Indian Aesthetics: Rasa Theory

The study of Indian art should begin with some question. But how was this art made? What were its guidelines? What was its purpose? These answers emerge from the study of Indian philosophy at large and Indian aesthetics in particular. This paper aims to present an overview of aesthetics in the tradition of Indian art, as it has been understood right from the Vedic to this day. With a basis of art theories from ancient treatises this paper hopes to present a brief view of what is considered the best and beautiful in art.

Folk drama has a long tradition in India. Unlike the classical tradition of Sanskrit drama with a well documented and codified methodology of scripting and performance in the texts like Bharat Muni's Natyasastra, folk drama is oral and is a creation of the collective wisdom of the people. It is composed, improvised and performed by the same group of people with little formal training in theatre. The indigenous communities in India which constitute nearly eight percent of the country's population have their own very rich tradition of theatre. As is obvious, in their case drama means performance. The script is always fluid and allows a great degree of improvisation with every performance, the stage is often any piece of ground and the performers are amateurs. Music, song and dance form a very significant aspect of the performance and the plots are oftem multiple having sufficient scope of digression into sub-plots. The paper attempts to discuss the tribal dance drama Gavari performed by the Bhil tribe of South Rajasthan. It is perhaps the longest folk drama performed by any folk community. The play is performed for forty days beginning from the day following the festival of Rakshabandhan. This is the time when the peasantry is comparatively free after the sowing of monsoon crop is over and the people engaged in agriculture are able to spend some time away from their farms. The paper attempts to discuss how the plot and the sub plots, performance and the participation of the audience subvert the classical tradition of mainstream theatre. In the absence of an authentic script the discussion relies on the recordings of performances seen in various parts of Udaipur district of Rajasthan, India.

Journal of knowledge engineering

Facial expression analysis with respect to Bharathanatyam a classical dance style of south India is studied in this paper by using image processing techniques and several properties associated with the face are taken into consideration. The emotional changes result in the changes in the facial expression. Accordingly the curvatures developed on the face and the dimensions of the objects on the face such as eyebrows, lips and the area of the mouth also change. Naturally there exist changes in the intensity of the pixels corresponding to these objects. The natural eyes can distinguish these sharp changes in both the cases and understand the facial expressions. The experimental results predicted a definite change in every trail. These results can also be used as a tool to design intelligent system which recognizes different emotions of people in different environment. The results are found to be of immense scientific and psychological interest.

1995

This study is a critical documentation and investigation into the production of a set of digital film artworks installed in the College of Fine Arts gallery as the culmination of the Master of Art (Film, Video, Sound, and Computing), Media Arts. The digital film artworks are comprised of : (i) Worship Sculpture Dance: Odissi : Movements in Stone, the imaging an ancient devotional classical Indian dance form Odissi, from the state of Orissa, India; (ii) Zang Tumb Tumb 1, inspired by the Futurist sound poetry of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and the Luigi Russolo and The Art of Noise; (iii) A Few Small Snaps, the digital animation of a series of autobiographical self-portraits stimulated by a study of the Mexican self-portrait painting of Frida Kahlo; and (iv) Strange Cities2 an interactive CD-Rom new media script. Strange Cities script (writing) has been included to the Worship Sculpture Dance study as blueprint for potential future research and development. The aim of this creative research has been to focus on new technology as a contribution to a questioning of traditional (analogue) modes of art production. The approach has been to explore & image traditional classical Indian forms of representation (dance, choreography, and music culture) and to re-interpret and translate these ancient forms as a new form of engagement. At the same time, the objective of this creative research has been interrogate transforming notions of the filmic, televisual, radio(audio)phonic, sonic and the (digital) computer medium, and to investigate questions of authorship and to challenge the uniqueness of the art object. This creative work is the outcome of conceptual and art historical research, focusing on the potential of an articulation of the philosophical, historical, cultural, formal and spiritual in a digital (computer) landscape.

This is a soft copy of my doctoral dissertation written during the final five years of the previous millennium .Apart from a fairly large theoretical component dealing with translation theory, practice of translation and translation studies, it consists of around ninety compositions of Narsinh Mehta (c. 15th century AD), one of the greatest poets of Gujarat translated by me into English. Besides a critical appreciation of his works, the translations are framed with chapters discussing his life, works and the cultural context in which they were composed. I have been working on the translations and they have metamorphosed into a very different avatar today. However, those presented here are the ones I submitted for the degree. There are some slight changes in this copy owning to my ignorance of formatting methods. The bibliography which appears at the end of the thesis comes before the `notes and references of the soft copy. The notes and references for the individual chapters now appear at the end of the thesis. The `Table of Contents’ is merely a showpiece- it doesn’t indicate the specified pages in this copy. I don’t intend to publish this thesis in the present form and it has appeared in parts in many places. The work which I started with my doctoral research is actually a work in `progress’ and I find it interesting to look back where I was some eight years ago. I would be honoured to hear your critical comments and reactions to my work. Sachin Ketkar Baroda, 27 December 2007