Bharata’s Theory of Aesthetic Pleasure or Rasa: Classical Indian Theories of “Aesthetics” and Their Relation to Cinema

Abstract

The paradox of junk fiction is solved by the Indian discovery of generalization of audience experience while engaging with fictional work and their willing identification with the mode which generates aesthetic pleasure or rasa for them from a play including tragedies. Bharata also gives a formula for a unit of performance involving a ‘goal-directed activity’ within a play which brings the audiences’ unconscious bodies and their consciousness at par with each other to make them relive a performance. Bharata’s elaborate plot structure is discussed in terms of the main junctures of a play, the protagonists’ mental state during those stages of the play and the nature of actions generally being undertaken in a play. Bharata also classifies aesthetic pleasure as of the following three types: aesthetic relish characterized by a mode of enquiry, aesthetic saturation involving a mode of saturation and aesthetic immersion involving a state of ecstasy being experienced by the audiences.