Abhinaya as Practice-as-Research

What does a collaborative process of an artistic creation entail? How does the individual components of text, music, and dance weave in a solo choreography? This article brings together the voices of the dancer (Sarkar), the choreographer (Dandavate), and the music composer (Mirle) who has also sung and is the curator of the project called Nachi Meera. This project has commissioned multiple artists working in different dance techniques to present Abhinaya-esque (meaning expressive dance works) expositions on songs by the renowned historical saint-poet Mirabai. Sarkar, Dandavate, and Mirle reflect upon their collaborative journeys in this reflective essay where the process of creating an Abhinaya is theorized as research. The dance piece itself stands by itself as a scholarly product with historical, performative, and artistic research methodologies informing the process. This article documents the collaborative process borrowing from scholar Robin Nelson’s Practice-as-Research (PaR) methodology and argues how the artistic product weaves verbal, kinesthetic, and aural communication in an iterative process of ‘doing-reflecting-reading-articulating-doing” (Nelson 32). Movement layers the intricacies of South Asian aesthetics or the Rasa theory that governs the mood of execution by the dancer. Improvisation through choreography supplements Mirabai’s lyrics and Mirle’s musical composition.

John Locke: The Construction of Knowledge in the Perspective of Philosophy

Epistemology is one of three philosophical dichotomies that rises to two main isms to obtain knowledge: rationalism initiated by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and empiricism initiated by John Lock (1632-1704). As an empiricist, Locke offers the tabula rasa theory to support his argument. Thus, this study aims to describe radically and comprehensively the concept of John Locke's thought from the perspective of epistemological philosophy. This aim is achieved by describing the background and principal works of John Lock on the philosophy of epistemology, including the main ideas, views, and reasoning of his empiricism through tabula rasa theory. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative in the field of philosophy. Data were collected through a literature study, then analyzed hermeneutically with two methodical elements: verstehen and interpret. First, this research shows that knowledge is principally obtained from sensory experience in which the mind is only passive. Second, the sensory experience is obtained objectively (primary quality) and subjectively (secondary quality). Third, external sensation and internal sensation obtained from sensory experience are built into simple ideas to complex ideas.

PROBLEMATIZING PREVALENCE OF RASAIN THE PLAYS OF MAHESH DATTANI

Natyashastriya theory of Rasa is a spirit so abstract that can only be suggested, not described in any work of visual, literary or performing art. Rasabhasa, a concept from Bharata Muni’s Rasa theory, alternatively nomenclated as a semblance of Rasa interestingly appearsparallel to Rasa but is not Rasa. Bharatmuni reiterates the relishing of Rasa or Rasabhasa from a conditional amalgamation of Bhava (emotions), Alambana Vibhava (protagonist), Uddipan Vibhava (environment) and Vyabhicharibhava (transitory emotional feelings) in the protagonist i.e. the one who leads (NayatiItiNeta). The conditionality isfurther enunciated emphasizing that not all protagonists relish Rasa or Rasabhasa distinctively in a dramatic performance. Modern plays with their stark distinctions from the ancient Indian plays like Abhigyanshakuntalam portray multilayered characters dealing with the questions of identities in various spatialities and temporalities at a glance do not seem insinuated with the characteristics underpinned in Natyashastra. These distinctions and coming away from the thematic contextualization of ancient Indian plays enshrouds the idea of Rasa Relish. Dattani’s On a Muggy Night in Mumbai and Seven Steps around the Fire explicitly raise gender and identity issues of LGBT community, in dealing with their thematic structure and characterization reveal relishing of Rasa or Rasabhasa. The paper critically problematizes the translational affinities between Rasa and Rasabhasa, also aspires to explore two plays by drawing on the concept of Rasabhasa. (Re) interpreting Rasa and Rasabhasa in the context of modern LGBT plays is the central premise of this research paper.

The Aesthetics of Rupture: Deconstructing Rasa

Semantic fixity is a transcendental signified. One of the touted aims of literary theory was to topple it. The Indian semantic concept of Vyañjana attempted to do this millennia before. But canonical theories of Rasa established Rasananda as an attainment of absolute coherence and harmony. What this paper calls trans-epistemic praxis is a viable methodology to reclaim the long-lost rupturality (if structurality is resisted, rupturality must be embraced, at least as a neologism) inherent to aesthetics. This is done in a Post-theory context. “Bhanga” (rupturing) leads to “bhangi”, aesthetic charm. It is an aporetic textual disruption that leads to the most fertile indeterminacy of meaning. Modern literary theory set out on a debunking and destabilizing mission of liberal humanist tenets, but got hardened into “doxa”, crystallized structures and hierarchies. This necessitated a theorizing of theory itself. The chronotope of Post-theory gets foregrounded. A crossing of spatio-temporal boundaries gives us the freedom to site Rasa Theory and Indian Poetics as Post-theoretical. Inter-spaces and inter-times are engendered. Deconstruction and Rasa become heterodoxic knowledges to each other, subverting each other honouring the alterity of the other. This exercise liberates Theory from becoming sclerotic. Orthodoxics and monologisms get flouted. Theory is a story. Story is built on the figurality of language. The tropology of language is built on a never-ending desire for signification. This desire never meets with satiation. The concept of “Rati” can be seen as this interminable desire of language. Post-theory is a call to wake up from amnesia, the terrible oblivion regarding the fact that Deconstruction and Rasa are ceaseless streams of reading processes and not rigid and straitjacketed end products. This ruptural aesthetics leads to the rapture of poeisis, the indeterminate significatory process.

How Not to Read like a Victorian: Reimagining Bankim’s Reader in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Novels

This article examines the novels of the nineteenth-century Bengali author Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in light of classical Sanskrit literature and the rasa theory and argues that practices of Sanskrit kāvya literature are as dominant in the structural and aesthetic elements of the Bengali novel as are Western forms of novel production. The arguments are located in the reader to suggest that Bankim’s novels train readers to read the Sanskrit past as encoded in the text and as coexisting with the westernized colonial present, albeit in a difficult relationship. The article pays particular attention to the novelist’s adaptation of two forms of Sanskrit prose, the kathā and the ākhyāyikā, and his exploration of the śṛngāra (erotic) rasa. While the Bengali novel emerges after the introduction of its Victorian counterpart, the former is a product of engagement with tensions foreign to the British novel. Exploring this alternative reading practice provides an opportunity to understand how Bengali and Sanskrit—in terms of literature and culture—are part of the lived experience of both Bankim and his nineteenth-century readers, and part of the aesthetic and ethical foundation of the early Bengali novel.

Rasāsvāda: A Comparative Approach to Emotion and the Self

This paper explores the philosophy of emotion in classical India. Although some scholars have endeavored to develop a systematic philosophy of emotion based on rasa theory, no serious effort has been made to read the relationship between emotion and the self in light of rasa theory. This exclusion, I argue, is an outcome of a broader presupposition that the 'self' in classical Indian philosophies is outside the scope of emotion. A fresh reading of classical Sanskrit texts finds this premise baseless. With an underlying assumption that emotion and self are inherently linked, this paper explores similarities between the Indian and Chinese approaches.

Kāvya’s Repeat Performances

Largely left underexplored in rasa studies has been an implication made in the middle of the tenth century that śāntarasa eludes theorization with respect to the theater (nāṭya) but may function within an exclusive theory of poetry (kāvya). A discussion in the Daśarūpaka (“The Ten Dramatic Forms”) and its commentary cryptically imply in the fourth chapter of that work that if śāntarasa is viable at all as a genre of rasa theory, it is medium-specific to kāvya and not possible in nāṭya. Though śāntarasa is a dubious category for theater theory and pragmatics, they seem to argue, it may be acceptable in poetry through a synergy of two theoretical schemas: poetics and Yoga psychology. Reviewing these arguments opens up a larger conversation about the significance of medium to rasa theory and the inherent limitations for conceiving unified theories of art.

The Application of Hasya Rasa in Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun” and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”

Literature like poetry has aesthetic value along with social value. The expression of emotion is the power of literature that enthralls readers; readers enjoy texts experiencing rasa. This paper aims to analyze Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun” and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” from the perspective of the rasa theory, i.e. an Eastern aesthetic theory. The poems randomly selected expose hasya rasa experience. The poets exploit hasya rasa to disseminate and propagate pleasure as well idea, thought, like erotic love, frivolous; the experience of hasya rasa is a uniqueness that enthralls readers to read the poems again. The expression and realization of rasa constitute the aesthetic value and power of the poems. The poems selected here demonstrate that the formal and serious poems can be amusing, chucklesome. Although the realization level of hasya rasa may vary from individual to individual as their academic, professional, social status, and age, there is hasya rasa experience in the poems.