Some Aspects of Rasa Theory

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

Page 95

THE RELEVANCE OF RASA THEORY TO MODERN LITERATURE
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1. The first is from Jacques Maritain's Creative Intuition in art4 where he discusses T. S. Eliot's views regarding the nature of emotions in poetic creation and criticism. While he agrees with Eliot that “one who reads poets should not mistake for the poetry an emotional state aroused in himself by the poetry, a state which may be merely an indulgence of his own emotions"; and that "the end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion are removed "-Maritain calls these "brute emotions or merely subjective feelings"-he adds his proviso that "this pure contemplation itself is steeped in the creative emotion or poetic intuition conveyed by the poem. T. S. Eliot goes on to say: "It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting... The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones, and in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual fact emotions at all,..poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion." And Maritain observes : "The escape of which he speaks cannot come about except through poetic knowledge and creative emotion, and in the very act of creating.” At last he is in full agreement with Eliot when he ends up with the following observation: "Very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet."
Before I cite the next passage, let me set beside this the aphorism of Anandavardhana-'If the poet be suffused with emotion, the entire world of his creation will be pulsating with rasa; If he should be devoid of it, the entire world of his creation too will be dry and inspid'.5
Here is Abhinavagupta's exegesis of śrngāri : The poet should be taken to be suffused with the delectation of the various ingredients of a love-situation as found in literature; one should not wrongly understand that he must be a voluptuary running after women in life. Further, the
word śrngära here is really indicative of rasa in general. 6 Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta thus are well aware of the distinction between what Maritain would call 'creative emotion and T. S. Eliot would call 'significant emotion' on the one hand and brute emotion or raw emotion of everyday life. The former is a singular feature underlying all creative writing; while the latter belongs to the private lives of people as particular individuals with their worldly love-hate complexities. I quote this passage to underscore the point that this has not been particularly noticed by Sanskritists, when Abhinavagupta regards kavi and sahrdayc as two poles of the same creative power :
4. New York, 1955, p. 310. 5 śrngári cet kavih kávye jätam rasamayam jagat/
sa eva vītarāgaścet nīrasam sarvameva tat//
-Dhvanyaloka, Ed. K. Krishnamoorthy, Dharwad, 1974, p. 250. 6. Locana, N. S. P. Edn., Bombay, 1935, p. 278.