Terms & Concepts in Indian Theatre

• Sanskrit drama emerges in fragments and short pieces beginning in the first century, CE, and continuing to the tenth century.
• The most commonly read and performed examples of Sanskrit drama include plays by Bhasa, Shudraka, and, especially, Kalidasa. The work of all three of these playwrights comes within the first three or four centuries of the tradition.
• The plays often concern the exploits of the kings and heroes of history. As with the Greek tragedies, ‘historical’ figures of Sanskrit drama include mythical persons and the subjects of epic poetry. Supernatural beings of several varieties play important roles in the stories of Sanskrit drama. Important characters in Sanskrit dramas also come from the middle and lower classes, including soldiers, merchants, and hermits and sages. Of the two principal types of dramas, the Nataka plays feature stories about kings and divine beings. The Prakarana plays concern stories that revolve around middle-class characters.
• The action of Sanskrit dramas includes precious little action. Most often, the potentially exciting moments of a drama occur offstage and are related to characters onstage by way of messengers, letters, or eye-witnesses who can see what is happening out of view of the other characters (and out of the view of the audience).
• Although the plots commonly involve battles, kidnappings, flying demons, and rampaging elephants, what we get onstage in a Sanskrit drama is dialogue about kidnappings and elephants, and so forth.
• Nevertheless, as in many other dramatic traditions around the world, Sanskrit drama creates and sustains tension through the plans that characters lay in dialogue with each other, the obstacles that arise to prevent those plans from coming to fruition, and the ways that characters maneuver to accomplish their aims, anyway.
• The dialogue of Sanskrit drama consists of both verse and prose. Within a single, unified speech, a character may slip out of prose and into verse and back into prose several times. Dense with figurative speech and imagery, the verses demonstrate the playwright’s poetic skill. Because the the verse in his play Shakuntala, the playwright Kalidasa, for instance, is, perhaps, regarded in India more as a poet than as a dramatist.

• The Nāṭya Śāstra is a Sanskrit Hindu text on the performing arts.
• The text is attributed to sage Bharata, and its first complete compilation is dated to between 200 BCE and 200 CE, but estimates vary between 500 BCE and 500 CE.
• The text consists of 36 chapters with a cumulative total of 6000 poetic verses describing performance arts.
• The subjects covered by the treatise include dramatic composition, structure of a play and the construction of a stage to host it, genres of acting, body movements, make up and costumes, role and goals of an art director, the musical scales, musical instruments and the integration of music with art performance.
• The title, ‘‘Natya Shastra’’, can be loosely translated as A compendium of Theater or a A Manual of Dramatic Arts. Nātya, or nāṭakameans “dramatic arts.” In contemporary usage, this word does not include dance or music, but etymologically the root naṭ refers to "dance." The ‘‘Natya Shastra’’ is the outcome of several centuries of theatrical practice by hereditary actors, who passed their tradition orally from generation to generation.
• The Nāṭya Śāstra is notable as an ancient encyclopedic treatise on the arts, one which has influenced dance, music and literary traditions in India. It is also notable for its aesthetic Rasa theory, which asserts that entertainment is a desired effect of performance arts but not the primary goal, and that the primary goal is to transport the individual in the audience into another parallel reality, full of wonder, where he experiences the essence of his own consciousness, and reflects on spiritual and moral questions.
• The Natyashastra defines drama in verse 6.10 as that which aesthetically arouses joy in the spectator, through the medium of actor's art of communication, that helps connect and transport the individual into a super sensual inner state of being.
• The Natya connects through abhinaya, that is applying body-speech-mind and scene, wherein asserts Natyashastra, the actors use two practices of dharmi (performance), in four styles and four regional variations, accompanied by song and music in a playhouse carefully designed to achieve siddhi (success in production).
• Drama in this ancient Sanskrit text, thus is an art to engage every aspect of life, in order to glorify and gift a state of joyful consciousness.
• The text discusses the universal and inner principles of drama, that it asserts successfully affects and journeys the audience to a supersensual state of discovery and understanding.
• The text states that the playwright should know the bhavas (inner state of being) of all characters in the story, and it is these bhavas that the audience of that drama connects with. The hero is shown to be similar to everyone in some ways, trying to achieve the four goals of human life in Hindu philosophy, then the vastu (plot) emerges through the "representation of three worlds – the divine, the human, the demonic". Drama has dharma, it has artha, it has kama, it has humor, fighting and killing. The best drama shows the good and the bad, actions and feelings, of each character, whether god or man.

• According to the first chapter of the Natyashastra, theatre begins with Brahma. When approached by other gods who complained that the scriptures, the Vedas, were not sufficient to keep people from behaving badly because the common and uneducated couldn’t read the Vedas, anyway, Brahma decided to create what he called a “Fifth Veda” that would make the content of the Vedas accessible to everyone. (The first four Vedas being highly literate, Sanskrit compositions consisting of the Rg Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda, and the Atharva Veda.)
• Theatre, Brahma reasoned, would be able to teach everyone. Even the illiterate.
• Brahma taught the art to Bharata, and charged him to teach the art to his hundred sons. As the premier of the new art, Bharata’s family presented the first theatre performance to an audience of the gods.
• The first play concerned the god Indra’s victory over the demons, commencing with a recitation from the Vedas, and then proceeding to dramatize the great battle that ended in Indra’s triumph. The performance was a tremendous success. Everyone regaled the actors with congratulations and gifts.
• But the demons, who had also watched the play, got irritated by the foolish way they had been portrayed and by the dramatization of their ignominious defeat, the demons caused calamity around the playing space, and had to be chased away by Indra, wielding a flagpole (the nearest weapon at hand). When the dust settled, the gods all got together to devise some means of keeping theatre safe, and theatre buildings were designed with each particular part consecrated to warden powers.
• Then they went and asked the demons for their opinion.
• When the demons explained that it was unfair to humiliate them as a means of entertaining the gods, Brahma assured them that this new art was intended for everyone, implying that they could expect the gods to be humiliated upon occasion. Brahma then charged Bharata not to mount any production without first worshiping properly at the stage.
• So goes the origin myth as recorded in the opening pages of the Natyashastra. Through this story, the author of the Natyashastra establishes a couple specific notions that are still attached to theatre in India, many centuries later.
• First: theatre both teaches and entertains. Thanks to Plato’s disdain for theatre and Aristotle’s attempt to vindicate the art, European cultures have argued incessantly as to whether theatre’s primary justification is its power to teach or to entertain. The Natyashastra does not privilege one above the other. A companion to the Vedas, theatrical art instructs people in duty, and simultaneously distracts and delights.
• Second: theatre is divinely conceived and commissioned. As opposed to the reputation theatre has across history and cultures for being the occupation of delinquents and miscreants, the Indian ideal regards theatre as a noble, even sacred, endeavor. People ought to revere theatre and treat it with the respect due to a gift from the gods.
• The first chapter of the Natyashastra, then, gives theatre artists cause to rejoice.

• Note that, whatever the shape, and however else the playing space might be divided, the space the Natyashastra designates for the audience is small. Five hundred audience members who could be satisfied with four square feet each would be able to accommodate each other within a forty-eight-feet by forty-eight-feet box. The theatres for classical Sanskrit drama were not the vast, open, hill-side semi-circles of classical Greece. On the contrary, these were what we call “intimate” spaces. The proximity of relatively small audiences to actors meant that the actors’ expressions could be much more subtle, much more refined and sophisticated than would have been practical for the performers of ancient Athens.
• Bharata identifies several other parts of the rectangular theatre, including a platform structure called a mattavarani, for instance, which sat to the side of the central playing space. Perhaps there were two mattavaranis, sitting on either side of the primary stage. The relationship of the rangashirsha to the rangapitha, including how each of these areas was to be used, is also a matter of dispute.

• Book twenty of the Natyashastra makes distinctions between ten kinds of plays. The ten categories account for long, multi-act plays and very short one-act plays and everything in-between. The list of ten types of plays is as follows:

1. Nataka
2. Prakarana
3. Samavakara
4. Ihamrga
5. Dima
6. Vyayoga
7. Anka
8. Prahasana
9. Bhana
10. Vithi

• The Natyashastra distinguishes these categories from each other on the basis of the number of acts in each. An “act” (anka) is generally understood as a cohesive dramatization of events that occur within the course of a day. However, the Natyashastradoes not demand that these events run contiguously. Therefore, an act might include episodes from the morning, mid-afternoon, and late evening. Furthermore, these acts
• The two principal genres of Sanskrit drama both include five to ten acts. The Nataka corresponds most closely with what Aristotle called Tragedy, although there are some distinct differences. As in Tragedy, the characters of Natakas are divine—gods and demons—and royalty, and stories are not invented but taken from “history” (which, in this case, would include stories that are found in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana). Natakas concern stories of cosmic import, reiterating the divine roles of kings and sages of myth.
• On the other hand, Natakas do not end badly. Where the Tragic hero falls, the hero of a Nataka triumphs. Sanskrit plays, in general, including Natakas, affirm a celestial order that sustains a temporal order that serves the cosmic good. The royal heroes of the plays exist as a function of cosmic order, and, consequently, survive and thrive in conjunction with the cosmos. Kalidasa’s Shakuntala is the best known example of Nataka.
• Prakarana, the other principal category that includes five to ten acts, roughly corresponds with Aristotelian comedy. Prakaranaplays concern middle-class characters who are invented by the playwright. The stories take place outside of palaces and royal circles, in the lanes and houses of town, and are concerned with middle-class interests in money, love, legal justice, and bourgeois honor. With plots hanging on the complications of mistaken identities, petty revenge, theft, and political intrigue, Prakarana plays also end happily. At least, like Natakas, Prakaranas affirm the identities of their middle-class heroes, and their place in a permanent cosmic order. Shudraka’s Mrcchakatika (Little Clay Cart) is the best known example of Prakarana.
• The remaining categories are shorter and more narrowly focused. The Samavakara and Ihamrga, for instance, use fewer than five acts, and exclusively concern divine characters. Furthermore, Ihamrga plays only concern war over a woman.
• The Vyayoga and Anka plays are one-acts, concerned only with the events of a single day. The Anka is to revolve around sorrow, and is expected to involve, especially, the lamentation of female characters. Bhasa’s Urubhangam may be an example of Anka.

• A rasa (Sanskrit: रस lit. 'juice' or 'essence') denotes an essential mental state and is the dominant emotional theme of a work of art or the primary feeling that is evoked in the person that views, reads or hears such a work.
• The word rasa may be translated as “juice” or “essence”. Sometimes the term is translated as “flavor”. But we should not equate Bharata’s term with the flavor of food. For Bharata, rasa is not emotion. Emotion, in Bharata’s language, is bhâva (BHAH-vuh), which is the thing that Bharata associates with food and flavor. In Bharata’s analogy, a person tastes the flavors of food, enjoys those flavors, and then feels a certain kind of pleasure. An audience member experiences—or tastes—the activity on the stage, including words, gestures, and also feelings or emotions, as though these things were the flavors of food. The audience member then feels pleasure in his or her experience. This last feeling of pleasure is what Bharata calls rasa.
• Rasa is an aesthetic state of mind that accompanies an audience member’s experience of theatrical art and conscious reflection on his or her experience of that art.
• Bharata Muni enunciated the eight Rasas in the Nātyasāstra, an ancient work of dramatic theory, written during the period between 200 BC and 200 AD. Each rasa, according to Nātyasāstra, has a presiding deity and a specific colour.

1. Śrngāram (शृङ्गारं) Love, Attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour:green.
2. Hāsyam (हास्यं) Laughter, Mirth, Comedy. Presiding deity: Ganesha. Colour: white.
3. Raudram (रौद्रं) Fury. Presiding deity: Rudra. Colour: red.
4. Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं) Compassion, Tragedy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour:dove coloured.
5. Bībhatsam (बीभत्सं) Disgust, Aversion. Presiding deity: Shiva. Colour: blue
6. Bhayānakam (भयानकं) Horror, Terror. Presiding deity: Kala. Colour: black
7. Vīram (वीरं) Heroic mood. Presiding deity: Indra. Colour: wheatish brown
8. Adbhutam (अद्भुतं) Wonder, Amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

As the tradition of alankara-shastra developed from the sixth through tenth centuries CE, a ninth rasa was contentiously endorsed by certain scholars. Subsequently, the nine rasas were accepted by the majority of the Alankarikas, and the expression Navarasa (the nine rasas), could come into vogue.

9. Śāntam Peace or tranquility. deity: Vishnu. Colour: white

In addition to the nine Rasas, two more appeared later (esp. in literature): Additional rasas:

1. Vātsalya (वात्सल्य) Parental Love
2. Bhakti (भक्ति) Spiritual Devotion

However, the presiding deities, the colours and the relationship between these additional rasas have not been specified.

Abhinavagupta. Tenth century philosopher/theologian. His commentary on the Natyashastra is regarded as the authoritative interpretation of the work. Abhinavagupta correlates the Natyashastra’s rasa concept with experience of unity with Brahman, or ultimate reality in its thoroughly unified form. After Abhinavagupta, rasa becomes a religious concept, and a ninth rasa—shantirasa, or “peace”—is codified as part of the Natyashastra’s theoretical heritage.

Ashvaghosha. Author of very early fragments of Sanskrit dramas. A Buddhist, his plays treat Buddhist subject matter.

Bharata. Purported author of the Natyashastra. Bharata may have lived between the first and fourth centuries, CE. Although many different people may have contributed to the composition of the Natyashastra, the text demonstrates sufficient unity throughout to support the notion of a single, primary author who was remarkably well-informed about all aspects of theatrical production, including acting, architecture, costume design, movement, music, and aesthetics.

Bhasa. Writer of the oldest complete Sanskrit dramas. The thirteen plays attributed to Bhasa include very short, one-act plays and long, multi-act plays. His play Daridracharudattam tells an early version of the story at the heart of Sudraka’s masterpiece Mrcchakatika. Bhasa’s short play Urubhangam includes the onstage death of its protagonist, contrary to the conventions cataloged by the Natyashastra.

Kalidasa. The greatest of the classical Sanskrit dramatists. Probably active in the fourth or fifth century, CE, Kalidasa’s three extant plays are regarded as the mastery of the form. Kalidasa’s play Shakuntala became popular throughout Europe in the centuries of colonial expansion, appearing in English, German, French, Italian, Russian and Danish by 1815.

Shudraka. The author of the best-known example of prakarana, or comic, play. Perhaps writing during the fifth or sixth century, Shudraka’s Mrcchakatika or Little Clay Cart, models the middle-class concerns of Sanskrit comic drama, and includes an honorable but impoverished middle class hero, a cruel and cowardly aristocratic ruler, noble convicts, clever townspeople, and a countryside of people who rise up in revolution.

Abhinaya. Acting. The Natyashastra uses this term to refer to the physical expression involved in portraying characters.

Bhava. Feeling or emotion. Divided into several subcategories in the Natyashastra, bhava refers to physical and psychological feeling as experienced and used by actors.

Lokadharmi. Common style. Probably not anything like “naturalism” in the twentieth-century sense of the term, lokadharmistyle was probably designed to appeal to more diverse audiences, and, so, to be less attentive to conventional codes and more open to improvisation and to whatever devices would suit a moment.

Nataka. One of the two major types of Sanskrit drama. Across multiple acts, the Nataka concerns royal and divine characters involved in stories with historical or mythic precedent. Often love stories, the plots of natakas also concern patrician interests: war, gods and demons, religious thought and practice, and conventional, aristocratic values. Kalidasa’s Shakuntala is the premiere example of nataka.

Natyadharmi. Theatrical style. A kind of theatrical presentation that depends on convention and abstraction in the way that actors move and speak, and even in costuming and scenic design.

Nandi. Part of the purvaranga, the preliminary religious rites that preceded performances of Sanskrit dramas. The nandi, or opening prayer, appears as the first lines of many Sanskrit dramas, invoking divine favor (usually of Shiva) on the performers and on audiences.

Nepathya. The backstage area, as specified in the theatre architecture described by the Natyashastra. Perhaps only behind a curtain, as opposed to a structure. Many plays designate the nepathya as the area from which offstage voices and noises come.

Prakarana. One of the two major types of Sanskrit drama. Usually composed of several acts, prakarana plays concern fictional, middle-class characters, and revolve around problems not unlike those found in Greek comedy: romance, court intrigues, political plots, petty crime, and money.

Purvaranga. The religious rites, perhaps requiring several hours, that preceded the performance of Sanskrit dramas. The opening chapter of the Natyashastra describes how these rites are necessary as a means of protecting the theatre space from the interference of demonic forces that might not be pleased by the content of a play.

Rangapitha. Probably part of the stage area of the common, rectangular theatre described by the Natyashastra.

Rangashirsha. The primary “stage” area of the common, rectangular theatre described by the Natyashastra.

Rasa. The “flavor” or “essence” of a performance. Not to be confused with bhava, a term that refers to feeling and sensation, rasa has both a metatheatrical and metaphysical quality. In theory, an audience member can reflect on, or savor, his or her own feelings and sensations as engendered by experience of theatrical artistry. And audience member’s self-conscious examination of his or her own aesthetic experience can entail an impersonal sensibility of the physical and emotional apparatus at the root of sensation—that is, an impersonal sensibility of the audience member’s own self.

Vidushaka. An almost obligatory comic character. The “clown” appears in many Sanskrit dramas as the protagonist’s Brahmin sidekick, always hungry, seldom content, and little invested in the religious life of his putative vocation.