Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c83.51

v2.c83.51

The second division of suggestive poetry, the *vivakṣitānyapara-vācya*, in which the expressed is meant but is made to resolve itself into the unexpressed, is obviously based on *abhidhā* or Denotation, and embraces the more important matter of *rasa*, which has already been worked out by the Rasa school in the sphere of the drama. Two possible cases of this division are enumerated, viz, (1) that in which the suggested is of imperceptible process (*asaṃlakṣya-krama*), i. e., where the expressed denotation brings the suggested sense imperceptibly into consciousness, and (2) that in which the suggested is of perceptible process (*saṃlakṣya-krama*). Under the first group comes the suggestion of *rasa* and *bhāva*, for it is made clear that these emotional states can only be suggested in this way. Under the second group are included the suggestions of matter (*vastu*) and of figure (*alaṃkāra*) by matter and figure in turns, based respectively on the power of word, or its sense, or both. Thus the unexpressed, which is raised to comprehension by the suggestive power of a word, or its sense or both, can be an unexpressed fact or matter, an unexpressed imaginative mood which may be put into the shape of a poetic figure; but in most cases—and these cases are of primary importance in poetry—it is an unexpressed emotional mood (*rasa*) or feeling (*bhāva*), which is directly inexpressible, but which can only be suggested by an expressive word or its sense. We have already seen²⁴ that the poet can at his best directly expresses the three factors which bring about the *rasa*, viz., the *vibhāva*, the *anubhāva*, and the *vyabhicāri-bhāva*, but not the *rasa* itself as a mood which is inexpressible in its nature. At the most, we can give a name to it, e.g., we can call it love, sorrow or anger, but the mere naming of the *rasa* in poetry is not capable of awakening the mood itself in the reader which consists of a self-manifested state of the mind. Therefore, with the denotation or description of these factors, the poet can only suggest the *rasa*; in other words, he can call up a reflection of the mood which the reader realises as a particular condition of his own mind²⁵. The expressed factors, the *vibhāvas* etc., are thus the suggestor or *vyañjaka* of the *rasa*, which is the suggested or *vyaṅgya*. The suggested, no doubt, depends for its manifestation on the expressed (*vācyārthāpekṣa*), which consists of a denotation of the factors which suggest it, but it is in no way produced from it as an effect and differs entirely in essence. This suggestion is said to be ‘of an imperceptible process’, because the perception of the suggested *rasa* by means of the various factors necessarily involves a process, but from its quickness the process is not perceived, like the process, as one writer graphically puts it, of the apparently simultaneous piercing of a hundred lotus-leaves placed one upon another. At the moment of relishing a poetic mood or feeling we are so absorbed in it that we do not perceive the process which suggests it, and this subtle suggestion may fittingly be described as one of ‘imperceptible process’.