The Natyashastra -- Bharata's Fifth Veda of Drama, Dance and Rasa

In the Treta Yuga, says the first chapter of the Natyashastra, the gods came to Brahma with a request. People had fallen into greed, anger and grief, and the four Vedas could not be heard by everyone. They asked for something that could be both seen and heard, and that everyone could share. So Brahma composed a fifth Veda, the Natyaveda, drawing on the other four: recitation from the Rigveda, song from the Samaveda, acting from the Yajurveda and emotion, rasa, from the Atharvaveda. He gave it to the sage Bharata, who taught it to his hundred sons, and the first play was performed.

The book that tells this story is the Natyashastra, "the treatise on drama", attributed to Bharata Muni. It is one of the most remarkable works of the ancient world: a complete manual of the performing arts in thirty-six or thirty-seven chapters and some six thousand verses, with passages in prose. Scholars date its compilation to somewhere between about 200 BCE and 200 CE, drawing on older material.

Almost nothing about performance is left out. The Natyashastra describes how to build a playhouse and consecrate the stage; the kinds of plays and how plots are structured; the gestures of the hands (mudras), the movements of the eyes, brows, neck and feet; costume and make-up; speech, metre and the regional dialects actors should use; music, its scales and instruments; and how an audience should judge a performance. The book even records a quarrel: when the first play showed the gods defeating the asuras, the asuras in the audience were offended and disrupted it -- and so Vishvakarma was asked to build a proper, protected theatre.

The Natyashastra's most influential idea is rasa, literally "juice" or "flavour". Its famous formula, the rasa-sutra, says that rasa arises from the combination of vibhavas (the causes, such as the characters and setting), anubhavas (the outward signs, such as tears or a trembling voice) and vyabhichari bhavas (the passing emotions). A spectator watching a play about grief does not simply feel sad; through art, sorrow is turned into the savoured experience of karuna, the compassionate rasa, which can be enjoyed even though it is about pain.

That distinction -- between a raw emotion and its aesthetic, shareable form -- shaped Indian thinking about all the arts for two thousand years. Abhinavagupta, the great philosopher of Kashmir, wrote the classic commentary on the Natyashastra, the Abhinavabharati, and compared the tasting of rasa to the bliss of realising Brahman. For him, art at its height was close to spiritual experience.

Bharatanatyam, whose very name many dancers today connect with Bharata, shows the Natyashastra's afterlife most clearly. It grew from the temple dance of Tamil Nadu, performed for centuries in the sacred precincts, and was reshaped in the early nineteenth century by four brothers at the Thanjavur court, the "Thanjavur Quartet", who gave the recital its modern order. In the twentieth century, as the temple tradition declined, revivalists such as Rukmini Devi Arundale brought it to the concert stage, consciously drawing on the Natyashastra and later texts such as the Abhinaya Darpana.

In all these forms, the Natyashastra's founding promise holds: a dancer telling the story of Krishna or Shiva through hand gestures and the movement of the eyes is still offering what Brahma made the fifth Veda to be -- the truths of the other four, made visible to everyone.