The theory of rasa enunciated by Bharata has stimulated both creativity and critical discouirse in the Indian arts for nearly 2000 years. The text of the Natyasastra is as relevant to literature, poetry and drama as it is to architecture, sculpture, painting, music and dance. Its comprehensive treatment of artistic experience, expression and communication, content and form emerges from an integral vision which flowers as a many-branched tree of all Indian arts.

The Natyasastra is the deep repository of Indian performance studies. It embodies centuries of performance knowledge developed in South Asia on a range of conceptual issues and practical methodologies of the body. The composition of the Natyasastra is attributed to Sage Bharatha, and dates back to between 200 BC and AD 200. Written in Sanskrit, the text contains 6000 verse stanzas integrated in 36 chapters discussing a wide range of issues in theatre arts, including dramatic composition; construction of the playhouse; detailed analysis of the musical scales; body movements; various types of acting; directing; division of stage space; costumes; make-up; properties and musical instruments. As a discourse on performance, the Natyasastra is an extensive documentation of terminologies, concepts and methodologies. This book presents 14 scholarly essays exploring the Natyasastra from the multiple perspectives of Indian performance studies--epistemological, aesthetic, scientific, religious, ethnological and practical.

Bharata's Natyasastra, the earliest treatise on dramatics, is, even today, the origin of our dramatic tradition. Besides being the most important study of dramatics, it is also the most comprehensive. The all-inclusive quality, however, creates problems for the reader who has to go through a great deal of unnecessary information. In this book, the author has culled all information essential and relevant to drama, eliminating the superfluous. Eschewing attempts to provide any kind of a scholarly or original interpretation of Bharata's views, the author has focused on giving the reader a connected account of the study of dramatics suing modern terminology. The purpose is to introduce those interested in drama to Bharata's wisdom and to throw light on the state of dramatics in ancient India. Written in a simple and lucid style, the author takes the reader through topics like theater houses, the stage and stage craft, play-construction and the rasa theory. All lovers of drama are sure to find this book both useful and absorbing.

The Square and the Circle of the Indian Arts is a major contribution in Indian art history. More than a book on the theories of arts, it has far-reaching implications for the way one thinks about the future of indology and art history. It provides a model to be emulated for inter-disciplinary research, not only between the arts but also the sciences and the arts. The book begins by re-examining the imagery of the Vedas and the Upanisads, highlighting some aspects of early speculative thought which influenced the enunciation of aesthetic theories, particularly of Bharata in the Natyasastra. The next chapter introduces a new methodology of analyzing the rituals (yajna) as laid down in the Yajurveda and the Satapatha Brahmana, the best way to focus the relationship between the text and the practice. Four chapters follow – one each on drama (natya), architecture (vastu), sculpture (silpa), and music (sangita). Each presents some fundamental concepts of speculative thought, concerned with each of the arts and purposefully correlates these with actual examples both of the past and the present. The afterward to this second edition remains an event not only because the book benefits from the works published since the first edition, but also because it presents the author’s integral vision and her unique adventure into the boundaries of several disciplines. It demonstrates the efficacy of her earlier approach of investigating the imagery and the metaphors as basic to the discourse of the Indian tradition. She proposes a multi-layered cluster of concepts and metaphors which enable one to uncode the complex multi-dimensional character of the Indian Arts. Also significantly she suggests a deeper comprehension of the relevance of the developments in the field of traditional mathematics and biology for the study of the language of form of the Indian Arts.