Brecht in Hindi: The Poetics of Response
states. When these last three appear as elements of poetic expression, as vibhava, determinants, i.e., persons and situations forming constellations which determine the course of action; anuVhava^ consequents, i.e., the corresponding theatrical expression; and finally, vyabhicaribhava, accompanying transitory states, they bring about the aesthetic experience corresponding to the respective dominant state and known as rasa.5
The rasa and bhava concepts were closely interlinked withftorfte,6 the structural 60 scheme or plot of drama on the one level, on the other with abhinaya, the language of gesture, of interpretation.7 In theNatya Sastra therefore rasa was contained within an elaborate structure, linking dramatic composition with actual performatory techniques in theatre.
The bhava and rasa principles were further developed to become universally applicable to all forms of artistic creation in the ninth and tenth centuries. Central categories of these new interpretations were sadharanikarana, generalisation, the aesthetic state of consciousness which is distinct from the experience of everyday life and thus completely independent of any individual interest, and camatkara, wonder, astonishment, as the quality of the moment when the viewer perceives the latent impressions of the mind (vasana) in a density not experienced in everyday life. Further the concept ofsahrdaya9 the partaker of aesthetic experience, as one whose sensibility and perception had been trained and prepared for reception, circumscribed aesthetic experience as limited to those thus privileged.
Hereafter, theatre aesthetics were absorbed into general poetics with distinctly spiritual affiliations.9 By this time what has come down to us as classical Sanskrit drama had ceased to be performed, both through lack of patronage and through the emergence of modern languages, though popular drama and lyric flourished.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rasa became explicitly linked with religious and personal devotion. Srngara, the erotic rasa was accorded the highest status amongst the rasas and was identified as the state of being, as well as the response of the devotee to Krishna, the God with the flute, sporting with the milkmaids on the bank of the river Yamuna. It is in this form that the rasa aesthetics survive up to the present day, as part of the theology of the religious movements which came into existence then,10 as also in continuation of the traditional scholarly exposition of Sanskrit poetics, used as analytic tools in the exegesis of Sanskrit and Sanskritic literary compositions.
FOLK THEATRE
While rasa was becoming increasingly theological on the one hand and secularized in erotic court poetry on the other" there is some evidence of theatre, folk-religious, in the court-chronicles of the Mughal emperor Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605. Towards the end of Mughal rule, whether as a consequence of official policies of suppression or of political upheaval, drama seems to have suffered practical extinction, surviving as performance on the outskirts and borders of the Mughal empire, in Nepal, Mithila and Assam. It surfaced again in the early nineteenth
Journal of Arts 6" Ideas