a thought-trend that fits with the vibhāvas and anubhāvas of this grief, [which] if it is relished (literally, if it is chewed over and over), becomes a rasa and so from its aptitude [toward this end] one speaks of [any] basic emotion as becoming a rasa. For the basic emotion is put to use in the process of relishing: through a succession of memory-elements it adds together a thought-trend which one has already experienced in one’s own life to one which one infers in another’s life, and so establishes a correspondence in one’s heart.¹⁰

Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Sr., points out that this reflective, mirroring response of the heart, this hrdaya-samvada, is differently understood by Abhinavagupta than a viewer’s “empathy” in the West (“I feel Hamlet’s emotions as my own”); here, one’s own latent and personal memories of grief are liberated into “a universal, impersonal flavour.”¹¹ It is precisely this impersonality, this ego-less emotion, experienced in tanmayi-abhava, total absorption, which is desirable — the sahrdaya wants the state of objectivity, not increased subjectivity. He doesn’t want to experience grief at a personal level, he wants to relish the stable emotion of grief within himself, made available to him because of his heart’s concordance with the suffering of the characters. “The feelings of delight, sorrow, etc., [produced by the representation] deep within our spirit,” Abhinavagupta says, “have only one function, to vary it, and the representation’s function is to awaken them.”¹²

The aesthete rests in rasa in a kind of meditation, tasting the waves of emotions within consciousness, and the bliss he or she experiences is the same as the yogi’s beatitude. The difference is that the sahrdaya’s limited self is not “completely immersed” or vanished; the accomplished yogi, on the other hand, goes beyond the self altogether, and exists in a state of complete transcendence which is nirvikalpa, “without support”—without object, without subject, without ideation and verbalization. This does not mean the yogi’s experience is necessarily “better”—the relishing of beauty cannot happen when there is no subject and no object, and there is a harshness often associated with the yogi’s effort, with the sheer enormity of the exertion. But within the aesthetic experience, “This rasa is poured forth spontaneously by the word which is like a cow, for love of her children; for this reason it is different from that which is (laboriously) milked by yogin.”¹³

One of the protagonists in Red Earth and Pouring Rain participates in an event usually referred to as the First Indian War of Independence (by Indians) or as the Great Mutiny of 1857 (by the English). The memory of an entire culture includes certain events that become shared samskaras or latent traces, and these too can be mobilized by the poet. As I wrote about the 1857 war, there was both a sense of great power from resurrecting iconic events, and a feeling of unease from the still-palpable pain of that long-ago trauma.

Jacques Lacan broke from the psychoanalytic establishment with his famous manifesto “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” and in this speech he refers directly to Abhinavagupta and dhvani theory, invoking “the teaching of Abhinavagupta” to elaborate upon “the property of speech by which it communicates what it does not actually say.”¹⁴ Lacan argued that the unconscious “does not express itself in speech; it reveals itself through suggestion,” and that the analyst should deploy the power of dhvani “in a carefully calculated fashion in the semantic resonances of his remarks.”¹⁵

According to Lalita Pandit, through dhvani, “poetic language reaches the condition of silence. It functions like a meta-language, generating many meanings by deploying collective and individual memory banks, latent impressions, mental associations.”¹⁶

Like the Lacanian analyst, the poet can direct dhvani at the depths of what a culture leaves unsaid, and thus manifest in the sahradaya’s consciousness the echoes of those great silences.

Great art is distinguished by its resonance, by the depth of its dhvani. But the rasa that the viewer will experience also depends crucially on his own capability and openness: “The word sahrḍaya (lit. ‘having their hearts with it’) denotes persons who are capable of identifying with the subject matter,” Abhinavagupta writes, “as the mirror of their hearts has been polished by the constant study and practise of poetry, and who respond to it sympathetically in their own hearts.”¹⁷ The sahrdaya’s education and erudition has not made his heart or hrdaya impervious, it is able to “melt” in response to art; this is in contrast with the “scholar” whose heart “has become hardened and encrusted by his readings of dry texts on metaphysics.”¹⁸

Abhinavagupta insists that rasa cannot be “caused.” That is, mimesis — of things, of events, of people — offers us an opportunity for savoring, and this gustation is not a fixed or “frozen” mental state, a simple matter of stimulus and response, such as the joy one might feel in response to the words, “A daughter is born to you.” The sensitive viewer or reader inhabits the imitated action through an act of concentrated sympathy, and so

the relishing of beauty arises in us from our memory bank (saṃaskāra) of mental states which are suitable to the vibhāvas and anubhvās of those basic emotions [that are being portrayed in the characters of a literary work] …

So what is born here is a rasyamāṇatā (a being tasted, a gustation, of beauty), that is, a savouring that eclipses such worldly mental states as the joy that might be produced by reunion with a constant stream of old friends. And for this reason [viz., because of its super-normal character], the savouring serves to manifest something, not to inform one of something, as might be done by an established means of knowledge (pramāṇa). It is not a production such as results from the working of a cause.¹⁹

The poet’s pratibha or intuitive genius — which harnesses craft and training — therefore depends on the sahrdaya’s intuitive receptivity — which is polished by learning — to become complete. It is for this reason that Abhinavagupta begins his commentary on the Dhvanyaloka with an evocation of “the Muse’s double heart, the poet and the relisher of art.” The coming together of the poet and the reader is what creates “brave new worlds from naught and even stones to flowing sap has brought.” Beauty is imparted by the “successive flow of genius and of speech” from the poet to the sahrdaya.²⁰

Since rasa cannot be “caused” in a deterministic manner, you cannot produce art through test-driven development; your true sahrdaya may be born a hundred years after you die.

There are other qualities of poetic language that make verification difficult or impossible. The speech of the poet can be effective even when it doesn’t obey the rules of everyday language. According to Abhinavagupta, even denotative and connotative meanings are only aids to the production of rasa, unessential props which can sometimes be discarded: “Even alliterations of harsh or soft sounds can be suggestive of [rasa], though they are of no use as to meaning. Here, then, there is not even the shadow of the metaphor.”²¹ So music alone, without lyrics, can be the occasion of rasa. Even when language is used to construct an aesthetic object, when meaning and metaphor are necessarily present, to want the object — the poem, the story, the play — to convey coherent, verifiable information about the real world, as a treatise might, is to fall into a category error. Poetry’s meaning does not need any external referentiality or validation to produce pleasure. “[In poetry] the savouring … arises like a magical flower, having its essence at that very moment, and not connected with earlier or later times.”²²