Some Aspects of Rasa Theory

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

Page 98

SOME ASPECTS OF THE RASA THEORY
passive endurance into a soluble problem of conduct, the unpleasant into the evil....
But there are always tribulations which science has not yet been able to change into temptations and which it will never be able to change because they have already happened. It is with these that art is concerned; the Muses are the daughters of memory. For if past events cannot be altered, our attitude towards them can. They can be accepted. Their relation to each other and the present can be understood. The moralist's attack on art comes from his confusion
of art with science.14 The romantic movement in the West advocates the autonomy of the poeticart; and raises its banner of revolt against conformity to any external norms. It makes the poet the 'unacknowledged legislator of the world'. Anandavardhana too asserts in the same strain :
In poesy's unlimited estate,
the poet is the Creator sole! As he pleases, so things mutate
in this universe whole !15 His poet obeys no law which is not intrinsic to his inspired vision. This law itself is the integral norm of propriety (aucitya) to rasa. It is at once a-logical and a-moral. Any theme is grist to the poet's mill. What makes it aesthetically viable and valuable is only rasa-aucitya. That is the reason why rasābhāsa has an honoured place alongside of rasa in literature, according to Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta. The latter insists on the condition that the sahrdaya should be free from inhibitions imposed by his personal beliefs and unbeliefs, to make his response genuinely aesthetic. Against the background of Auden's penetrating analysis of experience, it will be easy to see how the Indian conception of thematic "rasadis" alongside of the over-all creative rasa is both meaningful and significant. The former are governed by the law of unity, symmetry, harmony, and propriety while the over-all rasäveśa or creative afflatus is a law unto itself.16 The question of the poet's belief is not brought into literary criticism or value judgement. What is ever insisted upon is the commonality of interest between the poet and his reader, since art, by definition, is a shared thing. This is a point admitted by Auden also. If it cannot be shared, "poetry would be no more than a personal allegory of the
14. Ibid., p. 39. 15. apare kävyasaṁsāre kavireva prajāpatiḥ/
yathāsmai rocate viśvar. tathedam parivartate// -Loc. cit., p. 250. 16. The following citation found in Pratihārendurāja shows how rasa and rasadi were not
always kept distinct even in early times : rasādyadhisthitam kāvyam jīvadrūpatayā yataḥ/ ucyate tadrasādinām kāvyātmatvam vyavasthitam//