Aesthetics in the West is an age-old game. The first moves were made by Plato and Aristotle; later Kant and Hegel joined the game; it is being played today by people of calibre. Aristotle and Kant - or their eastern counterparts, Shankuka and Abhi-navagupta — are giants; the .present day ^laratjji theoreticians are to them what pebbles are to mountain — peaks. What contribution can we hope to make to a game which was started and kept going by Aristotle and Kant? And this without first ac-quiring the preparatory materials and skills? We are qualified to make only a hesitant move and retire. If one is deluded into believing that one has done something more than this, one should, as a corrective, carefully read again — or, as would'be the case with many, for the first time - Aristotle, Kant, Shankuka, Abhi-navagupta. One will then realise that our so-called original theories have been suggested in passing by these great minds. As our scholarship develops, the illusions about our achievements will progressively melt. Once people realize the need for adequate knowledge — of art and theory — they will desist from writing on the subject on the strength of a brief acquainUftce with an Qsborne or a Santayana. We shall have to modify a little o^t earlier statement about the absence of the threefold preparation needed for the creation of an aesthetic system. It is of course a fact, that we do not have any vigorous traditions. However, occasional attempts to move in the right direction appear to have been made. An occasional essay in practical criticism, which is comprehensive and which also goes into minutae, a good critical survey of the literature of a particular period, an able treatise on a subject like imagery provide some, although meagre, evidence in support of this. But as these attempts try to exceed their present limits, difficulties crop up. For now we are forced to face questions about our basic conceptual structure. Within which structure have we been functioning? What are our valuational criteria? What is our aesthetic tradition? Everything that has taken place in India since ancient times obviously ly does not belong to oi/r(Maharashtrian) today. By the 12th century A.D. the vigorous Sanskrit traditions in imaginative and critical literature dried up. Today's writer cannot claim to have a living and comprehensive relation with them either on the creative or the critical plane. If we try to re-establish a relation with these there are two types of formidable obstacles in the way. It is true that we do now and then come across Pundits who discuss the Sanskrit poetic theories on an academic plane. But nobody would analyse a modern Indian play on the basis of the Sanskrit structuring principles ofsandhis and sandhyangas. Nor do we get a.detailed analysis and evaluation of a modem play in terms ofalambana and vibhavas, anubhava, vyabhicharibhavas. Occasionally, we run into a critic who says that a partyc^ilar hovel is suffused with the karuna rasa. But he does not use the concepts ofvrbhava, sthayibhava, sadharanikarna. If the modern critic's responses do not spontaneously get articulated in the old Sanskrit theories, if these theories are not already there in the womb of the creative and critical processes of a modern man, these theories cannot be legitimately claimed to be our's today. Secondly, the concepts which we spontaneously use today do not appear to have received due attention and emphasis in Sanskrit poetics. Sanskrit theoreticians agree that rasas are closely 45 January-March 1984