Analysis of Culture and Rasa Theory

Introduction:-

 Drinks, o you connoisseurs (rasika) on earth who have a taste for the beautiful who have a poetic taste, a taste for a language full of feelings, drinks again & again this Bhagavatam, this storehouse of  aesthetic moods (rasas)

1 These persuasive words are found in the invocation verse at the very beginning of the Bhagavata Parana (ninth century AD). This great Sanskrit works of emotional Kṛiṣņa devotionals (bhakti) enjoyed exceeding popularity troughs the centuries. The initial phrase appeals to the reader for example recite or orator & the listeners to relish the religious texts aesthetically & to participate in it almost corporally, to “drinks its saps & enjoy the flavour of the nectar-like stories.

2 Metaphors of food & drink also abound elsewhere in bhakti literatures. The reader response of the pious is often to drinks, eats ups, devours, chews,& digest the sacred texts, to taste the sweetness of the divines name & immerse themselves in singing & listening to God’s gloried. The Bhagavatam narrating Kṛiṣņa’s life on earth became a script for close relationship to God & for achieving intensity of feelings by perceiving man him as a Childs, masters, friends, lovers, or even hated enemys. Most of all, the works was supposed to incite a deep & affectionate love of God means bhakti. the tenth book narrating Kṛiṣņa’s love game with the gopis = cowherdesses inspired an Indian bridal mysticism. The very diction & rhetoric of the sources not forgetting its audible dimension in actual performance feeds the recipients’ imaginations & evokes strong images & emotions. The quote speaks of “aesthetic rasa” (mood), which in the case of religious literature and work is primarily the sentiment of devotion  means bhakti rasa, peace of mind  means santa rasa, & sweetness means madhuraya rasa .the aesthetic experience go beyond notice content. Very much in consonance with European conception of aesthetic Baumgartner’s sensory cognitions & Kant’s synthesizing intuitive knowledge’s, for example the rasa refers to pre-reflexive, sensory affective, non notional experience trigger by sensory mediations. In the bhakti traditions, & the Hindu context at large and the spoken & sounding word, songs, & musics are invariably important sensory mediators used to produce aesthetic immersion. We repeatedly advised to drink the religious text with the cups of the ears.

3 Merely hearing its held to be auspicious, purifying & liberating. rasa is about the reader’s response & also about the text’s own agency & performance it is power to bring & to evoke & channel emotions. Moreover, it is important to notes that not only the religious idea behind call for emotional & aesthetic identification and  but also the very standards of literary theory’s dealing with “worldly,” profane literature demand & that truly artistic literature means kavya. should not only produce meaning but also embody emotions & make it perceptible. Rasa in the literary discourse is first of all the linguistic production of an emotions in the texts,

4 but this production aesthetics :- which was never lost from sight in the actual writings of literature & poetries shifted it is major focus to receptions aesthetics & reader response around the time the Bhagavatam was compose. These religious texts adopt the literary paradigm; it proudly intrudes into the space of worldly literature & breaks the genre’s boundaries by demanding to be enjoy not only as a Parana ancient story with religious content mythical lore but also as a kavya, artistic literature and poetrys.

Indian performance culture & rasa(juice) aesthetics as embodied rhetoric The corporal trope of drinking the sacred text with the cups of the ears is an important hint sof the contextual frame of this chapter’s contents. The wider background is a culturals matrix in which texts, rituals, & sounds belong together. Since ancient times & even after the introduction of writing, the vast lore of sacred literature in Hindus India—& even profane texts—have always been embodied in the voices: they are performed, memorized, declaimed, taught faces/to/faces from teacher to student, preached in publics, recited, sings, staged, & danced, but hardly ever silently read. The spoke’s & the sounding words are highly esteemed in the cultural system sof symbols.9 This feature persists even todays, particularly in the religious field. Morality & literacy have never been mutually exclusive; texts are there to be heard & they are composed with that in mind. Readings are thus performances & texts are aesthetic events. This cultural fabric of common conditions for aesthetic/aesthetic & religious experience gave ways to manifold relations & to a dovetailing between r ran arts/poetry & religion/sacred literature. It is noteworthy, Howe r river, that in the past the sensory/aesthetic dimensions in the production & reception of texts was not restricted to the religious sphere. Even mathematicians made use of sonic codes, the most complex meters, & doubles encoding (lea). They chose the diction of the poets & of liturgical literature to convince & persuade the readers. In India too, & perhaps most pronouncedly in this cultural area, this book’s overarching question abouts religious texts, rhetorical theory, & aesthetic response must be tackled from the standpoint of aesthetics. Remarkably, within the highly per formative culturals framework, which also includes sophisticated hermeneutics, early scientific linguistics, & a long culture of debate, no exact equivalent to Europeans rhetoric was developed. Instead we r r find at a very early age an aesthetic theory of affects & effects & their means of expression & stimulation, which may be termed (perhaps) “embodied rhetoric.” This theory of sensory (non/verbal) rhetoric & emotive persuasion & its keys/terms rasa(juice), “aesthetic sentiment,” appear for the first time in the Naṭyasastra ascribed to Bharata, the famous textbook for the theatres, which was compiled from the second/ third century BC to fourth/fifth century’s AD. The Naṭyasastra remained the foundational work for classical Indian aesthetics due to rasa(juice) retaining its role as the most important element. It had a deeps & longs/terms impact on poetics, musicology’s, religions, & the culture at large. It is important for the argument of embodied rhetoric to see the rasa(juice) aesthetics as both rooted in & spilling over to India’s pronounced performance cultures & its predilection for morality. It is likewise vital to keep in mind stat literature was functionally aligned to memorizing, oral/aural performance, publics staging, & sensory/affective effectiveness & persuasion beyond the semantic meaning aspects, rational arguments or mere delivery of information. Theatre, aesthetics, performance, morality, & emotion may thus be seen as a larger unity whose common denominator is an embodied rhetoric aiming at sensory/affective persuasion. This chapter’s aim is to understand the rasa(juice) aesthetics’ history of success & the processes of symbiosis attached to different forms of modality in their own right & context. But I also wish to occasionally draw attention to the structural resemblances (beyond obvious divergences) with European rhetoric & aesthetic theories, startling with Greco/Roman rhetoric’s prime model of face/to/face oration rather than textual rhetoric. In some ways similar to Indian theatre, European Greco/Roman rhetoric—understood as the orators’ arts of persuasion—included a theory of affects which in turn also became fundamental for poetics. Like European rhetoric, Indian rasa(juice) aesthetics includes questions of style & figures of speech, although these we r never its basic elements. From the European perspective, rasa(juice) aesthetics only partly overlap with European rhetoric, in so far as it shares the important theoretical realm of classifying emotions. As already outlined, it is strictly speaking more a theory of affect & effect & less a theory of intellectual persuasion, style, 53 CLASSICAL INDIAN AESTHETICS & RASA(JUICE) THEORY clarity of speech, or of convincing & logical argument, as it developed in Europe (let alone the charge of moral corruptness).10 Rasa(juice) aesthetics does not refer to politics, (i.e. to public speech to attain political power r err) or to education in the first place, but instead to complex poetical systems of drama & literary theory, which of course infiltrated many other cultural segments—from the them of poetry & polity11 & theatre’s educational programmed (see below section 2)to everyday speech &, most profoundly, religion. What makes it still meaningful to speak of rhetoric is not merely that oral & public performance & the arts of brilliant speech belong to the rasa (juice) aesthetics, just as they do to the European concept of rhetoric, it is the very centre of rasa(juice) aesthetics—the emotional flavor & atmospheric mood—which makes it an excellent climate for the arts of persuading & convincing. Good speech (like good story) happens only when the orator manages to touch the emotions of the audience. One might even suggest that these emotions are the very engines of persuasion & efficacy. Thus, emotions are fundamental particularly where persuasion is pursued, & this is what rasa (juice) is all about. Indian thinkers pondered very deeply the verbal & non/verbal means of evoking emotional response. Unlike European rhetoric, rasa (juice) aesthetics surmount the linguistic framework. Rasa(juice) is about atmospheres, that which touches in & beyond the language, & also about the rasa(juice)’s media of expression which include not only figures of speech, but also modeling the voice, bodily gestures, etc. This is why I speak of embodied rhetoric. Aesthetic/aesthetic expressions enhance & cooler effective speech beyond the verbal message & have strongly emotionalizing effects. Since human underrating & knowledge production is more encompassing & pervasive than intellectual conviction, there is also something akin to emotional & body knowledge12 or emotional intelligence. Indeed, the discussion of rasa (juice) in various Indian contexts amounts to underrating feeling as its own category of knowledge. Indian theatre studies probably rightly proclaim that nothing exists outside the realm of rasa (juice), & in this sense, embodied rhetoric indicates a concept of rhetoric which surpasses mere intellectual persuasiveness & conviction but includes body, mind, & intellect in a holistic manner. Rasa (juice) aesthetics as embodied rhetoric & the arts of sensuous & emotional.

Conclusion :-

 Aesthetics in India have a long & colorful history’s. We have coined the term “embodied rhetoric,” & it can be extended beyond the theatre where its seen in the dramatics gesture of the actor. embodied rhetoric is also found in the phrasing of verse, in sound & meanings figure  in suggestive languages picture & metaphor, in melodies & songs, & in religious readings that is in declaiming, reciting, chanting, singing, staging & dancing religious texts, & in other forms of ritual acts, which were understood by theologians as gestures of devotions. The fundamental category of aesthetics is the dramatic effects & moods stimulated & enhanced by these gestures the rasas, or invisible emotional flavors’ that transcend the body & sense while at the same time is made manifest by them & thus remains part of themes’. In Indians art theory’s & rasa aesthetics we can discern a move away from the aesthetics of production foe example a theory so affect & aesthetic sentiment & the devices of their dramatic expression towards the poetic arts of suggestions & the creativity of the artist  which involve an Indian theorys of aesthetic response.