Rasa: Performing the Divine in India (review)

This slim little volume is part of a larger series of books intended "to introduce readers to basic concepts in India's long and rich religious and cultural traditions" (ix). In particular, Rasa: Performing the Divine in India proposes "to explicate the origins of Indian aesthetics in religious belief and practice, to articulate the religious sensibility responsible for those origins, and to begin to chart the difficult waters of change that characterize Indian aesthetics in respect to religion currently" (ix). To accomplish these goals, Schwartz proposes "to articulate the meaning and significance of rasa in order to provide a perspective from which performance traditions in India, both classical and non-classical, may be understood" (ix). This is a very tall order for a work barely a hundred pages long. Subtract thirty-one pages for illustrations, and you begin to see just how difficult the task becomes.

In chapter 2, rasa is defined and explained. This section is just fourteen pages long, but is clear and interestingly written. After establishing the roots of rasa in the sense of taste and the savory qualities of Indian cooking, Schwartz emphasizes that "[far] from rejecting the body for its fallibility, Indian aesthetics celebrates its potential to express the transformative ability of its underlying divine nature. Artistic experience through the body may enable the attainment of the highest spiritual goals" (9). What is troubling is that Schwartz appears to rely almost exclusively on secondary sources to develop her arguments. Rasawas first explained in the Natyasastra, the foundation text of Indian dramaturgy variously dated between 200 BCE and 600 CE. Since then, there have been many surviving interpretations and reinterpretations of rasaand other related terms that raise controversies about their meaning and purpose. For example, in "Sanskrit Drama in Performance," in the book bearing the same title, coedited by Rachel Van M. Baumer and James R. Brandon (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981), V. Raghavan, the late distinguished Sanskrit scholar—who was fond of quoting chapter and verse from this ancient text much as a biblical scholar might do to prove a point—traces these controversies through numerous ancient texts. At one point, he cites the Kashmiri poet Abhinavagupta, writing in the eleventh century CE, who "equates only natya, or a full drama, with rasa" (21), not the other branches of the performing arts as Schwartz has done. Indeed, there is strong justification for this claim, since the bulk of the Natyasastra focuses on drama and theatre. And it is not unreasonable to conclude that even its chapters on Indian dance and music may be presumed to relate to the performance of the Sanskrit plays and not to an exploration of these other arts as independent forms of expression. In chapter 3 Schwartz defines abhinaya as "the proper name for the use of the elements of gesture in performance to produce a predetermined effect" (36). Yet Manomohan Ghosh in his translation of Nandikeshvara's Abhinaya Darpana (Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1957) says, "The sanskrit word abhinaya is made up of the prefix abhi 'towards' and the root ni 'to carry'. Thus it means 'representing (carrying) a play (toward) spectators'" (8). In other words, the term means acting, not gesture. For many years now Indian and Western critics have taken abhinayato refer to acting in both theatre and dance.

The heart of Schwartz's book is chapter 3, "Rasa in Practice: Drama, Dance, Music." Strangely, a mere four pages has been relegated to a discussion of drama and theatre. A reader would be hard pressed to understand how rasaworks in Sanskrit drama and theatre by perusing these four pages. Not only that, she has said nothing about rasaand the numerous genres of performance in rural areas of the country, or its application to modern regional language drama and theatre.

Only eight pages are devoted to a discussion of Indian music. Here too it is difficult to understand how music produces rasain an audience after...