Series: Open Knowledge Fellowship 2025
You’ve tapped a link and arrived here. As you scroll, words and images unfold, perhaps you zoom in, linger or pause at something that catches your eye. Through these subtle gestures, an emotional response arises, and you begin to wonder. This emotional stirring is what the ancient Indian aesthetic theory of rasa alludes to and tries to define.
Spend a moment exploring this copy of the Gulistan in the collections of the Royal Asiatic Society. Notice how your body moves as your mind moves through the story. Continue the journey from ancient manuscripts to colonial photographic albums and consider how digital rasa can shape our connection with digitised cultural collections.
Ancient Indian Aesthetic Theory and the Concept of Rasa
Our human understanding of the concept of aesthetics has its roots in Ancient Greek philosophy and its principles of rhetoric. In much the same way that written language branches out in different directions, so do our ideas of beauty. While European aesthetics define beauty in objective terms based on religion, Indian culture employs a more nuanced and complex theory.
The theory of Rasa, explained in the Nāṭya Shāstra, is rooted in our emotional responses to subjective experiences. European philosophers didn’t catch on to this perspective until the Enlightenment, when earnest German philosophers like Schopenhauer, who revered his Latin translation of the Indian Upanishads or ‘Oupnek’hat’ over all other books, started connecting with Indian ideas through newly available translated Sanskrit texts – Europeans had previously only known of Sanskrit through Persian versions. The Enlightenment wasn’t a one-way street; rulers like Tipu Sultan also adopted its principles to legitimise power.
Can we balance the emotionally weighted Indian concept with the more objective, heavy European perspective to build a richer sense of aesthetics? And how does our interaction with online content change the way we see it?
My understanding of Rasa is that varying levels of creative skill (pratibha), create the conditions in which one’s state of mind (bhava) can create the emotional responses or flavours (rasas), of which there can be dominant or subsidiary manifestations, as conveyed to the spectator by the performer or creator. Whilst the concept was originally intended to describe the nature of poetry, rasa theory has also come to be fundamental across a spectrum of art forms, perhaps positioning poetry as common ancestor, despite there still being questions over its true universality. Rasa theory is tied to more performative or literary ideas than the theological ones of European aesthetics, reflecting the significance of poetry to the Indian concept of aesthetics.
This concept of rasa originates in a work called the ‘Nāṭya Shāstra’, attributed to Bharata-muni between 200 BCE and 500 CE. But such a complex concept, conveyed itself using poetry, is still quite esoteric, and its impact was reliant on those who subsequently contemplated, described and summarized it.
One such poet, who did so “more clearly and engagingly than anyone had previously” was Bhānudatta Miśra, who composed two works that have been extremely influential, the Rasamānjari (Bouquet of Rasa) and the Rasatarangini (Rivers of Rasa).
Bhanudatta’s Bouquet of Rasa and Rivers of Rasa
I came across an early copy of the Rasataraṅgiṇī when I was exploring the role of the colour red in Sanskrit manuscripts. Its description, which mentions Indian aesthetic theory, sparked my curiosity.
Fortunately, in this case, the work has been studied, and even an English edition and translation published, and so I can dig a bit deeper than I can with some of the other Sanskrit texts. In his “Bouquet of Rasa”, Bhanu poetically classifies various character types (nāyikās) (Pollock, p.xxxiii), and this cast of typical characters forms a collective “bouquet” of the ideas of perfection.
In “Rivers of Rasa” Bhanu uses poetry to explain the nature of aesthetic emotions and reactions, each as a distinct “wave” – he describes this “River of Rasa” as a beautiful pond in which the reader floats like a goose.
Dancing from Stage to Screen: “Digital Rasa”
Visual devices in manuscripts can animate them, bringing their words to life, but they don’t just illustrate or provide clues to the structure of a text, they can also convey associated “stage directions” or physical gestures that go hand in hand with those texts.
Exploring two sets of Mudras : Gesture and Emotion
Many South Asian religious practices incorporate elaborate hand movements or gestures, called mudras. Which of these two manuscripts do you think demonstrates the creative skill (pratibha) and is more likely to have the biggest impact on your state of mind (bhava)?
In the first example – Yogāmbarasamādhipūjāpaddhati (MS Add.1383) :
My first example of this is perhaps a little beguiling in that it is unfinished. Only one page has the gestures drawn in, and there are at least fifteen pages with spaces left for further gestures. We may never know exactly why a manuscript might remain unfinished, and can only speculate. But as someone more comfortable behind a camera lens than with a pen or pencil in my hand, I would hazard a guess that someone had a go and realised how hard it is to draw the human hand! We can therefore contemplate the level of pratibha, or skill, through which we view the illustrations, and how that impacts the emotions we afford this particular example.
In the second example – Sarvadurgatipariśodhanasamādhi (MS Add.1278)
whilst fairly similar in nature, is vividly different in appearance, and contains the “Adiyogasamadhi” or ‘State of contemplation of the Primary Yoga’, which “describes practices aimed at procuring a better rebirth for the dead and a better life for the living”. The vibrancy of the coloured illustrations in this manuscript, which is further offset by the bright yellow colour of the paper, seems to dominate over the text. The organic glaucous-green foliage forms that accompany many of the illustrated mudras seem to invite a fluidity and motion that I can only guess is intended to instruct and animate the gestures further. It has been suggested that these concertina manuscripts would be the ideal format for consulting during performance, and I would propose that the dazzling figures of this one might only add value to this idea, making them more perceptible to the most fleeting of glances between the dancing motions.
In comparing, we can see how they both invoke entirely different states of mind in us as we view them.
Text as Movement : Reading the Devikavaca
A Sanskrit manuscript in the collections of Cambridge University Library has always captivated me – it is one of only very few manuscripts in the collections that is written on birch bark. The text represents a Devikavaca, a hymn praising the goddess Durga, and it’s considered a kind of charm or amulet:
At first glance, the circular spiral of text in the manuscript appears static. Yet, it seems to invite a reader to start rotating it as part of the process of reading it – perhaps a whirlpool of rasa? This more subtle suggestion of movement creates a universal circular sensation that invokes other spinning and whirling parallels in other meditative or religious practices. There is also a connection between the circular form and many of humanity’s most fundamental cultural associations, such as perfection, unity, movement, and infinity.
Could the Rasa Theory have influenced Colonial Photographers ?
The historic Sanskrit manuscripts are clearly firmly rooted in the Indian tradition in every sense. Yet, while researching the photographic albums of Alfred Hugh Fisher in search of Tambusami, I wondered if there are any traces in these photographs that hint towards an influence of Indian aesthetics, captured and presented as they are, through a colonial lens ?
Which of the two photographs has more effect on our state of mind, or bhava? Which gives us more flavour, or rasa, and flows with life?
Samuel Bourne
Fisher wasn’t the first colonial artist/photographer tasked with documenting aspects of India, its people and its culture. In fact, one of the world’s oldest photographic businesses, Bourne & Shepherd, was established in India by British photographers in the 1860’s. Its studio in Kolkata only closed for business in 2016.
In particular, Samuel Bourne’s skill as a photographer is clear testament to the success of the business; his work exists in the collections of some of the biggest institutions around the globe, Cambridge University Library among them.
Bourne’s photo of ‘the rock of Trichinopoly from the east’, taken in 1869, shows an impressive level of technical skill. When you zoom in, the clarity is amazing, especially considering that photography had barely existed for 25 years. One thinks of the speed with which the quality of digital photography has improved over the last 25 years! The composition is textbook material – we can see some figures, which add scale, some texture, and context, but there is a European stiffness to the whole scene. It seems too tidy, soulless even.
Alfred Hugh Fisher
Fisher was more of a traditional artist than a photographer. He received photographic training shortly before departing on his expedition for the British Government’s Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC). He appears less technically skilled than Bourne, but does this give a clear view of his pratibha? Fisher had been provided with specific instructions and encouraged to capture the suggestion of movement, and the influence of his photographic tutor, John Thomson’s “Street Life” style is also evident. In looking at Fisher’s album of photographs that were not used by COVIC, and in reading his own, almost poetic, descriptions we can see the influence of the Impressionist movement, itself heavily influenced by eastern aesthetics, themes and techniques.
If we compare Bourne’s photo to Fisher’s, probably taken about 30 years later in 1907/08, we can make some striking observations.
- Very little is in focus
- The framing is far from text-book
- The lighting isn’t ideal – areas are either too dark and dingy or too bright and washed out.
But there is life, and lots of it, we can see people everywhere going about their business, there are imperfections, puddles, piles of “stuff”, movement, there’s even a handful of faces in the foreground that seem to be curious about what Fisher is doing and staring into the lens.
Maybe Fisher’s fluid style was not exactly what COVIC were expecting?
A particularly good example of Fisher’s, seemingly over-zealous, capturing of movement are his attempts to photograph a trip on the Nilgiri Mountain Railway, which feature more “actual” movement than the “suggestive” request from COVIC might have hoped for. You can almost immediately conjure up the sounds, smells, and motions of a steam train journey… I was amazed to find from my research that not only can you still undertake this journey, the steepest railway track in Asia, in person, but you can also undertake it virtually by using Google Street View! – Although after spending a few minutes on this virtual ride, I think I’d prefer adding the real experience to the bucket-list.
Wonder – the 7th Wave of the River of Rasa…
Bhanudatta describes “wonder” (adbhuta), in the seventh wave of the ‘River of Rasa’, as a stable emotion, the neutralisation or balancing of the senses, and he calls it the “amazing rasa”. He goes on to tells us that:
“Hyperbole, misinterpretation, fantasy, and apparent contradiction are all forms of the amazing rasa.”
Regardless of whether we click, scroll and type, or tap, swipe, pinch and twist, the digital landscape in which we most often explore not only these historic collections, but navigate the whole of the web.
The nature of modern technology commands our hands to dance. They dance over plastic, metal and glass, as our eyes or ears witness the world that these dances reveal. These mudras have become a daily ritual for almost all of us.
The concept of Pratibhā refers to knowledge, intuition, wisdom. One definition of it that I came across defined it as “always free from the limitations of time and space”. The same is often true for our digital landscape – time becomes flat, we can see an old manuscript and a relatively new photographic image at the same time, on the same screen, and we can zoom in and out until we lose any sense of scale.
The theory of rasa is a complex interweaving waves of levels of skill or experience, permanence, intensity, pleasure, and dominance. But perhaps the nature of digital rasa reverses the dynamic? The audience also becomes a performer by developing the way they see, which is affected by their own state of mind and skill (pratibhā).
