Abstract
Abstract:The last surviving form of live Sanskrit drama in performance-the Kūṭiyāṭṭam tradition of Kerala-claims, with some justice, to preserve elements of the most ancient forms of Indian theater, attested in the Nāṭya-Śāstra. Kūṭiyāṭṭam performers and scholars of the art also continue to use the terminology of Kashmiri poetics and aesthetics to interpret what happens on stage. But in fact, almost nothing links the aesthetic system of Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka and Abhinavagupta with the complex, heavily localized, and largely untheorized world of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. Even basic and familiar terms such as dhvani or camatkāra have been entirely reconceived and laden with new meanings in this tradition (dhvani, e.g., is said in the Vyaṅgya-vyākhyā, one of the few surviving medieval Sanskrit sources dealing with the Kūṭiyāṭṭam repertoire, to refer only to the contrapuntal use of eye movements to suggest meanings directly opposed to the surface level of the text being performed). Although the handwritten handbooks of performance, āṭṭaprakāram, passed down in the performers’ families, are helpful in understanding structural features of the art, and the artists’ own interpretive statements are always of great interest, in the end we can only begin to formalize a theory of Kūṭyāṭṭam aesthetics inductively, after witnessing full-scale performances. These tend to be long, in an arithmetic sense-ranging from 12 hours to over 150 hours for a single performance-but amazingly action-packed and suffused with meaning, thought, and emotion, minute by minute. These performances require, indeed are directed toward, a wide-awake spectator capable of entering into the imaginative world on stage in a personal, active way. All Kūṭiyāṭṭam works also restructure the Sanskrit text they have chosen to perform, scrambling its natural, linear sequence in the interests of generating an entirely different cognitive basis for experiencing the play. There are also strong, though often nonexplicit, thematic elements operating in every major Kūṭiyāṭṭam text-in-performance. This chapter will offer an initial set of hypotheses about the nature of the aesthetic experience that emerges in this tradition, its overriding expressive themes and unusual structure-on the basis of the twenty-nine-night performance of one of the major texts, known as Aṅgulīyâṅkam, which I witnessed in the summer of 2012….
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of |
Subtitle of host publication | Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. |
Pages | 221-248 |
Number of pages | 28 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781472524300 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781472528353 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Jan 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Arindam Chakrabarti and Contributors, 2016, 2018.