In the chapter on Rasa, the normative Sanskrit text the Natya Shastra makes the following points: that there is no limit to the infinite shades of human emotion (bhava) and to the types of artistic treatment of them, and yet there is a canonical recognition of eight rasas (what may be translated as affects); these rasas may be further subdivided into derivations and relations between these eight – of particular interest to us is the kinship presumed between karuna and raudra (terror/rage); there is a general pre-eminence of sringara (erotic/romantic); that these affects are not abstractable but are intrinsically related to variables such as the types of acting, the music (vocal and instrumental) and dance played, and the shape (oblong, square or triangle) of the stage and theatre.

For the Natya Shastra, rasa is tangible, and the favored analogy is the palpable satisfaction of a well-cooked meal. The meal in its entirety includes the haptic raptures of delight of the spectator – be it the spectator in the diegetic space, or the spectator in the audience. Likewise, in the chapter on plot, the text makes the following points: the plot is imaged as a set of sandhi (joints), and the action of the hero is sequenced thus: the beginnings involve a sense of inquiry, sustained effort, varied hints at the possibility of fruition, further conviction (in the face of adversity), and finally, actual achievement of the fruit. There are also recommendations for digressions, and a centralised principal adversity – however, as with the sequence above, the centrality of the protagonists’ mission, and his eventual success, is not questioned. Indeed, the plot does not assume that the adversity may not quite be overcome, even as the schema allows for doubts and unexpected revelations. There is also a discussion of the need for an introduction where the kind of play may be signified by the type of introducer – for example, a priest or chamberlain or artist would indicate a more serious kind of play involving the sufferings of noble personages.

Advertisement

One notes this schema to see how Rama’s Last Act partakes of this tradition but also substantially exceeds its rather meagre frame. But let one first begin with a brief context: the scholar-playwright Bhavabhuti belonged to the first half of the eighth century, and was likely born in what is today, Maharashtra; he was a distinguished Vedantin, and though he could not participate in the influential Shankaracharya brand of advaita as that developed historically later, he belonged to the broader Vedic and epical traditions. His first play Act of the Great Hero, also centred on Rama’s deeds. As it is his more mature latter play Rama’s Last Act that is being discussed here, one may note how he related to the terms of the Natya Shastra, a text he is perhaps more likely to have been familiar with.

In line with the traditions of the Shastra, he uses the idea of the indirect introduction to the play to involve us readers/viewers in the play as participants – even if we are participating primarily with our emotions, rather than as causal agents. He also uses the structure of a quest – though here the quest is for an imagination of moral perfection, the sense of a good life both sensuously enjoyable and morally agreeable. But there is adversity and though the play perseveres with the image of the protagonists (Rama, but also Sita, the twin sons and so on), the overall affect is more a sense of an overwhelming tragedy and loss that the skeletal remains of plot (the nominal final reunion) can scarcely repress. Far more than the plot, the play is thus driven by combinatorial arrangements of affect (which, one imagines in the staging, include the fine and persistent use of melody, percussion and movement) that bring the audience ever closer to the internal world of the ripening of the play. The core of the play is the slow-cooked dénouement of karuna, and is thus a comment on the irrevocable pathos of our shared world.

There is a self-consciousness about every aspect of the Bhavabhuti play from the Prologue onward. The play begins with the director and an actor welcoming the audience into the world and epoch of the play: it is Ayodhya, on the appointed day of Rama’s coronation. There is a recognition that all emotion and intelligibility between the director, audience and the play is mediated through conversation and language: the first verse is a tribute to the play’s “reverence to language, / a deathless thing, a part of the soul”.

The sutradhara (director) is present at the opening, announces the play, and speaks of how a divinity (language) infuses the human, allowing the human to aspire to something more than the everyday – this is, after all, the time of Rama’s coronation. The Natya Shastra specifies that the director and actor wear white, hold handfuls of white flowers, as well as always “have a look of surprise in their eyes.” The speed of an actor’s gesture and gait may be used to emphasise the pacing of the play or to “suggest the lapse of time”. The director is not an external master of ceremonies as may be current convention – rather, he is both inside the diegetic space of the play as an onlooker and participant, as well as outside, addressing the audience (for example, by asserting that this play was written by a historical person called Bhavabhuti, and that this is the time of coronation). The direction is by signal and word, and there is a transformation of the theatrical space to that of a “sojourner of Ayodhya of that day and age”.

Entering that realm, the director begins to wonder, along with the audience, at what he sees – for instead of a joyful Ayodhya ruled by the great king Rama, he finds an Ayodhya that seems to be in mourning. There is no sound of music anywhere, neither veena nor percussion. He finds out that he has reached the city at a pivotal moment: Rama has triumphed, the allies have returned, Sita is pregnant. Yet there is a note of menace in the air. An actor tells the director to compose a hymn for this joyous occasion, but the director notes that “however pure the words – or the woman – /there are always people who’ll be malicious”. The audience is forewarned of the turn of events. Such fore-knowledge is integral to the karuna rasa of the play: karuna here includes the sense of exhaustion and repetition that the cruelties of the play (especially Sita’s situation) give rise to in the audience’s psyche.

Excerpted with permission from Rama Rasa: Transcendence and Worldliness in the Ramayana Tradition, Nikhil Govind, Bloomsbury.