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I dian aesthetic terminology
It is against this background that Bharata's theory of rasa becomes meaningful, a theory which touches all the problems of aesthetics in its boundless sweep, though it has started more controversies than it hass silenced, in ancient as well as modern times. Bharata's rasa is primarily beauty in the composite arts of Natya made up of many elements like music, dance, gesture, poetry and painting. In the art representing natural beauty, alankara or decorative skill of the artist as displayed in manipulating his medium or rawmaterial, whether spontaneous or stylized is like the body of art. We should now add that its vital essence or soul is rasa or aesthetic emotion or sentiment. We said that beauty was a guna or inner quality of the body of nature or art discernible to a sensitive beholder; rasa is something even more far-reaching than the guna of beauty because it can transform by its magic touch as it were even ugliness into beauty, and endow form even to the formless. This theory of rasa, especially as amplified by Dhvani philosophers, is a typically Indian contribution to aesthetics; and it has its parallelisms in the most modern thinking on the subject in the West like that of Susanne K. Langer, Cassirer, and T. S. Eliot.
It needs to be reiterated that all Indian aesthetic concepts are inter-related and interfused. They all revolve around the pivotal axis of rasa. Alankara, guna, ruti, vṛtti, dhvani and aucitya are telling instances in point Some modern studies of these in isolation have resulted in obscuring the issues and their relevance as never before, though they havs aften been hailed as learned research'. Prefessor Hiriyanna has rightly decried this research mentality which shuts out new thought and prevents right understanding. But we have yet to learn this lesson, it seems! Indian aesthetics underscored the organic unity of these concepts by offering the analogy of a beauty queen. Her natural beauty also adorns her so to say; and is alankara which is of the svatah-sambhavi type. But she might add to her natural beauty of limbs by adorning herself with multiple ornaments each one best suited to set off her charm
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