Some Aspects of Rasa Theory

Author(s): V M Kulkarni
Publisher: B L Institute of Indology

Page 85

THE RASA THEORY IN RELATION TO ALL THE FINE ARTS.
73
It is in order to lend beauty to the feeling depicted in a poem or play that the poet has to make a highly clever use of vibhāvas, anubhāvas and vyabhicāri-bhāvas, which are but the means to be employed to give rasaexperience to the reader. The word 'samyoga' in the raso-sutra means samyag yaga' or an exquisite combination. The whole charm of a poem is a result of the poet's choice of the appropriate vibhāvas etc. and their proper synthesis into one whole. That is why it has been rightly said that the poet uses the same words as are known to all people and that he uses them in the same senses in which others do, but a piece of poetry assumes a new form, only on account of the skill of the poet in properly weaving them into one whole.1
Rasa may, therefore, be described as the beautiful delineation of an emotion with the help of suitable vibhāvas etc. as to give an extremely delightful experience of that emotion to the reader or spectator.
But the rasa-theory had initially been propounded as an essential element of natya (i.e., the dramatic art) and it came to be applied later on to kavya or poetry. Can this theory be of a considerable use to all the other fine arts as well ? That is the main question we have mainly to consider in the following pages of this article.
Fine arts other than nätya and kavya are generally supposed to be alekhya (i. e., drawing and painting), sangīta (music), mūrtiśilpa (sculpture) and vistuśilpa (architecture). Sangita is made up of nộtya (dancing), gita (i. e., singing or vocal music) and vădya (i. e., instrumental music). By 'fine arts we shall, for our present purposes, understand those arts the main aim of which is to give delight to the artist himself and the rasikas by bringing into being something endowed with uncommon beauty.
We shall begin, then, with alekhya. This art is pretty old so far as 'our country is concerned. I need not here proceed to describe the semi-circular, circular, square and other shapes that used to be given to sacrificial altars and the figure of a heron that used to be arranged' in Vedic times, as is mentioned in the 'Sulva-sūtra' written soon after the Vedic literature proper. In the Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, an explicit mention has been made of a number of pictures, in the bedrooms of Rāvaņa.
The śāstra of the art of drawing and painting has been dealt with, fairly elaborately, in nine adhyāyas (adhyayas 35 to 43) of the third Khanda of the Visnudharmottara Purana, supposed to have been written about 600 A. D. These nine adhyayas are known by the name 'Citra-sūtra'.
But much before the elaboration in the Citra-sūtra proper, i. e., in the early ślokas of the second adhyāya of the same third Khanda of the Vişnu
1. a 99 ThT:, a garsiauna:
तथापि नव्यं भवति काव्यं प्रथनकौशलात् ॥ 2. Tri sta tari tayya