A History of Sanskrit Literature c25.s1.1

c25.s1.1

IT is very possible to exaggerate the effect of theories of poetics¹ on Indian poetry and to ignore the fact that in India as elsewhere the poets set the models on which theory was built, and that it was only gradually that the effect of the textbooks on poetics came to be of ever-increasing importance. It is little short of absurd to imagine Kālidāsa as laboriously striving to conform to rules which in his time were, to the best of our knowledge, only in process of formulation, and which in any case were, as we can see from our extant sources, always being laid down with distinct divergences of emphasis and detail. Of the age of the study of poetics we can say little, but the fact that Pāṇini does not mention Alaṁkārasūtras, while he does recognize Naṭasūtras, certainly suggests that dramaturgy came before a general survey of poetics, even if we do not believe that Pāṇini knew a fully developed drama. With this accords the fact that, beyond vague references to Kāçyapa and a Vararuci, and Yāska’s knowledge of discussions of similes, Upamās,² we have no certain information on poetics until it occurs as a subordinate element in chapter xvi of the *Bhāratīya Nāṭyaçāstra*, which is essentially a treatise of dramaturgy and which may be placed conjecturally somewhat earlier than Bhāsa and Kālidāsa, though there is no strict proof of date. The great merit of this treatise, a compilation unquestionably from previous works, is that it develops the doctrine of sentiment, Rasa, with its eight subdivisions as erotic, comic, pathetic, and those of horror, heroism, fear, disgust, and wonder. Sentiment is a condition in the mind of the spectator of a drama, or, we may add, the hearer or reader of a poem, produced by the emotions of the characters, and the emotions, Bhāvas, are excited by factors which may either be the object of the emotion, as the loved one is in the case of love, or serve to heighten it, as does the spring season. The emotions manifest themselves in effects of various kinds, and they are essentially distinct in psychological character among themselves, while the sentiments, though subdivided according to the emotions which excite them, are nevertheless essentially one in feeling, and this feeling, which later authorities seek more clearly to define, is a special purely aesthetic emotion comparable to the bliss obtained in contemplation of the absolute by the intellect which can comprehend it.¹