Natyashastra

The Natya Shastra is incredibly wide in its scope. While it primarily deals with stagecraft, it has come to influence music, classical Indian dance, and literature as well. It covers stage design, music, dance, makeup, and virtually every other aspect of stagecraft. It is very important to the history of Indian classical music because it is the only text which gives such detail about the music and instruments of the period. As an audio-visual form, Natyashastra mirrors all the arts and crafts, higher knowledge, learning, sciences, yoga, and conduct. Its purpose is to entertain as well as educate. Bharata was an ideal theatre artist.

It is certainly not an overstatement to say that Natyashastra indeed laid the cornerstone of the fine arts in India. The commentaries on the Natyashastra are known, dating from the sixth or seventh centuries. Abhinaya is a concept in Indian dance and drama derived from Bharata's Natya Shastra.

It is used as an integral part of all the Indian classical dance styles, which all feature some kind of mimetic aspect to certain compositions, for example in depictions of daily life or devotional pieces. A most important partition is that between NATYADHARMI ABHINAYA and LOKADHARMI ABHINAYA. The former is poetic and stylistic in nature, following a codified manner of presenting emotion and expression which pertains to the conventions of the stage, which appear to have greater artistic quality by virtue of taking something from natural life and rendering it in a suitably stylised way. Lokadharmi abhinaya is the opposite: realistic and un-stylised, involving very natural expression and movement, as occurs in daily life. Often this is the more difficult as the potential for interpretation of an emotion or a line of poetry is never-ending. Since Natyadharmi follows classical traditions and rules of acting all the actors tend to act in similar way, whereas Lokadharmi acknowledges the performer’s individual difference in style and talent. This doesn’t do away with the classical nature of the performance, wither. Bharata himself was not averse to the idea of making slight changes in the Mudras as and when the incident demanded.

The first manifests where the play projects natural behavior of characters, depicting various professions and activities of the people as observed in our world, and is enacted without playful flourish of the limbs-ª various conventional gaits and postures. On the contrary, if a play contains speech, activity, beings and states of extra-ordinary kind, and requires acting with playful flourish of limbs and possesses characteristics of dance, requires conventional enunciation, and is dependent on emotionally carried persons, it can be said to have been composed and enacted by ‘natyadharmi’ or the conventional practice.  ‘Lokadharmi’ constitutes the basic or raw material, while ‘natyadharmi’ brings out innovations, gives the play a perspective, endowing it with beauty and puts it in the idiom or language of a particular performing art.

In real life we have some permitted and some prohibited kinship and relations, and union is allowed in the first category only. Bharata calls them gamya and agamya relations respectively and makes some concessions for play productions: "If a person, who has been employed in the role of a woman for whom marital connection with a particular character is forbidden by the sastra-s, is made to appear in trie role of another woman with whom connection is permitted, it becomes an instance of natyadharmi.