The fifth Veda and the ancient essence of art

Somewhere between the second century BC and the second century AD, a seminal treatise on drama emerged in India called the Natyashastra, written by Bharata. The writer was so confident that his work was going to resonate for ages to come that he termed it the fifth Veda, after the central Hindu texts, the Vedas. It was a first-of-its-kind work in the Hindu intellectual tradition, which was further solidified by later commentaries, especially by Abhinavagupta, who made significant contributions to the theory of artistic expression in his magnum opus, Abhinavabharati. For now, we need to borrow only a few concepts from the Natyashastra to understand the meaning of art from a fresh perspective.

While the Greeks immortalised psychosomatic states as gods and goddesses such as Eros (love), Nike (victory) and Mnemosyne (memory), the Hindus dived deeper into human emotions and explored how this inner landscape could serve the arts. One of those concepts is Navarasa: it describes the nine essential emotions present in any work of art. These emotions are Shringara (love and beauty), Veera (courage and valour), Hasya (laughter and joy), Adbhuta (wonder), Raudra (anger), Bhayanaka (fear), Karuna (sorrow and compassion), Vibhatsa (disgust) and Shanta (peace). Bharata also recognised 33 momentary feelings which further accentuate the expression of these nine emotions such as Nirveda (dejection), Moha (passion), Garva (arrogance), Autsukya (inquisitiveness), Vitarka (deliberation), Vibodha (awakening) and more.

If a playwright wanted to depict a battlefield, the Veera Rasa would be performed by the actor not just through his emotive gestures but also through his speech, clothing, make-up and props. For Bharata, a drama (or any work of art) was successful only if it managed to evoke the intended Rasa in its audience. If a production centred around Veera Rasa succeeds in conveying something about courage or war to its onlookers, to immerse them wholly or even in a subtle style, then it has fulfilled its purpose. This suggests that the audience, termed Rasika, was just as important to the artistic process as the artist in the universe of the Natyashastra.

We might immediately recognise how at odds this is with modern entertainment mores. From experiencing art through travelling bards or becoming one with it as artists performed in picturesque open-air auditoriums and temples, we have somehow arrived at a point where art is little more than ambient noise. It exists in the background as a comfortable distraction, but it is rare that we let it take us on a journey that then communicates something vital about life to us. How did we get here? And most importantly, can we recover that ancient essence of art today?

The earliest known cave painting is believed to be almost 70,000 years old, found in Liang Metanduno Cave on the island of Muna, in the Sulawesi Province of Indonesia. While the painting itself is a fairly average handprint, what is remarkable is its existence. After all, it begs the question – why do we create art at all? Why do we take the fact of our being and seek to project it outside of us? What could we possibly gain in this process? Meaning, beauty and happiness, perhaps. These are our primal instincts, almost as important as those geared for survival. Why else would our cave-dwelling ancestors have bothered painting the human body, geometrical shapes, even animals onto the only canvas that would outlive them? Prehistoric art shows us not only the ubiquity of art as self-expression but also the intuition that it is perhaps the only way to immortalise our fleeting existence.

When we experience Homer’s tales of war and love in the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, we learn something about what it means to be human during times of turmoil. When we look at Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus or Raja Ravi Varma’s Shakuntala, we gauge what beauty feels like. Or when we set foot in St Peter’s Basilica or the Brihadeeshwara Temple, we may come to know how art endures when it comes from a place of divine conviction. Art, then, is not so much a choice of canvas as it is a journey from the finitude of self-expression to an infinitude of self-realisation.

Bharata recognised this and sought to both bring down the heavens to an earthly plane as well as elevate the mundane into the sacred. He begins his treatise by performing the first drama to the gods and manages to please them with its first act. As it rolls on, he shows demons being defeated and killed. At this point, the real demons arrive to obstruct the performance to avoid being shown in a bad light. As a result, the actors forget their dialogues and movements, leading to utter chaos. The dramatist asks none other than Brahma himself for protection, who in turn asks the celestial architect, Vishwakarma, to design a drama house that could be protected by the gods. From that point onwards, it is decided that any drama can only be performed after a due consecration of the stage, art and instruments. In many traditional Indian art forms such as Bharatnatyam, Mohiniyattam and Carnatic music, artists offer a prayer to the gods before they begin their performance. They repeat the same prayer at the end of each act.

To the modern mind, this may sound antiquated and unnecessary. However, Kapila Vatsyayan, in her book Bharata: The Natyashastra, explains that Bharata was not just writing about art but had fully internalised the philosophical underpinnings of the Upanishads in his work. ‘It is not only ritual purification; it is the constant endeavour to arrive at a greater and greater degree of subtlety and refinement,’ she writes. ‘Bharata makes it clear that what he has set out to do is to present a universe of name and form of the physical, the mortal, of the body, senses and speech, which will match speculation and meditation, ritual and sacrifice.’ Vatsyayan argues that Bharata sought to mould this holy sphere of art into a space for imagination and self-realisation that would belong to everyone irrespective of their caste in a caste-conscious Hindu society.

No wonder, then, that much of popular Hindu iconography should revolve around artistic metaphors. From Krishna’s Leela as the divine dance of life to Saraswati’s veena, a musical instrument symbolising the harmony of knowledge, there are countless examples of this deep relationship between art, self-realisation and the divine in the Hindu pantheon. But the most spectacular and profound of those is the depiction of Shiva as the lord of dance, Nataraja.

Worshipped as the lord of destruction, Shiva is the epitome of pure consciousness. He destroys illusions, deceit, selfishness and the like, only to lead his believers onto the path of truth, beauty and compassion. His dance, then, is not just an artistic performance but the fabric of existence itself. Ananda Coomaraswamy, in his book The Dance of Shiva, writes that his dance represents his five activities, or Panchkrityas. These are Srishti, which includes creation and evolution; Sthiti, which includes preservation and support; Samhara, which includes destruction; Tirobhava, which includes veiling, embodiment, illusion, and also, rest; and finally, Anugraha, which includes release, salvation, and grace.

This dance may be beautiful, Lasya, or violent, Tandava. That is, the dance of existence has a duality, but it remains a dance nevertheless, full of meaning and purpose. When it is beautiful, it fosters creation and evolution. As it sustains, it both gives rise to illusions and simultaneously, shatters them, too. Eventually, the structure becomes untenable and must be destroyed. Except, this destruction is never a catastrophe but only a transformation for a newer cycle to start all over again.

Coomaraswamy defines this image of Shiva as the synthesis of science, religion and art. He writes, ‘in these days of specialization, we are not accustomed to such a synthesis of thought; but for those who “saw” such images as this, there could have been no division of life and thought into water-tight compartments’. The author also mentions the Natyashastra, writing that ‘art is an imitation of that perfect spontaneity – the identity of intuition and expression in those who are of the kingdom of heaven, which is within us’.

Born in modern Sri Lanka, Coomaraswamy was the first Keeper of Indian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the early 20th century and remains the most authoritative voice on Indian art for a western audience. His essay on Shiva ended up being so popular that it led to a mad rush for Nataraja sculptures in many western museums, which were often stolen from temples in India to be sold for museum collections. Recently, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art announced that it would repatriate three Nataraja sculptures, dating from the 10th century onwards, back to India.

In 2004, as an associate member state, the Indian government gifted the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in Switzerland a bronze sculpture of Nataraja. It was chosen by the Indian Department of Atomic Energy to symbolise the ‘cosmic dance’ of subatomic particles with a salutation to the lord of dance who is also the ‘creator of this cosmic universe’.

While Shiva continues to dance for eternity, we can only witness but a few moments of the performance. We can do so through faith as well as science, but perhaps, the most enjoyable path towards it is through art. Whether as an artist or the audience, it is up to us to immerse ourselves in the rasa of the artistic journey. Because here, we find not just art but the essence of life itself.