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THE RELEVANCE OF RASA THEORY TO MODERN LITERATURE
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discarded long ago by philosophers like Maritain. To Richards there is no aesthetic emotion peculiar to art: "When we look at a picture or read a poem or listen to music, we are not doing something quite unlike what we were doing on our way to the gallery or when we dressed in the morning."25 Even art-critics like Roger Fry have shown how transmutations of sensations of experience take place in art. Our reaction to works of art is a reaction to a relation and not to sensations as such or even to objects or persons. I have been struggling all the time to highlight the fact that rasa as explained by Bhatta Nayaka and Abhinava does not exist outside the percipient. It is to be discovered or intuited within by an inward directed process, which is non-empirical and hence called alaukika or lokottara; these terms should not be interpreted as .super-normal because intuitive apperception is quite a normal feature in all aesthetic contemplation.
One more digression from texts bearing on sädhāranīkarana in Sanskrit. I might be permitted, to build up the right atmosphere for the understanding of the intended purport of the texts. That is the modern idea of symbol. Susanne Langer is the reputed exponent of the theory that all art is essentially symbolic.26 She has drawn inspiration from the Indian rasa theory also. According to her all artistic creation consists of only "forms of human feeling." Art does not represent actual things and events but ideas of them. It has import without conventional reference. The symbol has a special sense of "sïgnificant form" where "significance" is a quality felt by the percipient while "form" is that art-object outside which expresses feeling. This feeling is not communicated but revealed. The aesthetic emotion is not expressed in the work, but belongs to the percipient.27 The correspondence of all this with the postulates of the dhvani theory is obvious. When widely interpreted in the context of modern thought, dhvani or abhi-vyakti is nothing but a sudden revelation; the sahrdaya's response is a fresh discovery of rasa. The poem is only a stimulus.
But then there would arise the philosophical problem as to how rasa would be a valid experience in the absence of the subject-object relationship. This is dismissed by Sankuka with a mere assertion :
Who can challenge an experience which is validated by the testimony of being clearly felt ?'28 But Anantadāsa, son of Viśvanātha, commenting on his father's Sähïtyadarpaņa29 quotes two verses which offer this svatah
25. See, Principles of Literary Criticism, New York, p. 16 ff. 26. Vide-1. Fecling and Form, New York, 1953.
2. Philosophy in a New Key, Cambridge (Mass.), 1942.
3. Problem of Art, New York, 1957. 27. For further details, see Richard Courtney, On Langer's Dramatic Illusion, Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XXIX, No. 1 (1970). 28. Cf. yuktyā paryanuyujyeta sphurannanubhavaḥ kayā ? -Abhinavabhāratz (GOS), Vol. I,
1956, p. 273. Locana on Sāhityadarpana, Ed. Devadatta Kaushik, Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1978 Delhi, p. 7.
