The Natyashastra Is a Sanskrit Manual in 36 Chapters, Dated to About 2,000 Years Ago, That Lays Out How to Build a Playhouse, Stage Ten Kinds of Play and Evoke Eight Rasas

The Natyashastra is a Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts that sets out, in 36 chapters and about 6,000 verses according to Live History India, how to build a playhouse, train an actor, tune an orchestra and move an audience. Its second chapter gives three floor plans and three sizes for the theatre, and its sixth lists the eight rasas, the “flavours” of feeling that a performance is meant to produce. Liesbeth Pankaja Bennink and the Raja Deekshithar family, who have studied its echo in stone, call it “the most ancient text on the performing arts”, and its list of 108 dance units is carved on the four gateway towers of the Chidambaram temple in Tamil Nadu.

A manual with a date range, not a date

Live History India gives the text a span of roughly 200 BCE to 600 CE and says it was “probably written around 200 BCE”. Manomohan Ghosh, whose English translation calls itself the first complete one, concluded from language, metre, geography and inscriptions that the text we have existed by the second century CE and that the tradition it records may go back to about 100 BCE. Bennink and the Raja Deekshithars say about 2,000 years ago, within a margin of 500 years. All three are ways of stating the same uncertainty.

Authorship goes to the sage Bharata, though Ghosh doubted that a single author lay behind it. He read the word bharata as originally meaning an actor, with the name of a founding sage growing out of it, since, he writes, the epics and the Puranas hold no story about such a person. Live History India likewise says many scholars doubt a single author. The work is a dialogue in which sages question Bharata, and its first chapter gives its own account of origins: Brahma compiled a Natyaveda from the four Vedas, taking recitation from the Rigveda, song from the Samaveda, acting from the Yajurveda and rasa from the Atharvaveda.

Ghosh’s footnote adds that this Natyaveda is reckoned at 36,000 verses, and that the surviving text holds about 12,000 granthas, a traditional measure of length, while Live History India counts about 6,000 verses. Neither count fixes the size of the original, since they use different measures.

The first chapters: the playhouse

Chapter 2 opens with the sages asking for a description of the playhouse, and Bharata answers with a building specification. In Ghosh’s translation the architect of the gods, Vishvakarman, devised three shapes: oblong, square and triangular. Sizes run to 108, 64 or 32 cubits (hastas), and the large house is for gods, the middle one for kings and the small one for everyone else. At the 18 inches Live History India gives for a hasta, a 64-cubit hall is roughly 29 metres.

For a house built by humans the advice is to stay moderate: Ghosh renders it as an oblong playhouse 64 cubits long and 32 wide, and the text gives its reason: in a larger hall the words lose their clarity and the actors’ faces cannot be read from the back. Live History India, which counts about 105 verses on the building, summarises the plan as an audience in the eastern half and the stage and green room in the western half. In Ghosh’s translation the tiring room has one door to the stage and a second facing the auditorium. Seats rise in rows, each a cubit higher than the one in front, so that every spectator overlooks the stage. Roof pillars are decorated with figurines of a woman with a tree. Bharata also gives instructions for the site and the day, and in Ghosh’s translation says that if the measuring cord breaks in two, the patron of the show will die.

Wording is not identical across editions. An online Sanskrit edition with an English translation lists the superior size as 108, the middle as 84 and the inferior as 64, then gives 32 in the next verse, a mismatch its page does not settle. Ghosh says the text survives in two recensions and that he took readings from both where the sense required it.

In his notes, dated 1950, Ghosh wrote that the only physical trace of an ancient playhouse was a cave on Ramgarh hill, dated about 200 BCE, which a 1903 to 1904 Archaeological Survey of India report had suspected of being a theatre. From the chapter he inferred a hall of brick walls and wooden posts under a thatched roof.

Gesture, dance and the ten kinds of play

The middle chapters turn the body into a vocabulary. Ghosh’s translation lists four kinds of acting: through the limbs, through words, through dress and make-up, and through the actor’s inner temperament. It sorts the movements of the eyebrows, nose, cheeks, lips and chin one by one and assigns each a use, such as the nose that draws in air for a sweet smell. Chapter 4 teaches dance and lays out the 108 karanas, each a combined movement of hands and feet. It also gives 32 angaharas, larger figures built from six to nine karanas.

Ten forms of play are named in the same text. Ghosh’s chapter 20 lists the nataka, prakarana, anka, vyayoga, bhana, samavakara, vithi, prahasana, dima and ihamriga. Live History India describes the nataka as a play on a well-known story of a king or sage and the bhana as a play built on a monologue, and it says the dima shows gods and demons in conflict. Chapter 4 names a samavakara, The Churning of the Ocean, and a dima, The Burning of Tripura, as the plays shown to Shiva in the Himalayan region.

An orchestra gets its own chapter. In volume 2 of Ghosh’s translation, instruments fall into four classes: stringed, covered (drums), solid (cymbals) and hollow (flutes). One ensemble centres on a singer with players of string and wind instruments, and another on drums such as the mridanga, an earthen drum, the panava and the dardura.

What the temples kept

Dance historians can check the karana list against stone. Bennink and the Deekshithars name five temples with karana sculptures. At Chidambaram all 108 are carved in the passages through the four gopurams, and on the east and west towers each panel is paired with the relevant verse of the Natya Shastra. Bennink and the Deekshithars date the east, south and west gopurams to the 12th and 13th centuries, the north one slightly later. Tiruvannamalai also has all 108 in its east tower passage, Kumbakonam’s Sarangapani temple has a more or less complete series, Vriddhachalam has 101 in an unusual order, and the Rajarajeshvara temple at Thanjavur has an unfinished frieze of 81.

Narthaki, which draws on a report in The Hindu, adds that the Thanjavur reliefs show Shiva with four arms and that panels were provided for the unrepresented karanas too, which it reads as a sign that Rajaraja Chola meant to finish the set. That temple is one of the Great Living Chola Temples. The dance forms drawn from the treatise are covered in the eight classical dances, and the bronze dancing Shiva in the Chola bronzes.

Rasa: how the audience tastes a play

Chapter 6 sets out rasa. Ghosh translates the eight rasas as the Erotic, Comic, Pathetic, Furious, Heroic, Terrible, Odious and Marvellous. Each rests on a dominant state: love, mirth, sorrow, anger, energy, terror, disgust and astonishment. Beyond these come 33 passing states and eight involuntary bodily signs such as trembling and tears.

Its central sentence says that rasa arises from the combination of determinants, consequents and passing states. A comparison with cooking follows: as spices, vegetables and other ingredients together give a dish its taste, the dominant states, combined with other states, become rasa. Cultured people, it says, taste the dominant states on stage as a diner enjoys a well-seasoned meal.

Ghosh lists Lollata, Shankuka, Bhatta Nayaka and Abhinavagupta among the early commentators on the text. Abhinavagupta, a Kashmir Shaivite philosopher whom Ghosh places between the end of the 10th and the beginning of the 11th century, wrote the Abhinavabharati. Sahapedia calls it the only ancient commentary on the Natyashastra that has come down to us. His account, it says, centres on the spectator, and he is credited with building the philosophical case for a ninth rasa, shanta, or peace. Ghosh’s footnote notes that later writers on poetics added shanta to Bharata’s eight.

Reaching modern readers

By the early 19th century the Natyashastra was known only from quotations. According to Ghosh, H. H. Wilson, publishing in 1826, lamented it as lost, and that when F. Hall edited a medieval handbook in 1865 he had seen no manuscript of it until his work was well advanced. A Bombay edition appeared in 1894, Joanny Grosset’s critical edition of chapters 1 to 14 in 1898, and a Baroda edition with Abhinavagupta’s commentary in 1926 and 1934. Ghosh’s own translation, whose preface is dated 25 November 1950, carries “completely translated for the first time” on its title page. A second volume followed in December 1961.

Editing it was hard. Two tenth-century authors, Dhananjaya and Bhoja, already quoted different recensions, Ghosh says. The Baroda editor, as Ghosh quotes him, found Abhinavagupta’s manuscripts so full of errors that a scholar friend doubted Abhinavagupta himself could restore his own reading.

Performers did not wait for the editions. UNESCO inscribed Kutiyattam, the Sanskrit theatre of Kerala, on its Representative List in 2008, after an earlier proclamation in 2001, and describes it as more than 2,000 years old, performed in temple theatres called kuttampalams, with a complete performance running up to 40 days. UNESCO’s page does not mention the Natyashastra, but Live History India lists Kuddiyattam among the forms resting on its foundations, along with Bharatanatyam and Odissi. In its last chapter, verse 83 in Ghosh’s translation, the treatise says that whatever it leaves unmentioned is to be supplied by experts from observing the usage of the people.