A History of Sanskrit Literature: Classical Period, Vol. I c4.39

c4.39

The atmosphere of artistic creation as displayed in a Sanskrit play, as distinguished from the atmosphere of ordinary reality has well been described by Abhinavagupta in his commentary on Bharata's *Nāṭya-Sūtra*. Thus, Abhinavagupta says that the constitutive words of a Kāvya produce in the mind of the proper reader something novel, something that is over and above the meaning of the poem. After the actual meaning of words is comprehended there is an intuition by virtue of which the spatio-temporal relation of particularity that is associated with all material events disappears and a state of universalisation is attained. When in the play of *Śakuntalā* king Duṣyanta appeared on a chariot following a deer for piercing it with his arrows, the deer was running in advance, turning backward its neck from time to time to look at the chariot following it and expecting a stroke of the arrow at every moment, and drawing its hind legs towards the front, twisting the back muscles and rushing forth with open mouth dropping on the way the half-chewed grass, we have a scene of fear ; but our mind does not refer it to the deer of any particular time or place or to the particular king who was hunting the deer, and we have no idea of any fear as being of any particular kind or belonging to a particularly localised animal. The absence of this particularity is manifested in the fact that we have no feeling of sorrow or anxiety associated with it. It is because this fear arises in a special manner in which it is divested of all association of particularity that it does not get mixed up with any of our personal psychological feelings. For this reason the aesthetic experience produced by literature, the sentiment that is realised through delineation in art, is devoid of any association with any particular time, place or person. For this reason the aesthetic representation of fear or any other emotion is entirely different from any real psychological sentiment. And therefore, it is devoid of the ordinary associates that accompany any real psychological sentiment that is felt personally as belonging to a real person in a particular spatio-temporal setting. Abhinava says that in such a fear the self is neither absolutely hidden nor illuminated in its individual personal character (*tathāvidhe hi bhaye nātyantamātmā tiraskṛto na viśeṣataḥ ullikhitaḥ*). The artistic creation and representation then appear in an atmosphere of light and darkness, shadow and illumination in which the reference to the real person and the real time and place is dropped. As when we infer the existence of fire from smoke we do not make any reference to any special fire or any special smoke, so here also the aesthetic sentiment has no localised aspect. When through the gestures of the players different sentiments are aroused in the minds of the observers, then the representation so intuited is divested of the spatio-temporal relations.