Rasa: Performing the Divine in India (review)

Rasa, a concept of Indian aesthetics, is an awareness of union with the divine, which can (and should) result from the successful performance of music, dance, drama, poetry, devotional prayer, and possibly other performative acts, both practiced and observed, according to the classic text, Natyasastra. Susan Schwartz, in Rasa: Performing the Divine in India, uses the definition "taste, essence, flavor" and refers to rasa's primary referent as food. But taste and flavor are sensual experiences and food is a consumable material substance. "How is it possible," the book's blurb asks, "that a word used to describe a delicious masala can also be used to critique a Bharata Natyam performance?" This analogy or perhaps commingling of rasa in performance and food is not problematic for Indians, and Richard Schechner, in his TDR article "Rasaesthetics" (2001) describes the usage extensively. But Schwartz reifies rasa (a practice she repeats when discussing "traditions," "India," and "Islam"), and thus looses sight of its essence, which is experiential and processual, not objective: because rasa can in part be understood as taste or flavor doesn't mean it has a "primary referent" other than its own experiential reality.

First examining rasa in theory, Schwartz writes, "Rasa, as a way of describing the design and goals of performance, is an essential part of the vocabulary of performance in most contexts" (3), which is true. She links rasa etymologically with the Tamil rasam which is a peppery soup in South Indian cuisine, again suggesting that food is the primary referent for rasa, an assertion that moves rasa away from its intangible experience in performance to a form of consumption at the table. When Schwartz states that, "It is through performative modes that the sacred becomes palpable in India" (6), she seems to be viewing rasa as an outsider, one who has never experienced it, or is unable to write about that experience if she has. For Indians, the sacred is palpable. Performative modes affirm the tangibility of the sacred, just as a murti affirms the known presence of the divine. Schwartz describes "the Indian understanding of time" as "circular, an infinite and eternal round of cycles within cycles" (11). The statement reveals her bias toward stasis rather than process: time is always cyclical, continuously moving; and a circle, as we know from studies of tala and raas (Krishna's round dance), is placed in time rather than moving through time. Time in Indian culture is primarily cyclical not circular. Moving forward, it returns to new beginnings.

The central chapter of Rasa is the third, "Dance as Mystery," which takes up Rasa in practice through discussion of drama, dance, and music. Schwartz uses the works of scholars in these fields to describe differences in Western and Indian stage performances, and the secular and religious aspects of Indic drama, characters, and performance timings. The emotional reaction of the audience, a higher level of attainment, is "the experience of rasa" (25). Schwartz uses the Greek concept of mysterion to suggest that it is a "practice inaccessible to the uninitiated" (26). Here her illustrations are sculptures rather than living dancers. A brief history of the dance, a listing of its major components and styles, and sections on bharata natyam (with photographs of a dancer illustrating the rasas), kathak, and kathakali are heavily dependent on previous scholars' works.

The last chapter, entitled "Transformation in Time and Space" describes a "modern Arangetram" (89) in suburban Pennsylvania in order to explore diasporic cultural performance and its implications for the experiencing of rasa.

Writing about rasa for readers unfamiliar with Indian culture and aesthetics is challenging, since one must find a path between textbook informativeness and scholarly contribution. These are two different activities. Writing a textbook entails compiling scholarly writings on a particular topic or set of topics into a readable educational tool, intended mainly for classroom teaching. It does not require original work, except perhaps...