K.C. Bhattacharyya-the Concept of Rasa and the heirarchy of feeling

In the readings this week I realized that since we have begun this course there are a multiplicity of meanings associated withthe concept of rasa and I began to create a list of the many definitions as they arise in our readings. It quickly became apparent that like Indra's web or a many faceted jewel, the complexity of the concept has given rise to various writers focusing on different facets of this theory of aesthetic enjoyment. Where in Aesthetic Rapture: by Masson/Patwardhan (p 1) in speaking of the important Natyasastra of Bharata (the oldest known Indian work on the theory of literature) they identify the most important chapter in this enormous work as the 6th chapter on rasa defining it as “aesthetic or imaginative experience" and pick the interesting illustration of the subordination of literary perfection to the ability to evoke profound feeling response in artistic work as paramount to its success with the quote:
“We speak, generally of poetry, even where flaws exist, as long as there is clear evidence of rasa just as a jewel does not cease to be a jewel even if a worm bores a small hole into it.”

In the evolution of the understanding of Indian poetics they identify Ananda as using the term camatkara (aesthetic delight) for the first time, a term like many others introduced by Abhinava which later became the field of associated terminology for the tradition, closely linking delight with rasa. They quote Ananda as saying:

“the essence of rasa is aesthetic delight (camatkara) and is found in all the rasas.

Throughout all of the descussions of rasa various qualities of feeling become its descriptive network. And the ability to sensitively experience these feelings by the spectator/reader becomes the touchstone of the success of the endevour. This leads to the intrinsic heirarchy of the audience for Indian poetics, where the audience if minutely defined by the refinement of feeling as the restriction for entering into this rarified world. This paramour of feeling is known as the Sahradya (sensitive reader) whose heart is often said to “melt” (dravati) in the aesthetic response. The greater the ability for sympathetic response the more suitable the person is as the audience for artistic expression.

As Masson and Patwardhan point out that Abhinava attributes this responsiveness only to some people not to all, stating that "Mimamsakas and Vedic scholars are simply not sensitive to literature." and “those people who are capable of identifying with the subject matter, since the mirror of their hearts has been polished through constant recitation and study of poetry and who sympathetically respond in their own hearts are known as sensitive readers (sahrdaya)

In K.C. Bhattacharyya's article "The concept of Rasa" he defines rasa as "artistic enjoyment". stating that “rasa” in Indian Aesthetics signifies the essence of feeling and is to be taken either as "an eternal feeling or as an eternal value that is felt." In the precise and illuminating analysis of the heirarchy of feeling in the response to an artistic work Bhattacharyya specifies what he means by this interpretation of the word rasa in a most remarkable lucid way and ends with some startling comments on the experience of this ultimate purpose of artistic endevour as residing entirely in the skill and refinement of the sahrdaya who is capable of the highest feeling among feelings and subsequently the experience of rasa.

Fundamentaly he defines three types of feelings direct, sympathetic and contemplative. with each the distance between the experiencer and the object increases and allows for an impariality and freedom (from attachment to the object one assumes) and through this rarified distance from the immediate object of pleasure, the object becomes a symbol, an indicator of eternal reality and the ground for the merging of feeling with universal and the highest experience of rasa or enjoyment what Battacharyya refers to as the "universal heart". In this impersonalization the feeling is freed from an object and becomes eternalized.

The final startling conclusion that Battacharyya makes in his analysis of the "experience of beauty" is that any object is capable of becoming beautiful if contemplated from this refined point of view by a being of great power of sensitive feeling. He posits that the interplay between pleasure and pain is simply the relationship between union and affinity as sympathy with the object through feeling. Ugliness he defines as simply separation from the sympathetic response. Fundamentally he states that with the courageous love the feeling of identity and enjoyment may be transmuted to any object thus obliterating all experience of ugliness and pain entirely in terms of the purity and depth of their inherent ability to give joy.

A most remarkable concept that is also reflected in Tantric Buddhism in the ultimate nature of phenomena as luminous, mutable and empty and therefore all ultimately in terms of the nature of phenomena as inherently a creation of mind as of "one taste" all multiplicity being a function of consciousness....interesting parallel.