The taste of education: Indian tradition and the experience of artistic imitation

Abstract

The notion of rasa in Indian aesthetic tradition refers to an experience whose outcome is both pleasure and education, as the foundational myth of performing arts in Nāṭyaśāstra’s first chapter maintains to be the object of the “fifth Veda”. Commentators on the treatise attributed to Bharata elaborated on rasa and its nature, often diverging in their interpretations, which Abhinavagupta (x-xi cent.) resumes and discusses in his exegetical work. The Kashmiri Shivaite polymath envisages the spectator’s experience as a sharing of the states of being displayed by the performer, whose acting “generalizes” them beyond any individual peculiarity, and allows a delighted “tasting” of emotions in their universal expression. Such kind of tasting is equated to a non-ordinary, non-wordly experience, the consciousness of the non-duality of the universe itself. The poet’s and the actor’s work is not to “imitate” reality in the current sense of the term, but to cleanse it from its occasional traits in order to attain the knowledge of things as they really are, which is the ultimate end of human education.