Alaṅkāraśāstra

What it asks

An audience watches a play about grief and comes away satisfied. That is the paradox Aristotle addressed with catharsis, and Indian theorists addressed at far greater length and with more precision.

Their answer runs through rasa - the savour or relish an audience experiences. The emotion depicted is not the emotion felt. What the audience undergoes is a generalised form, detached from personal stake and from the particular characters, and it is enjoyable precisely because it is not their own grief.

The second question is about where meaning resides. The tradition's central discovery is that a poem's principal content is often not stated but suggested - carried by implication in a way that cannot be reduced to what the words denote or to figurative substitution.

The recurring problems

How rasa arises. Four rival explanations were developed in the ninth and tenth centuries: that the emotion is literally produced in the audience, that it is inferred in the character, that it is imitated, and that it is manifested in a generalised form through the removal of the obstacles that ordinarily keep an emotion personal. The last became dominant and is a genuinely subtle piece of aesthetic psychology.

Suggestion against statement. If a poem's real content is suggested rather than said, what makes one suggestion correct and another a misreading? The tradition developed a detailed taxonomy in answer.

What makes a poem a poem. Rival accounts located it in figures of speech, in style, in deviation from ordinary usage, in propriety, and in suggestion. Each is a full theory and they were argued against each other for centuries.

Whether the audience is deceived. Aesthetic experience requires knowing the events are not real and responding as though the emotion were. Explaining that without making the audience either credulous or unmoved is the same problem the paradox of fiction poses.

How it developed

The Nāṭyaśāstra, a compendium on drama attributed to Bharata, introduces rasa and the analysis of emotional states that supports it. Its dating is uncertain across several centuries.

The decisive work is Ānandavardhana's Dhvanyāloka in the ninth century, which argued that suggestion is the soul of poetry - that what a great poem principally conveys is not asserted anywhere in it. The claim was resisted and eventually became the tradition's central doctrine.

Abhinavagupta in the tenth and eleventh centuries wrote the commentaries that settled the field, uniting the theory of suggestion with the theory of rasa and giving the account of generalisation that explains how depicted sorrow becomes relished sorrow. He is among the most formidable aestheticians in any tradition.

Later theorists proposed rivals - propriety as the governing principle, or striking deviation from ordinary expression - and the debate continued into the seventeenth century at a level of technical detail that European aesthetics did not reach until much later, if at all.

The positions within it

Rasa theory, dhvani or suggestion theory, alaṅkāra or figuration theory, rīti or style theory, vakrokti or deviation theory, and aucitya or propriety theory. All are in the Schools section.

The historical winner was a synthesis: suggestion as the mechanism, rasa as what is suggested.

Where it stands now

Actively studied, and increasingly by philosophers rather than only by Sanskritists.

Its comparative value is high because it addresses exactly the problems Western aesthetics finds hardest - the paradox of tragedy, the emotional response to fiction, the location of literary meaning - with a vocabulary developed independently and in some respects more finely divided. The account of aesthetic distance through generalisation is the part most often taken up.