill a navarasa sequence of the nine faces.

That history has a shadow. Bharatanāṭyam grew from sadir, the temple and court dance of the devadāsī women of Tamil Nadu, whose communities were stigmatised and whose temple dedication was outlawed by the Madras Devadasis Act of 1947; the 1930s revival, led by Rukmini Devi Arundale and others, renamed and reframed the art, largely in other hands. Scholars still debate how much was preserved and how much was taken. Modern history

In Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur’s Temple of Fine Arts (founded in 1981) and many smaller schools teach Bharatanāṭyam and Carnatic music to thousands of children, and the arangetram, a dancer’s debut, is a family milestone. Classical music has its own theory of mood — each rāga is said to colour the mind — though rāga and rasa were never mapped one-to-one. Varies by school

Try this. Next time a film or song moves you, take it apart Bharata’s way. What were the vibhāvas (who, where, what music)? The anubhāvas (what did the actor’s face and body do)? Which passing feelings flickered? And the deep question Abhinavagupta asked: whose grief were you enjoying — and why was it enjoyable?

Questions

Is rasa the same as emotion?

No — that is the key insight. An emotion (bhāva) is personal and can hurt. Rasa is the relish of an emotion, freed from “mine” and “yours”, which is why tragedy and horror can be enjoyed. The distinction was drawn most sharply by Abhinavagupta.

Is sāhitya a religious discipline?

Mostly secular in its method: poeticians quote erotic, courtly and Buddhist verse as freely as devotional poetry. But it has deep religious links — drama as a “fifth Veda”, Abhinavagupta’s Śaiva aesthetics, and Rūpa Gosvāmī’s theology of bhakti-rasa. Go deeper → Navigating the Śāstras.

Who could study and perform it?

The Sanskrit theorists were overwhelmingly male and high-caste, though many women poets were quoted in the anthologies, and the Nāṭyaśāstra expects actresses. Performers themselves — actors, and later devadāsī dancers — were often low in social rank even as their art was praised. Today the discipline is taught to anyone in universities and dance schools.

Check your knowledge:

Quick check

In the rasa-sūtra, a lover’s sigh or trembling is a…

An anubhāva — the visible sign that follows from the emotion.

Who said the soul of poetry is dhvani, suggestion?

Ānandavardhana, in the Dhvanyāloka (9th century). Vāmana said style; Bhāmaha focused on ornament.

Which rasa was added to Bharata’s eight after a long debate?

Śānta — championed above all by Abhinavagupta.

In Tamil poetics, kuṟiñci, the mountain landscape, is the tiṇai of…

Union — and its god is Murugan, Cēyōṉ.

॥ Pause and reflect

  1. Which of the nine rasas does the art you love most deliver? Which do you avoid?
  2. Think of something that moved you because of what was not said. What was suggested?
  3. Rūpa Gosvāmī turned aesthetics into devotion. Has a song or a dance ever been, for you, a way of prayer?

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