Rasa

Therefore, for Allama, as, uh, one of his vachanas tells, poets are like parrots repeating what the previous poets, uh, repeated.

So Nagaraj reads such vachanas as offering the critique of literary tradition and the critique of Abhinavagupta's Rasa theory.

And one more critique, uh, of, uh, critique, uh, one more critique is on, uh, uh, Abhinavagupta's emphasis on the body.

For, uh, Allama, body is not important.

A raag is made by the particular pathways through its notes, by the phrases and signatures that give it its character.

And small changes in the way those notes rise and fall can completely change the mood or rasa.

The idea of Rasa goes back to Bharata's Natya Shastra, which names eight, Shringara for love, Hasya for laughter, Karuna for sorrow, Rodra for anger, Veera for courage, Bhayanaka for fear, Bibhatsa for disgust, and Adbhuta for wonder.

Later thinkers, most famously Abhinav Gupta, added a ninth, Shanta, the Rasa of peace, and together they became the Navarasas.

Carnatic musicians tend to attach these moods to rags.

And each Raag can have more than one Rasa, more than one emotion or mood, depending on how it is rendered.

Mohanam, one of the first Raags a student learns, is filed under Sringara, Hasya, Adbhuta or Veera, depending on the melody and rendition.

That idea, that the smallest changes within a strict musical grammar can alter the emotional world of a piece, seems to me exactly the sort of problem Coltrane would have wanted to spend years exploring.

The Natya Shastra, traditionally attributed to Bharat Muni, is a foundational Sanskrit text on drama and performance.

One of its most influential concepts is Rasa.

Rasa is often translated as aesthetic flavour, essence or sentiment.

But none of those translations quite capture the whole idea.

The basic concept is that the performance can produce a particular aesthetic experience to a spectator.