Sanskrit Criticism by V.K. Chari

Abstract

An excellent study, Seary’s book reminds us that traditional literary meth­ ods, far from being exhausted and irrelevant, retain the power to remake literary reputations, reshape canons of scholarship, and revise the scope of literary history itself. R O B E R T JA M E S m e r r e t t / University of Alberta V.K. Chari, Sanskrit Criticism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990). xii, 302. $35.00 (U.S.) Professor V.K. Chari’s intention is to introduce a modern Western audience to the problems discussed by Sanskrit literary critics of classical India. He hopes to obtain a result similar to what the late B.K. Matilal achieved for classical Indian philosophy, and he brings to his task an impressive and extensive reading in Sanskrit alamkarasdstra, which comprise both poetics and aesthetics. The task which Chari has set himself is not an easy one. Sanskrit literary criticism spans a long period from Bharata in approximately the third cen­ tury of our era, up to the seventeenth century, and its most fertile period falls between the eighth and the eleventh centuries A.D. The Sanskrit theo­ reticians showed a remarkable intellectual sophistication in asking basic but still puzzling questions: What makes a poem a poem? What exactly is there in the linguistic message of a poem to distinguish it from any other linguistic message? Naturally, there was no agreed answer among the Sanskrit liter­ ary critics. One school stressed the mechanics of “poetic ornaments,” the alarnkdras, i.e., metaphors, similes, and phonetic ornaments such as alliter­ ation, etc. Another school stressed the rather diffuse entity called “style,” rxti. The two most important and philosophically most productive schools declared that the soul of poetry lay in dhvani, suggestion, and rasa, emotion, respectively. These two concepts merged into the dhvani-rasa school, when the rasa school included the concept of suggestion into its own theoretical framework. The rasa school had its origin in Bharata’s treatise on dramaturgy, the Natyasastra. He distinguished eight principal emotions to be represented on stage: the erotic, the comic, the heroic, grief, rage, fear, disgust, and wonder. Later on, a ninth rasa was added: the santi-rasa, quietude, peace. According to Bharata, these primary emotions are followed by the secondary emotions, bhavas. Chari observes that “The distinction between basic or durable emotions and transient or fleeting emotions is perhaps Bharata’s most original contribution to the aesthetic of emotions. This idea, which is practically unknown to Western criticism . . . , is the very cornerstone of the 487 aesthetics of rasa” (59). Hence, according to the rasa school the whole aim and raison d’etre of literature is to convey an emotion: “The rasa theory . . . [postulates] that there is one single end that is common to all literary discourse, namely, the evocation of moods, and, hence, one single, inclusive criterion — appropriateness in respect of the presentation of the emotions” (237). Whatever school of literary criticism they followed, Sanskrit critics only analysed the text alone, taking no interest in the personality, biography or psychology of the author. Furthermore, they stressed the impersonality of the emotions themselves: “The sorrow presented in the Ramayana is to be taken not as the personal sorrow of the poet but sorrow itself in its general­ ized form and identified by its criteria. If it were only a feeling personal to the poet, it would not attain the status of a poem (slokatva) and would not be fit for the reader’s contemplation” (17). Nor did Sanskrit critics show any interest in realistic descriptions of the world. It is significant that Chari never mentions Auerbach’s Mimesis, a work of major importance for recent Western literary criticism, although he alludes to it in his observation that “mimesis was not a seminal principle in the Indian critical tradition” (34). The stylized expressions of Indian art and architecture indicate how far the description and representation of “objective” nature was from being the aim of any branch of Indian aesthetics. Chari consistently adopts the attitude of a fervent devotee of the rasa theory of aesthetics. He is also a pure idealist in an almost Platonic sense: “. . . rasa is the objective structure of meaning embodied in...