35 Contemporary Indian Poetics

Dr. Bhandaram Vani

1. Introduction

There is a general agreement among scholars that “Indian Poetics” should be understood to have begun from Bharata’s Natyashastra.1 One of the primary reasons for this huge importance attached to Natyashastra in the study of Indian Poetics is also because there is no other ‘extant example’ available to us mentioning literary writing before this.2 The work was later commented exhaustively by four commentators. Unfortunately, apart from Anandvardhana’s Abhinavabharati, rest are lost. It is interesting to note here that Natyashastra was not a text about literature, though. The work was ‘meant to be a manual for the actors and directors in a performance’.3 According to Bharata the ‘central purpose of dramatic performance, as a work of art, is rasa (aesthetic emotion), which is its soul’.4 His entire theory is focused to discuss how artists and directors associated with a performance can ensure the construction and enactment of this ‘soul’.

Since without rasa the performance is supposed to be lifeless, there are several rules, prescribed by Bharata, ensuring its presence in a performance. However, although focussed primarily on performance, in discussing ‘vâcikâbhinaya (where enactment is through words), Bharata discusses different aspects of literary writing’ as well.5 He mentions that ‘good diction must fulfil ten conditions of good writing (gunas), abstain from ten faults (dosas) and maintain certain literary characters (laksanas). He lists thirty-six of these characters and discusses the use of literary figures (alamkâras), which separate literary from other kinds of writing’.6 However, Bharata, doesn’t only discuss literary writing along with performance, he goes on to discuss music, dance, ‘different styles of enactment’ also.7 In dealing with literary writing along with performance, music, dance among other forms of art, Bharata also constructs his idea that ‘the whole gamut of aesthetic experience which can be perceived by the eye and the ear’ (or human consciousness in general) should be driven by similar rules ensuring production of rasa.8 The production of rasa by various means should be the sole goal of any work of aesthetics, be it literature, be it music, be it painting, or be it dance. ‘In this sense, it is the only grand text on aesthetics in the Indian tradition. All else flow from it and can be considered its bhâsyas or commentaries’.

Given Natyashastra’s grand stature because of it being the only available text from ancient times discussing aesthetics in its totality, most of the discussions of Indian Poetics afterwards revolved around production of rasa through various means. Theoreticians differed in their concepts about origins of rasa, but their goals rarely deviated from what Bharata prescribed about importance of rasa as the ‘central purpose’ of a work of art. As the years progressed towards the contemporary times, the scholars working on Indian Poetics have often gone to the extent of mixing the secular and the sacred – bringing rasa to understand contemporary socio-political realities of India in literature. Many have also tried to weave the Western literary and cultural theoretical postulations with Bharata’s concepts (or his commentators’ concepts, for instance Abhinavagupta’s postulations about dhvani) to produce an “Indian” poetics in the contemporary times. A similar overview emerges when one looks at some of the major scholars of Indian Poetics of the recent past.

1.1 Some Critics and their Concepts

‘Aurobindo and A.K. Coomaraswamy belong not only to the category of cultural critics, it is with them that the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics begins in the Indian English Literary Criticism. The telic universe of Aurobindo’s work of art is a conceptive extension of God as Time and Space. The work of art is the figural body of God visualized as universal rhythm. It appropriates and assimilates the cosmicity of God against the nullity and void of existence. Aurobindo’s aesthetic theory grows out of body-plexus symbolism where he has a scheme of eight levels of ascent and descent. Each form is peculiar to its own level of existence, corporeal and mental qualities and state of consciousness. Aurobindo has a four-tier hierarchy of his basic structure: mental-vital, giving expression by thought and speech to sensations, emotions and other volitions of the physical being; the emotional-vital which is the seat of love, joy, sorrow, hatred, etc ; the central-vital which houses ambition, prde, fear etc. which are stronger emotions; the lower-vital which is full of small desires, sexual hunger etc. The art-work provides knowledge by identity, knowledge by direct observation, knowledge by completely separative means without direct contact’.

‘A.K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) regarded art history as the history of the human spirit and art as rooted in life. Divorced from life, art becomes mere mechanical architectonics and is open to corruptions from industry and degradation in values. Coomaraswamy’s critical principles are based upon his study of Hindu sculpture, art, painting, religion and philosophy. Coomaraswamy believed that art has little to do with personal self-expression. He emphasized the use of universal symbols. Works of art imitate divine forms and are rituals to that purpose. Beauty leads to that process of self-discovery in knowledge and goodness. The poetic form is identical with the soul element. “Function and meaning cannot be forced apart; the meaning of the work of art is its intrinsic form as much as the soul is the form of the body. Meaning is even prior to utilitarian application.” Imitation, Coomaraswamy regarded as, “the embodiment in matter of a preconceived form.”

Nature is only the material body, the essence being provided by the spirit. Forms have a divine origin, be it painting, architecture, music, literature. They follow a cosmic pattern that images the lila of God’.

‘Prof. C D Narasimhaiah’s basic canon is the assimilation of the best both from the Indian as well as the Western traditions – critical and creative. His has been a life-long search for the common poetic, the principles that minimise the differential in favour of the common and the unitary. Narasimhaiah adopted the historical and comparative method, believing in the close textual analysis. Influences on Narasimhaiah are clearly those of his guru (F R Leavis), Arnold, Eliot, and others. He regards Indian Literature in English as part of Indian Literatures written in different languages. The Indianness of the tradition means a continuity of the art-work’s links with the Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Puranas, among other central texts. Narasimhaiah laments the gradual Americanization of the Indian intellectual – Vikram Seth and Shashi Tharoor – for example whose novels come in for severe attack. Narasimhaiah is also not very happy with terms like Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism since they posit a locus that may be radical in a negative sense’.

‘Professor K. R. Srinivas Iyengar and M.K. Naik are other important figures within contemporary Indian Poetics. Iyengar avoids doctrinaire approach and advocates for an open mind which is neither impatient nor ready to condemn. Iyengar combines literary criticism with literary historicism. Commenting upon Commonwealth Literature, Iyengar said that it should be considered as a unity, even a spiritual force for it is only in the writer that the integrity of the character is visible. It is this integrity which, by the use of the inspired word, can redeem the world’.13 ‘M. K. Naik began as a critic by writing on the novels of Mulk Raj Anand, Narayan, Raja Rao, Somerset Maugham and the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Naik’s basic approach is historical and formal. His book Mirror on the Wall surveys British fiction on India. Naik stands for art to be rooted in a specific soil. Naik belongs to the tradition of Arnold as far as historicism is concerned. Naik holds, like Raja Rao, that we cannot write like English, we should not. He pleads for an understanding of India’s rich critical traditions by the practising Indian critic in “Towards an Aesthetic of Indian English Literature.” At the same time he is not hesitant of taking the best from the Western critical tradition’.

‘M Hiriyana’s Art Experience and K. C. Pandey’s Comparitive Aesthetics are two other contemporary concepts that should be mentioned. While Hiriyana’s book is influenced by his History of Indian Philosophy, K. C. Pandey’s two volumes provide knowledge of the traditions of the West’.

‘Krishna Rayan’s name in applying the central tenets of Sanskrit Poetics upon works in English and other Indian languages stands singularly distinct. Krishna Rayan’s four books on poetry – Suggestion and Statement in Poetry (University of London Press, 1972), Text and Sub-Text (New Delhi: Arnold, 1987), The Burning Bush (New Delhi: D. K. Pub, 1988), and Sahitya: A Theory (New Delhi: Sterling, 1991) make Rayan a very formidable contemporary critic. In Preface to the first book, Rayan makes it clear that he is neither writing an exposition of Sanskrit Poetics, nor discussing English critical theory. His task has mainly been centered on providing theoretical critical models for Indian scholars. Rayan relates his concept of ‘suggestion’ to I. A. Richard’s ‘emotive meaning’, William Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, Cleanth Brooks’ ‘irony’, Tates’ ‘intention’, Ransom’s ‘texture’, and Blackmur’s ‘gesture’.16 ‘In his book Text and Sub-text (1987), Rayan looked at the theory of suggestion and tried to establish that suggestion—the production of unstated, subsurface, indirect, multiple, emotive meaning—was what distinguished modern literature from the literature of earlier periods. Rayan examined texts like Alfred Tennyson’s Becket alongside T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Christopher Fry’s Curtmantle and Jean Anouilh’s Becket ou L’Honneur de Dieu. Four of Thomas Hardy’s novels exploring the notion of a return to the roots were analysed in relation to novels by Margaret Drabble that pursue a similar theme’.

‘The book, Text and Sub-Text, also looks at the practice of suggestion and evocation in Milton’s Paradise Lost and the poetry of W.B. Yeats and the minimalist, micro-suggestive, poetic practice of the Review poets. The critic quoted critical passages from Western theorists to relate the theory of suggestion to symbolist practice as well as to the Sanskrit concept of rasadhwani. He also considered the binary oppositions like emotive/referential meaning (I.A. Richards), oblique/direct (E.M.W. Tillyard), local texture/logical structure (J.C. Ransom) and intensive/extensive meaning (Allen Tate) to be renamings of the suggestion/statement distinction found in Eastern as well as Western poetics’.18 In this book ‘literariness is understood as suggested meanings. The poems of Keats, Yeats and Milton are examined in terms of the doctrine of suggestiveness. Historical approach is important in so far as it is relevant in tracing the evolution of images, symbols, and other tropes of language. In the Post-Script to Text and Sub-Text, Rayan says that the poetic of suggestion…will be concerned with the work’s meaning defined as consisting its formal order in the way the work employs its presentational unity …the image and the scene functioning with the same presentational immediacy and determining the ontological identity of the work”.

‘In Burning Bush: Suggestion in Indian Literature (1988), Rayan extended the rasadhwani concept to modern subcontinental texts in various languages by authors like Nirmal Verma, Kiran Nagarkar, Lokenath Bhattacharya, Rajinder Singh Bedi (fiction); P. Lankesh, Kumaran Asan, Jayanta Mahapatra, Nissim Ezekiel, Dina Nath Nadim and Soubhagya Kumar Mishra (poetry); and others besides some older texts from classical Tamil and Sindhi in order to demonstrate the applicability of the theory to different languages, genres and periods’. ‘The Burning Bush further explicates implications of dhvani theory by applying on different works in Indian languages. Rayan’s foundational beliefs concerning a work of art are: (i) its highly formal nature, (ii) its suggestiveness, (iii) its correspondence with the state of mind of a competent reader. Sahitya, A Theory is a quest for literary universals’. ‘In Sahitya, a Theory, Rayan produced an eclectic theory for Indian critical practice by bringing together Sanskrit, Tamil and Western concepts with plenty of examples and quotations. Natyasastra and Tolkappiyam were referred to as two basic texts. Here, he also established parallels between the rasas of Natyasastra and the meypadus of Tolkappiyam. The critic looked at the diverse aspects of literature like literariness, image, narrative, character, style, rhythm, landscape and evaluation. In the chapter on landscape, he introduced the tinai concept of Tolkappiyam. The landscape here was the signifier, and the bond that held it to the signified was arbitrary and fixed by conventions which were sustained for several generations during the Sangam period’. ‘Rayan says  that the question what is literariness can be framed as how a literary text works. The answer to this is: by the emergence of emotions, meaning from its verbal structures. Rayan also has a gift for the invention of categories – he says that the gaudiya, pankali, and vaidharbhi are not only styles but emotions too. On the question of evaluation awaiting a work of art, Rayan’s criteria are dhvani-kavya, gunibhoot-vyangya, and chitra-kavya. In order to avoid the subjective element from evaluation, Rayan says that critics should center on the objective features of a work of art only – plot, imagery, etc.’

‘Ayyappa Paniker tried to apply the tinai theory to Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s novel Kayar, while V.J. Sebastian did it to a series of contemporary poems. S. Carlos (Tamilavan) also tried to extend and apply the theory to modern texts in Tamil’.

2. Traditional Indian Poetics in Contemporary Times

2.1 Problems

At the risk of sounding somewhat generalistic, one can say that often many Indian literature texts have tried to stay within Natyashastra’s tenets about how ‘moral precepts’ are ‘to be kept in mind while writing’.25 Natyashastra’s conclusion that ‘performance should teach, but through entertainment and delight’ has often been one of the goals of writers within Indian Literature written in different languages (although without ruling out exceptions and experimentations).26 And a criticism based on rasa, dhvani, alamkara or auchitya theory worked successfully with those texts. ‘In trying to answer the question, what is the essence of a successful performance’, Natyashastra suggests – ‘the communication of aesthetic emotions or rasa; and then goes on to look at the mechanism of communication of aesthetic emotion briefly’.27 A similar tendency to judge a literary piece of writing on the basis of its capacity to convey the ‘soul’ and the ‘spirit’ by critics can be seen in the discussion above about some of them.

For a long time, such an emphasis on ‘essence’ rasa, dhvani, ‘spirit’ within Indian literary criticism made sense comfortably for many of us. However, things get complex afterwards and such theories seem too simplistic to understand the complicatedness of times we witness, for instance after Post-colonialism or Post-modernism. ‘While these are interesting experiments, the method can work fully only in a stable static culture with a lot of received assumptions and capable of a large number of shared responses. The theory of rasas is also too limited and rigid to make it critically effective when applied to modern texts where the boundaries of emotions are blurred, the moods are in a flux and the responses more complex. Behind these theories is a whole static world view and a fixed view of literature and literariness. They have also a tendency to look at literature, especially poetry, as a craft detached from its time and society. Both classical Sanskrit and Tamil poetics, therefore, fail to historicise their texts, and themselves need to be historicised to be understood. Concepts like dhwani and ouchitya (propriety) and the linguistic injunctions against asleela (obscene), gramya (rustic) and chyutasamskara (uncouth) can hardly be isolated from the class that generated them and hence do not apply to several subaltern forms and movements, both ancient and modern’.28 In the wake of a wide dissemination of the Western literary theory, it is also possible to appreciate many of the ancient texts (or non-normative, subaltern texts in different periods) for their radical energy. The radicalism built in these texts seems much more complex than what rasa or dhvani or almakara theory allows us to envision. ‘The traditional concepts of pratibha (genius), sahridaya (the competent reader), the sahitatva (the fixed togetherness of the word) and the meaning—compared to the bond of Parvati and Parameswara—as something deposited in the work by the author and the authorial institution itself emerge from an idealist philosophical premise. The concept of the reader as the producer of meaning, of the text as a flux, and the absence or the eternal “deferance”— deferring—of a “final meaning”, literariness itself as the effect of reading, and the historical and ideological determinations of the text are alien to this aesthetic ideology’.

‘While the concepts of dhwani and anumana do take the reader into account, it is an abstract reader outside real history. It is seldom bothered with the question of the historical construction of subjectivity and hence fails to answer several questions about writing, reading and authorship’.30 And therefore the Indian Poetics that has been interpreting Bharata’s Natyashastra in different ways and following that to understand literature till then, finds itself at a crossroad.

Satchidanandan reiterates a similar sentiment when he says, ‘Traditional Indian poetics is in a crisis today. Its categories are proving clearly insufficient to explain several of the modern genres, forms and movements in Indian literature. This often unacknowledged crisis had already begun with the maturing of Indian languages, which declared their independence from Sanskrit centuries ago even while retaining aspects of it that they found useful to their flowering and growth. These languages had their own literary traditions, mostly oral, which informed their new developments. Some of them, like Tamil, had a  different poetics altogether. Their canons were formed not only with examples from Sanskrit literature, many of which Tamils got translated or adapted, but from Western, especially English, classics as well, which were either translated or followed as models’.

According to him the ‘ inadequacy of the existing paradigms became acute in the 19th century when, mostly under the Western influence, new prose genres like the novel, the short story and even modern prose drama began to develop in Indian languages’ and literary criticism ‘hardly had any tools to explain and interpret the new forms’.32 ‘The crisis began to affect even traditional forms like poetry with the advent of new genres like the sonnet, the pastoral, the elegy, the new lyric or the sequence poem and new movements like modernism that replaced the simile and the metaphor with the symbol and the image and experimented with free verse and prose as the vehicles of poetic imagination. Imagination itself had grown unconventional with new modes such as symbolism, surrealism, anti-poetry and the like. Then came the new movements like Dalit writing, women’s writing, tribal writing, nativism, ecocentric writing and modern folk writing, not to speak of the Indian variants of postmodernism, all of which sprang from new social awakenings and carried a new intellectual and verbal energy that could hardly be explained by traditional poetics. In addition, now there are concrete poetry, blog-poetry, hyperlink and multimedia forms that are trying to go beyond language with the additional use of visual images, both still and moving, as well as sound’.

Satchidanandan attributes this inadequacy of traditional Indian Poetics and problems faced by the contemporary Indian Poetics’ scholars to ‘ the radical changes’ that started ‘happening in Indian life itself: the complexification of life brought about by the changed environment; the new textures of urban living with its contradictory aspects of penury and luxury made possible by new technologies; the intensification of the alienation among the intelligentsia; the angst of the new awareness of space and time; the growing consumer instinct; the loss of traditional values and the growth of the new post-industrial ethos; the continued intervention of the modern state in every aspect of the lives of its subjects; the revolutionary awakenings of the marginalised and oppressed sections of the people against discrimination based on caste, class, race, religion and gender; the threats of war, poverty and terrorism; the search for new identities; and the new structures of feeling generated by these transformed environments of existence’.

2.2 Response

As a response to this inadequacy of Bharata’s Natyashastra (or traditional Indian Poetics in general), there are two tendencies that one finds in contemporary Indian Poetics. One is an attempt to re-interpret rasa, dhvani, auchitya, alamkara etc in light of contemporary realities, blending it with the western cultural theories. Satchidanandan calls this response ‘a form of enlightened revivalism’ which ‘has been an attempt to extend, develop and reinterpret traditional poetics in order to apply its concepts to modern texts and genres, at times incorporating the concepts of Western poetics in the process’.35 Another tendency is to borrow the western literary and cultural postulations to analyse Indian literature written English and other languages. ‘The influence of Western criticism was evident from the very beginning of modern criticism in India, which emerged along with the new genres like the short story, the novel and the modern prose-play. If initially it was only English criticism that influenced Indian critics, later Russian, French and German schools also began to have their impact. This began chiefly with the emergence of Marxist and Freudian analytical models. Sydney and Arnold had held sway for some time in liberal Indian criticism; later they were replaced by Eliot and I.A. Richards. This happened especially during the emergence of modern poetry, which came to be associated with Eliot’s modes and mores’.36 In recent past, there is a further shift within the contemporary poetics with critics like Meenakshi Mukherjee ‘criticising the ideological project of Englishing the world’, and ‘nativitizes [ing] the vital components of this project making literature grow from other than English sources’.

Summing Up

In this chapter we saw how Bharata’s Natyashastra and its rasa theory remained a wide influence over Indian poetics for long. We also saw how during the 19th century when Indian landscape witnessed a huge change, the rasa, dhvani, alamkara, riti, dosa, guna, auchitya etc proved inadequate to successfully appreciate the new forms of literary writings that came to the fore. Since then contemporary Indian Poetics have been trying to come to terms with this gap. We also briefly discussed the two major tendencies within contemporary poetics to respond to this gap. ‘The history of Indian criticism in the past few decades has been the history of the varied responses to these challenges and the attempts to arrive at some critical canon that might help unlock and explain contemporary Indian texts’.