A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics

by Sheldon Pollock

English
472

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Indian Literature, Religion

468 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 2016

About the author

Sheldon Pollock is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies. From 2005-2011 he served as the William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia, and before that as the George V. Bobrinskoy Distinguished Service Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1989-2005. He was educated at Harvard University, receiving his undergraduate degree in Classics (Greek) magna cum laude in 1971 before earning a Masters (1973) and Ph.D. (1975) in Sanskrit and Indian Studies. His areas of specialization are Sanskrit philology, Indian intellectual and literary history, and, increasingly, comparative intellectual history.

Pollock is General Editor of the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard U. Press). He was Associate and then General Editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library, for which he also edited and translated a number of volumes, and joint editor of "South Asia across the Disciplines," a collaborative venture of the University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press. He directed the international collaborative research project "Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism." He is currently principal investigator of “SARIT: Enriching Digital Collections in Indology,” supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Bilateral Digital Humanities Program.

Reviews

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is one major put-off in this book. Pollock somehow decides that it is a wise choice to translate every word - every title, every technical word, every concept is translated from the Sanskrit. And his rationale is that Sanskritists would know what these stand for and as to the rest, it doesn't matter anyways. Also, strangely enough he throws diacritic marks out of the window. The former especially makes the book a very uncomfortable read - I read this reader scratching my head.

But I still leave 5 stars because - boy o boy is Pollock a nerd. He is spectacularly erudite - he has collected some thirty poeticians from Bharatamuni all the way to Jagannadha Panditaraja in the court at Delhi in the 17th century as the tussle with such fine and elegant points on beauty. One is left standing with endless awe for the refinement and sophistication for the Sanskrit aesthetic tradition. In particular Pollock shivers with excitement in talking about Sanskrit poeticians passing the baton and responsibility of Rasa - aesthetic experience - into the hands of audiences rather than writers. We took are taken into the swiftness of tradition and its sweetness. And what is more adorable than Pollock gushing at the brilliance of the greats Udbhata, Bhatta Narayana, and obviously Abhinavagupta.

[Swetha Godavarthi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why do some performances or poems or stories move us to tears or to laughter, or any of the sensations in between? the term for this experience in Indian philosophy is Rasa. Rasa reader is an important examination of the concept of Rasa in Indian literature and dramaturgy. Spanning from Bharata's natyashastra in c. 300 to Jagannatha's views in court of Shah Jahan (c.1650), Sheldon Pollock quotes directly from works of Indian philosophers, dramaturgists and writers to examine how scholars grappled with and debated what is Rasa, where is it located, how is it acheived and how many types are there? The book spans the evolution of analysis and philosophy of Rasa from linguistic to psychological point of view and from secular to religious to vedantic point of view. A must read for students of arts, or even anyone even remotely interested in arts.

[Shreya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The reader gets a brilliant compendium of comparative aesthetic scholarship in elegant prose. What is rasa? When was it actually formulated, and in what context? How did it assume such significance in the contexts of aesthetic debates? Shelden Pollock traces the trajectory of the idea of rasa from theatre to poetics. It is a pleasure to follow the various streams of argument that Pollock traces through the classical texts. This could help us understand ourselves a little better by coming to terms with art and literature and reintegrating with the world at large.