Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c86.20

v2.c86.20

In spite of the unquestioned dominance of the Dhvani School, which no doubt recognised the importance of *rasa* but regarded it as one of the phases of the unexpressed only, one class of writers, who still adhered to *rasa* as the only element worth considering in poetry, continued to devote exclusive attention to it and build up a system, so to say, on the basis of the *rasa* alone. Of all the *rasas*, however, as *śṛṅgāra* (or love) forms the absorbing theme of Sanskrit poetry and drama in general, and as this particular poetic sentiment has an almost universal appeal, these writers naturally work out this important *rasa* in all its phases; and we have in consequence a series of erotico-rhetorical treatises, of which the earliest known and the most remarkable is Rudrabhaṭṭa’s *Śṛṅgāra-tilaka*¹⁰. Rudra states distinctly at the beginning of his work that although Bharata and others have spoken of *rasa* in the drama, his object is to apply it to the case of poetry, and that a *kāvya*, in his opinion, must possess *rasa* as its constant theme. Following upon this we have Bhoja’s *Śṛṅgāra-prakāśa* ¹¹, which (following the tradition of the *Agni-purāṇa*) deals with the subject in the usual elaborate cyclopaedic manner of its author, with profuse illustrations of every phase of the erotic sentiment in no less than twenty chapters. After this come innumerable works of a similar nature ¹², which take *rasa*, especially *śṛṅgāra*, as their principal theme and which were composed apparently with the object of guiding the poet in the composition of erotic pieces so popular and profuse in Sanskrit poetry. Of these, the *Bhāva-prakāśa* ¹³ of Śāradātanaya, which reproduces the substance of most of the chapters of Bhoja’s work, and the exhaustive *Rasārṇava* of Siṅga Bhūpāla, ¹⁴ a Tanjore prince of the 17th century, as well as the two well-known works of Bhānudatta ¹⁵, deserve mention. But none of these later treatises adds anything new or original to a subject already thrashed out to its utmost.