Ananta Charan Sukla
Pages 13-18
DOI: 10.3726/b10729_13
ABSTRACT
Rasa, Dhvani and Rasa-Dhvani are the major critical terms in Sanskrit poetics that developed during the post-Vedic classical period. Rasa (lit. juice) is used by a sage named Bharata (c. 4th C. B.C. – 1st C. A.D.) to denote the aesthetic experience of a theatrical audience. But Anandavardhana (9th C. A.D.) and Abhinavagupta (10th C. A.D.) intermedialize this experience by extending it to a reader of poetry. They argue that rasa is also generated by a linguistic potency called dhvani. Some critics like Bhoja (11th C. A.D.) also proposed generation of rasa by pictorial art, and further, some modern critics propose to trace dhvani property in non-verbal arts such as dance and music pleading thereby that these non-verbal arts also generate rasa. The present essay examines these arguments and concludes that generation of rasa is confined to only the audio-visual and verbal arts such as the theatre and poetry, and, dhvani as a specific linguistic potency, is strictly confined to the verbal arts. Its intermedialization is a contradiction in terms.