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HEMACANDRA ON SATTVIKA-BHAVAS
V. M. Kulkarni
of all the chapters of Bharata's Nātya-śästra the sixth Rasādhyāya and the seventh Bhāvādhyāya are the key chapters. For, they deal with the most important elements of rasa and bhäva (aesthetic or imaginative experience, and feelings or emotions) in drama. Bharata himself explicitly states 'without rasa no (dramatic) matter can arise'.1 Rasas and bhāvas being intimately connected, the bhāvas too are equally important. There is clear evidence that verses on rasa and bhāva existed even prior to the Natyasastra.2 Chapters on rasa and bhāva frequently use technical terms like vibhāva, anubhāva, vyabhicäribhāva, sthayibhäva and sättvika-bhāva in the course of the exposition of the theories of rasa and bhāvi. Abhinayagupta in his commentary on the Natyāśāstra emphatically states that “in the everyday world there are no such things as vibhāva, anubhāya and the like. They are merely causes and effects." In other words they belong exclusively to the realm of art.3
Now, the sole intention behind the invention of this terminology is obviously to emphasize the point that the world of drama is different from the real world. And as Abhinavagupta observes in his commentary, in the theatre we live neither in the time nor in the space of the characters portrayed in the drama nor of the actors. Nothing “really happens” or " is affected” in a drama or on the stage as it happens in the real world; when this is not carefully understood something like the following happens :
A well-known actress and an actor were to enact in a film a scene of an attempted rape. That the scene should appear as akstrima (natural) as possible, the actress asked the villain to do his best and that she would resist his attempt with all her might. Later she told her friend that if the filming had gone in a couple of minutes longer she would have died of suffocation :
In another film in a particular scene the actress was to be slapped. She asked the actor to give her a slap with all force so that it should appear ‘natural. When the actor actually slapped her, her ear-drum was damaged and her eye too.
