A Rasa Reader by Sheldon Pollock

Author:Sheldon Pollock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI033000, Philosophy/Hindu, REL032030, Religion/Hinduism/Sacred Writings
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

On “Verbal Acting”

(2.221)301 Some scholars have argued that the actual words for the aesthetic-emotional elements302 are themselves external to the creation of the mental state of rasa,303 but this is erroneous. To explain: they argue that rasa cannot be communicated by the words because the negative concomitance304 is invalid. But the invalidity of the negative concomitance is itself unproven to apply to any and all such words. For305 as we explained in the seventh chapter, the fourfold form of general acting must indeed be involved where any clear apprehension of rasa is present.306 But then, they retort, we actually do apprehend the erotic and other rasas even in the absence of such words as “the erotic” that directly express them, as in the following poem:

Your cheek is pale as a ripened śara reed;

like a lotus folding its petals in wintertime

is your eye; and your lips, wilted with hot breath lingering,

slender girl, bring the god of love to life.307

And that, they say, is surely an instance of the “absence of the negative concomitance.” But their argument here too is flawed, since it would be easy to identify some other cause for the apprehension of rasa here.308 The same reasoning applies in this case as in that of, say, scorpions: those born of dung are of one sort, those born of other scorpions are of another.309 And if that is acceptable, as it should be, our situation would be analogous. We may not have precisely the same kind of apprehension of rasa when the word “erotic” is used as we do under other circumstances; that said, it is not true that we do not have some apprehension of rasa from the word “erotic,” for if that were the case it would turn out that a statement like “The erotic, comic…are the eight dramatic rasas”310 would be as meaningless as the cawing of crows. When words are used in their conventional meaning, what is to stop them from denoting things, whether substantive or verbal? And hence the fact of something’s being a verbal form is no source of discomfort for our theory: what are we to say about the semantic capacity on the part of such forms as “one eroticizes,” or “one is amused,” “one tragicizes”? It is essential that such words be expressive of rasa, for otherwise, if your argument were valid, in poems like the following,

When Krishna left for Dvaravati the pining Radha embraced

the reeds on the bank of the Kalindi bent over from his footfall,

and the song she sang—shrill and broken by deep convulsive sobs—

made even the creatures in the water start to moan with yearning.311

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