Natyashastra

A treatise on theatre that became the foundation of every Indian art. The Natyashastra, attributed to the sage Bharata, is vast, technical and confident, and the single line at its centre has been argued over for two thousand years.

What it is

A complete science of the stage: the construction of the playhouse, the categories of drama, gesture, gait, costume, makeup, metre, music, the types of hero and heroine, and the emotional theory that holds it together. It is usually placed in the long window between about 200 BCE and 200 CE, which is a way of saying that it is a compilation with older material inside it.

It does not present itself as a handbook. The frame story has the gods ask Brahma for a kridaniyaka, a plaything, but one that could be seen and heard by everyone, including those the Vedas excluded. Brahma makes a fifth Veda, the Natyaveda, out of the other four: recitation from the Rigveda, song from the Sama, gesture from the Yajur, emotion from the Atharva. Drama is founded, in its own account, as the scripture available to people the scriptures kept out.

The rasa-sutra

Chapter six gives the line every later theorist spent a career on. In prose, not verse, and numbered 6.31 or 6.32 depending on the edition, it states that rasa arises from the conjunction of the determinants, the consequents and the transitory states.

That is the whole theory in one sentence, and it says almost nothing about how. What is the relation between the causes on stage and the flavour in the audience? Is it production, inference, manifestation, or something else? Four rival answers were developed, and we know them largely because Abhinavagupta reports them before giving his own.

The commentary that we read it through

Abhinavagupta’s Abhinavabharati, written in Kashmir around the turn of the eleventh century, is the most important thing ever written about the Natyashastra and is in practice how the text is read. His reconstruction of the earlier positions on the rasa-sutra is the only access we have to most of them. Anyone quoting Bharata on rasa is usually quoting Bharata as Abhinava understood him, and it is worth saying so.

How it reached English

Manomohan Ghosh’s translation, beginning 1951, is the standard complete English rendering and is available through wisdomlib.

What is not in it

The ninth rasa, in the oldest layer. Chapter six enumerates eight. Shanta, the peaceful, which later theory treats as the highest and which Abhinavagupta defends at length, is a subsequent addition and its status was contested. The familiar set of nine is the tradition’s, not necessarily Bharata’s.

Nor is it confined to theatre. Because the text bound drama, dance and music into one science from the start, rasa travelled outward until it was the measure of painting, of a raga, of a temple sculpture and of a single verse. By the sixteenth century Rupa Goswami had rebuilt the whole apparatus around devotion, making bhakti itself the supreme rasa.