Rasa

by Schwartz, Susan L.

• ISBN13: 9780231131452
• ISBN10: 0231131453
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-08-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

While many people outside India find the images, sounds, and practices of Indian performing arts compelling and endeavor to incorporate them into the "global" repertoire, few are aware of the central role of religious belief and practice in Indian aesthetics. Completing the trilogy that includes Darsan: Seeing the Divine and Mantra: Hearing the Divine in India and America, this volume focuses on how rasa has been applied in a range of Indian performance traditions. "Rasa" is taste, essence, flavor. How is it possible that a word used to describe a delicious masala can also be used to critique a Bharata Natyam performance? Rasa expresses the primary goals of performing arts in India in all the major literary, philosophical, and aesthetic texts, and it provides the cornerstone of the oral traditions of transmission. It is also essential to the study and production of sculpture, architecture, and painting. Yet its primary referent is cuisine. This book articulates the religious sensibility underlying the traditional performing arts as well as other applications of rasa and examines the relationships between the arts and religion in India today.

Table of Contents

PREFACE	ix
TRANSLITERATION AND ROMANIZATION	xiii
1. A Taste of Things to Come	1	(6)
2. Rasa in Theory: Text and Context	7	(14)
Etymological Ingredients	7	(3)
Sources of Inspiration	10	(2)
A Written Recipe for the Arts	12	(4)
Influences and Implications	16	(5)
3. Rasa in Practice: Drama, Dance, Music	21	(66)
All the Stage Is but a World	21	(4)
Dance as Mystery	25	(47)
Bharata Natyam	36	(11)
Shringara Rasa: What Love Has to Do with It	47	(5)
Kathak	52	(4)
Kathakali	56	(16)
Good Taste in Music	72	(15)
Dissonance, Assonance, Variation, Transcendence	78	(9)
4. Transformations in Time and Space	87	(12)
GLOSSARY	99	(2)
NOTES	101	(6)
BIBLIOGRAPHY	107	(6)
INDEX	113