Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c82.s1.2

v2.c82.s1.2

While the orthodox schools of Poetics were elaborating systems of *alaṃkāra* and *rīti*, there flourished several writers who discussed the question of the dramatic *rasa* after Bharata, and formulated explanations of the latter's much discussed *sūtra* on the subject¹. Their exposition, however, concerned the dramatic art, and their theories did not as yet come properly within the sphere of Poetics, which was entirely dominated by the *alaṃkāra*- and *rīti*-systems. The aesthetic importance of the *rasa*, therefore, was never realised, as we shall see, until it was taken up and worked into Poetics by the Dhvanikāra and his followers. The dramaturgic Rasa school, however, had in the meantime elaborated several theories of *rasa* and brought it into prominence as an element of the drama; and in this way it succeeded, to a certain extent, in reacting upon and influencing the orthodox theories of Poetics, which appear to have possessed, even at an early period a limited acquaintance with the *rasa*, and which actually accord it a place, however small, in their general systems of *alaṃkāra* or *rīti*.