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What did Bharata mean by Rasa?
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thoughts or the ideas of the artists, that is 'S' will have to be translated.
Let me illustrate the point. Suppose an artist, has to express a love episode between a hero and a heroine, say Śankara and Parvati. It cannot simply be in written or spoken symbols; one party making an offer and the other accepting it. With this mental event - love certain bodily events are necessarily concomitant. The mental content is expressed through bodily expressions and behaviour, very peculiar to the situation. In the actual world, too, if a lover expresses his love to his beloved and the beloved accepts the love, the whole situation cannot be simply verbal and devoid of proper signs of emotion. The beloved's acceptence of love - at least in Indian tradition-will be accompanied by certain bodily postures, or throbbing of the lips, or tremor of the body. The beloved will usually blush. She may not look straight into the lover's eyes, but may look downward, and in many cases, may not utter a word but remain silent. Usually such a scene may Occur at some beautiful place near a lake where there are lotuses. The dramatist, the creator of the art, has to conceive the whole of this complex situation with all its mental impli cations before expressing it in words or symbols. And in the act of staging of this drama, if the stage director is different from the dramatist, he has to construct on the stage, with the help of the set of actors and situations, all that the dramatist has to convey. The stage director thus makes use of this material in order to give concrete form to the ideas of the artist i,e. the dramastist. The set of actors and environment, and the acting and the bodily expression, the direction and the director-all these form the material of the Natya language, just as the meaningful words and their syntax form part of poetry. I think it was this Natya language or rather language medium that was called 'Rasa' by Bharata, in the same way as the language medium of literature or poetry was called Sabda'. Just as ordinary language or a
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