Bharata Muni and Western Dramatic Theory

Kalākalpa IGNCA Journal of Arts, 2021

Historical scholarship all over the world is witnessing what has been termed as an 'emotional turn' (Lewis, 2020, p. 121) in the last few decades, wherein instead of inaccurately classifying emotions as 'irrational and unscientific', scholars are trying to engage with feelings and emotions to make better sense of how past societies experienced and communicated these, and the tools and strategies employed by them for the same. In the context of early India, the rasa theory, on which the entire edifice of Indian dramatic and performance art is based, is a preeminent theoretical construct to understand emotional experience and expression. The present paper investigates the historical and cultural matrix in which emotions in the form of rasa laid the foundation of Classical Indian dramatic art 1 , with particular reference to the earliest extant treatise on the subject, i.e., Bharata's Nāṭyaśātra. The representation and experience of emotions enjoyed a prominent place in Indian drama right from the very beginning. Exploring the shift from production to reception aesthetics and accounting for the centrality of emotions in drama and poetry, this article also comments on the manner in which emotions further went on to enrich early Indian dramatic tradition. Focused reading of a single but the most authoritative text offers some fresh insights on the understanding and expression of emotions at a particular juncture in India's past.

Vishwabharati Research Centre, Latur, India, 2018

The book Indian English Drama: Themes & Techniques is a volume of research articles on contemporary Indian dramatists and their works starting from Rabindranath Tagore to nearly all present generation of dramatists like Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Dattani, Badal Sirkar, Habib Tanvir, Utpal Dutt, Mahasweta Devi, Usha Ganguli, Manjula Padmanabhan, Mahesh Elkunchwar and Manoj Mitra. The book will be helpful in giving critical insight to understand the art and vision of contemporary Indian dramatists both from thematic and technical points of view. The introductory chapter of the book is very resourceful to understand the growth and development of Indian English drama. Authors have presented their critical viewpoints on almost every aspect of dramatic arts, themes and techniques pertaining to Indian playwrights and their works. The book will give many ground breaking concepts and ideas on Indian English drama and is useful for both researchers and learners.

Ancient Sanskrit literature is perhaps the oldest literature in the world. Sanskrit poetics is Indian poetics; it is an epitome of theories and laws related to poetry and drama. Like Aristotle‟s Poetics, Sanskrit poetics also focuses on the drama. Bharata‟s Natyashastra is a milestone in ancient Sanskrit poetics. Mahakavi Kalidasa occupies a unique place not only in Sanskrit but also on World drama. Bhasa, Bhavbhuti, Harsha, Shudrak and Ashvaghosha are some of the noted dramatist.

TDR, 1997

Although it is rare to find a comparative treatment of Greek and Sanskrit drama as thoughtful and passionate as this one, students of classical Indian theater will recognize a familiar topic in the title. It is natural to want to see how two great ancient cultures that produced both a body of dramatic theory and a limited number of extant plays can shed light on each other. When the comparative study comes from the Indian side, or from a cultural fellow-traveler (such as myself), there is often an additional motivation. When colonial administrators introduced the

2016

JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS, 2020

It is always a pleasure to an ardent literary learner to know the new insights or aspects of literature. Here in this paper,we try to give a few new insights of Indian English Drama of its origin and development till the present day. It is noteworthy that creativity, be it dance, music or writing-has been a perennial flow in India from times immemorial to this day.Writing drama is also as old tradition as anything in India. Indian English drama takes its roots from both Indian traditional drama and English drama of the West. Mostly the themes and art of narration of Indian English drama resemble the traditional Indian drama and the form and staging aspects are taken from the Western English drama. Thus, one can say that Indian English drama is the child of Indian traditional drama and Western English drama.

India has the longest and the richest tradition in drama. The origin of Indian drama can be traced back to the Vedic Period. As a manifestation of our national sensibility Indian drama came into existence as a means of exploring and communicating the truth of things and was popularly known as the "Fifth Veda." During the age of the Vedic Aryans, drama was performed in a simple way. Different episodes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharta, and the Bhagavad-Gita were enacted out in front of people. Such type of performance is still very popular in India during the time of 'dussehra.' Bharata's Natyashastra in Sanskrit is the most pioneering work on Indian dance and drama. It discusses deftly all major aspects of drama, namely stage-setting, music, plot construction, characterization, dialogue and acting. Sanskrit drama flourished in its glory till the fifteenth century but thereafter Indian drama activity almost came to an end due to certain invasion on India. When Britishers came in India, the crippled Indian drama regained its strength. Thus, the western impact awakened Indian drama. However, K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar writes: Western education was as yet carrying all before it. It was the 'open sesame' to knowledge, freedom, power; it cut the old bonds of convention and tradition; it let in light into the old dark rooms of an obscurantist faith; and it made a new world and a new life possible for its beneficiaries.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2022

This paper is the fruit of a close and lasting collaboration between the two authors, elisa Ganser and Daniele Cuneo, the former being responsible for the first half, and the latter, the second. elisa Ganser wishes to express her gratitude to the swiss national science Foundation, whose generous contribution made the research for the paper possible within the framework of the project 'Performing arts and religious Practices in Classical and Medieval sanskrit literature' (Department of indian studies, university of Zurich). The Emotional and Aesthetic Experience of the Actor. Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien in Sanskrit Dramaturgy * Daniele Cuneo anD elisa Ganser (sorbonne nouvelle, university of Zurich) 'Moins on sent, plus on fait sentir' Diderot, Le paradoxe sur le comédien 'everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. only the dead have no sensations.' Konstantin stanislavski, An Actor Prepares which was spawned by the increased focus on the cognitive and responsive aspects of the process of artistic appreciation that developed in 9 th -c. Kashmir and held sway over the speculations on drama and poetry in the following four centuries or so. 21 in addition to these two extreme positions on the locus of rasa, the portrayed character on the one hand and the audience on the other, other possibilities have been argued for by sanskrit authors, not necessarily to the exclusion of other loci. That rasa is primarily situated in the dramatic text seems to be a conceivable corollary of a text-centred declension of the rasa theory, as it is ultimately the text itself that contains and triggers the rasa and must therefore be its primary locus. although already implicitly present in Bharata's image of the tree as a metaphor for the aesthetic process, 22 it is the reception-centred understanding of the rasa theory that highlights how rasa begins as an aesthetic experience already in the poet, which becomes its first locus, 23 and is then transferred to the viewer via the text being staged by actors. Within the aesthetic process triggered by a stage performance, the last conceivable option for the locus of rasa is the performer. such option, i.e. the actor's potential participation in the savouring of the rasa or, more generally, his emotional involvement in the play, will be the topic of the following sections.

Abstract: The present paper tries to explore the origin and emergence of the Indian Drama as an important and independent genre and analyzes the influence of Existentialism on the Indian English Drama. The pre-independence Indian English Drama is notable for its commitment to human and moral values, symbolic significance, technical virtuosity, thematic variety and poetic excellence, yet it was not much geared for the actual stage production, where as the post independent Indian English Drama was greatly benefitted by the growing interest of the foreign countries in Indian English literature in general and Indian English Drama in particular. The contemporary Indian English Drama is innovative and experimental in terms of technical and thematic qualities. It does not spring out of any specific tradition, rather reinvestigates folk lore, religion, myth, legend and history, thereby laying a foundation of a distinctive tradition in the history of world dram

2015

This thesis tests a newly developed model based on the Natyashastra, an Indian treatise on performing arts, and uses this for theatrical analysis in the contexts of British Asian theatre productions and contemporary Indian theatre in English. The study offers a tool that can provide an alternative model of analysis. By extending the existing analytical models, we can ask questions concerning the actors' emotional manifestation and their mental state while acting. This thesis attempts to interpret the actors' gestures and provides a structure to analyse them. In order to do that, this project uses the Natyashastra and rasa/bhava concepts as performance analysis tools, which might provide an alternate perspective to theatre analysis. The thesis reviews existing models of theatrical analysis and argues for an alternative model in Chapter One. It examines the analysis of theatre productions by scholars of British Asian theatre and contemporary Indian theatre in English in Chapter Two. Here, I review the ways in which scholars of British South Asian theatre have examined theatrical productions so far. Chapter Three tests the proposed model on four theatre productions, illustrating the ways in which theatre productions could be analysed, and identifies the model's limitations and advantages. Chapter Four discusses findings in the light of the results analysed in Chapter Three; it also outlines some questions which needs further investigation. By doing so, this thesis contributes to the field of performance analysis and theatre studies by developing strong links between the manifestation of the actors' bodymind, the directors' reception after their first reading of a play's text, and playwrights' initial emotions within the text, through production analysis. 9 A term coined by Zarrilli, which I will discuss later in the due course. 10 Prague School of Linguistics introduced semiotic theory to theatre and performance, see Jindrich Honzl's 'Dynamics of the Sign in the Theatre' and Jiri Veltrusky's 'Dramatic Text as a Component of Theatre. Chapter One: Existing Models of Theatre Analysis, the Natyashastra, and a Proposed Model Chapter Five, 'Preliminaries of a Play', deals with the concept of purvaranga (prologue), comprising dance compositions and song recitations to please gods and demons. The sutradhara (stage manager) adores Brahma 29 with dhurva songs, and in doing do announces the subject of the drama, sets the tone for the opening scene, and serves as a bridge between the audience and the world of the play. Chapters Six, 'Sentiments', and Seven, 'The Emotional and Other States', examine the fundamental emotional concepts and aesthetics of rasabhava. These two chapters are discussed separately later in this section. Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten codify body language and hand gestures, while Chapters Eleven to Fourteen address movement and steps. Bharata provides an extensive repertoire of sitting postures and steps to suit gender, character, occasion, mood, and dramatic situation (Ibid., p. 68). Chapters Fifteen, Sixteen, and Nineteen set out the rules of prosody, metrical patterns, modes of address and intonation, respectively. Chapters Seventeen, Twenty, and Twenty-seven identify the marks of a good play, genres of plays, and success of plays in dramatic productions. Chapter Eighteen focuses on the rules for use of language, and the subject of chapter twenty-one is plot (see Table 44). Chapter Twenty-two addresses the different Vrtti (styles). Chapters Twenty-three and Twenty-four address the aharyaabhinaya 30 , and refer to the use of make-up, costume/adornment for males and females, property, masks, minimal set design, and special representation such as seasons, forest and animals. Chapter Twenty-five focuses on different kinds of representation, temperament, and emotions represented in different ways. Chapter Twenty-six describes dealing with courtesans (dancers in courts). Chapters Twenty-seven to Thirty-three deal with music, musical instruments, rhythm and metrical cycles, and the qualities, origins, and nature of songs. Bharata argues, "That which cannot be expressed through speech should not be expressed through song" (Bharata, 1950, p. 147). 29 According to the Hindu religion, Brahma is the Creator of the Universe, depicted as sitting on a lotus. 30 Literal translation acting with decorated body and stage and I will explain further in the due course.