An audience is, first of all, a very ordinary thing: a group of people turned toward something together. In everyday language we call them śrotā when they listen, prekṣaka when they watch—those who lend their ears and eyes to a performance or a text. Sanskrit dictionaries gloss śrotā as “a listener; audience; ~gaṇa: audience; ~varga: audience” (Śrotā, in Wisdomlib / Hindi dictionary). Likewise, prekṣaka is defined as “a spectator, a beholder, one of an audience,” and in Hindi as “an observer; a viewer; spectator; one who sees; –varga/samāja: audience, spectators” (Prekṣaka / Prekshak, in practical Sanskrit–English and Hindi dictionaries). The English word “audience” follows the same logic: etymological dictionaries trace it to Latin audientia, from audire, “to hear” or “listen” (Audience, Etymonline; audire, Latin verb “to hear”). In all these words, the audience is defined not by creating anything, but by a shared act of receiving: they are the ones who gather, pay attention, and open their senses and minds to something offered to them. But then, does the audience do anything more apart from this? Let’s find out… 

In classical Indian aesthetics, the audience goes by many names—prekṣaka, samājika, rasika, sahṛdaya. At its most intense, it is the sahṛdaya, literally “one with a similar heart.” N. Anantha Lakshmi writes: “The reader or the spectator in whom, the Rasa originates is called ‘Sahrdaya’. Who is Sahrdaya? All the samajikas are not sahrdayas. The word sahrdaya means a person having the similar thinking and similar feelings as the author of the text or drama… the ideal spectator should have the similar mind or the mind of same wave length as the author to enjoy any literary work. This may be called as ‘sympathetic’ i.e. having similar feelings” (Lakshmi, 2008, paras. 11–12). In another formulation, “The word Sahrdaya means, the person whose heart (the origin of all the finer feelings and emotions) responds identically when exposed to the same experience. This common feeling which is innate in all human beings which becomes the ground for responding in the same way makes a samajika a sahrdaya” (Lakshmi, 2008, paras. 18–19).

Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra already hints at this special kind of audience. The viewer is not merely one who sees or hears. The viewer is one who tastes. “Rasa is so called because it is capable of being tasted” (Bharata, Nāṭyaśāstra VI.31–33; Ghosh, 1951, pp. 105–106). He explains this through a culinary image: “Just as well‑disposed persons while eating food cooked with many kinds of spices enjoy its tastes and attain pleasure and satisfaction, so the cultured people taste the Dominant States” (Bharata, Nāṭyaśāstra VI.31–33; Ghosh, 1951, p. 106). The audience, then, is not everyone in the same way. It is especially “cultured” and “well‑disposed” spectators who can truly taste what is presented.

This tasting, Bharata says, is mental: “the learned people taste in their mind the Dominant States such as love, sorrow etc. when they are represented by an expression of the States with Gesture. Hence these Dominant States in a drama are called the Sentiments” (Bharata, Nāṭyaśāstra VI.32–33; Ghosh, 1951, p. 106). The audience becomes a participant in an inner drama. What is shown on stage is only the beginning; what unfolds in the spectator’s mind and heart is where rasa actually happens.

Bharata explicitly defines the key terms of aesthetics—bhāva and rasa—in relation to what they do inside the spectator. Bhāvas, he says, are not just something the actors display; they are states that arise when performance reaches the viewer’s interior: “When the meanings presented by Determinants and Consequents are made to pervade the heart of the spectators they are called bhāvas (States)” (Bharata, Nāṭyaśāstra VII.1–3; Ghosh, 1951, pp. 107–108). Emotions do not remain on stage. They travel inward. They “pervade the heart.”

Rasa, for Bharata, arises when these inner states are universalised: “The Sentiments arise from them when they are imbued with the quality of universality (sāmānya)” (Bharata, Nāṭyaśāstra VII.7–8; Ghosh, 1951, p. 108). The sorrow on stage is not just this character’s private sorrow; it becomes sorrow itself. The spectator does not simply react with their own biographical pain; they experience a shared, universal emotion.

Abhinavagupta’s interpretation, as reported in the Baroda preface, describes this inner process in more detail. The editor summarises: “Permanent receptive moods for different Rasas eternally exist in the form of Sthāyibhāvas within all human beings and when the latter witness any performance these Sthāyibhāvas due to the contact of the Vibhāvas, Anubhāvas and Vyabhicāribhāvas presented on the stage manifest themselves by the suggestive capacity of Vibhāva and others into the developed form of Rasas which in turn afford enjoyment. This enjoyment alone is called Rasanubhava which is possible only through the poetry or dramatic performances” (Abhinavagupta, Preface, pp. 27–28). In other words, watching a play means that certain permanent moods inside us “wake up,” transform into rasa, and give joy.

Lakshmi translates this into the language of deep memory. “Even the reader or the spectator should have some qualities to experience the Rasa in its real sense. The capacity to experience a Rasa is attained by ‘vasana’, according to Abhinava Gupta. Here vasana means the impressions deep rooted in the human mind unconsciously. When one knows what is romance, then only he can relish the emotion of love i.e. Sringara” (Lakshmi, 2008, para. 10). To watch or read is to bring one’s stored impressions—vāsanās—into play. Inside the sahṛdaya, old experiences and latent moods are activated and reorganised by what is seen and heard.

Once we see how much is happening inside the spectator, the centre of gravity quietly shifts from the stage to the audience. The Abhinavabhāratī preface makes this shift explicit: “He proved that Rasānubhava or aesthetic experience rests only on the attentive spectators of dramatic performances and on the clever readers of poetry through Vyājana Vṛtti or suggestive capacity of the poems or several Bhāvas in the dramas” (Abhinavagupta, Preface, pp. 26–27). Rasa “rests only” on spectators and readers; without them, there is no aesthetic experience.

At the same time, the preface insists that the external side of performance—actors, gestures, props—is not where rasa truly lies. “The ingredients of food or the equipment and gestures of actors on the stage are only Vyājakas or unveilers of Rasas, already existing in persons in subtle form and are not active constituent parts in the enjoyment of Rasas” (Abhinavagupta, Preface, pp. 27–28). The actors’ work is crucial, but it is revealing, not producing. The real work is happening inside the spectator’s consciousness.

This is why, according to Abhinava, the very nature of nāṭya must be redefined. “According to Abhinava, therefore, the Nāṭyaśāstra is known as Rasāśāstra and all other particulars like Bhāvas and Abhinayas explained in this Śāstra should be taken as merely Vyājakas or the causes for the manifestation of Rasas. This kind of Rasanubhava or aesthetic enjoyment is far superior and called Alaukika while similar actions in ordinary life are not considered to be Nāṭya‑rasas or Rasas” (Abhinavagupta, Preface, pp. 27–28). If Nāṭyaśāstra is really a Rasāśāstra, and if bhāva and abhinaya are only means for manifesting rasa, then the spectator who experiences alaukika rasānubhava is the true centre of the art.

Interestingly, Bharata already gestures toward a hierarchy among viewers. In his account of success (siddhi), “the Success in dramatic performance was in his opinion of two kinds, divine (daivī) and human (mānuṣī) (XXVII.2). Of these two, the divine Success seems to be related to the deeper aspects of a play and came from spectators of a superior order i.e. persons possessed of culture and education (XXVII.16–17), and the human Success related to its superficial aspects and came from the average spectators who were ordinary human beings” (Bharata, Nāṭyaśāstra XXVII.2, 16–17; Ghosh, 1951, p. XLVIII). This anticipates Abhinava’s emphasis on the “attentive” and “clever” spectator, and Lakshmi’s sahṛdaya whose heart is tuned to respond.

If rasa lives in the spectator, then experiencing art cannot leave the spectator unchanged. Lakshmi begins with a simple observation about human nature: “For example, a child while playing hurts his finger. The onlooker unconsciously shakes his hand. Though the onlooker was not hurt he could feel the pain mentally… Suppose there is a good music or dance. When a lover of music or dance is exposed to it, he responds immediately and involves completely… We see small children getting up and tapping to the tune” (Lakshmi, 2008, paras. 13–14). Our bodies and minds mirror what we see and hear. This everyday empathy is the raw material of aesthetic experience.

In the theatre or in poetry, this mirroring becomes more intense. “The same way so many other feelings can be felt, experienced or enjoyed… A person who knows this ‘lokadharmi’ and experiences it as ‘natyadharmi’ is sahrdaya. In the process of experiencing the similar feeling as the character, the Samajika becomes one with the character eliminating his ‘self and the character. This is called ‘sadharanikarana’ or universalisation. This is termed as tadatmya identifying himself with the character” (Lakshmi, 2008, paras. 15–17). The sahṛdaya learns to step into another’s experience so fully that the boundary between “me” and “the character” temporarily softens. Yet this is not naive confusion; sādhāraṇīkaraṇa means that the feeling is also recognised as shared, universal, not just the property of one fictional individual.

Lakshmi describes the joy of this as a near‑spiritual bliss: “Likewise a different kind of ‘Rasa’, the aesthetic pleasure or emotion gives bliss which is ‘Brahmananda sahodara’ i.e. almost equal to ‘eternal bliss’. This is called ‘Rasananda’” (Lakshmi, 2008, para. 5). To be an audience in this sense is to have one’s heart opened to such rasānanda—to be tuned, again and again, to a finer pitch of feeling.

Ravindra Kumar Das adds another crucial dimension: the sahṛdaya is not a pure, abstract consciousness, but a socially located person. “It can be said that the ‘sahṛdaya’, as an individual, relates to poetry with a particular (class‑based) mental structure and a regulated mentality… Therefore, in the context of literary judgement, the sahṛdaya’s mentality is supremely important” (Das, 2021, para. 16). He insists that “‘hṛdayasaṃvādabhajḥ’. Hṛdaya is not mere tendency… he [the sahṛdaya] savours (reads) poetry together with their social existence” (Das, 2021, para. 17). Art shapes perception, but that perception is already patterned by class, history, and “social existence.”

Das is critical of theories that erase this experiencing subject. He notes that “Some schools have given such excessive importance to external meaning that they have reduced the role of society / the sahṛdaya almost to ‘zero’… They have not granted the enjoying–receiving–inquiring–relishing human being any necessary position in the context of poetry” (Das, 2021, para. 3). In such views, the audience becomes passive, even irrelevant. He adds that “the objectivist perspective has not the slightest trust in ‘social beings’ (ordinary people)… In short, this outlook treats ‘the people’ as inert” (Das, 2021, para. 4).

Against this, Das argues for a more open, plural understanding of sahṛdaya: “It is now more in tune with the times… to regard every kind of person as a sahṛdaya, and equally reasonable to give due weight to the judgements of sahṛdayas of every category” (Das, 2021, para. 14). This opens out Lakshmi’s “innate common feeling” into a democratic field. What they share, at best, is what Lakshmi calls “the common feeling which is innate in all human beings which becomes the ground for responding in the same way” (Lakshmi, 2008, para. 19).