Rasa

Poetry without Rasa is an imitation of poetry. The attractiveness of poetry is because of the Rasas. To be able to taste Rasa, the object that is being tasted should have taste worthiness. However, in the case of poetry and drama this taste is to be tasted with the help of the ears and the eyes. When these organs taste the Rasas they create sensations of happiness and sorrow that reach the mind and if the mind is functioning well then emotions such as happiness, sorrow, etc are awakened. The stronger the sensations the stronger the emotions and these are reflected on the human body parts. When the emotions reach a peak then exclamations emerge unknowingly and other organs of the body also react to these emotions simultaneously. The incident or event described by the poet becomes the living experience of the person listening to the poetry. The person becomes samras  with it. This means that the Rasa invoked by the poetry and experienced by the person listening to the poetry becomes the same.

It is believed that Bharata’s Natyashastra is the first work that discusses the form of Rasa process. However, according to Dr G T Deshpande, before Bharata, two Acharyas Druhin and Vasuki also propounded two different Rasa traditions. Bharata restricts himself to the Rasas in Drama. Although the concept of rasa is fundamental to many forms of Indian art including dance, music, musical theatre, cinema and literature, the treatment, interpretation, usage and actual performance of a particular rasa differs greatly between different styles and schools of abhinaya, and the huge regional differences even within one style.

Thus, the poetry or the drama that invokes emotions within a person listening or watching the performance and the degree to which such invocation takes place determines the degree and quality of Rasa in the poetry or the drama. Such a poetry or drama is said to be having Rasa – it is rasyukt . The poetry that contains the best essence of these specific emotions feels good and one wants to taste it over and over again. Hence literary experts have called these specific emotions Rasa. Feelings of anger, happiness are treated as the dharma of the mind. These could be interpreted as basic characteristics of the mind. These are experienced by everybody and the experts of poetics have assigned them the noun Bhaava. It is impossible to find a person who has not experienced these Bhaavas in life.  These Bhaava exist in the minds of all humans and the moment they get Chetana or they are touched by life they spread like a drop of oil on water and take over the entire mind. The experts on poetics decided on the Rasas based on these basic and self existent Bhaavas in all humans.

Influence on cinema:

Rasa has been an important influence on the cinema of India. The Rasa method of performance is one of the fundamental features that differentiate Indian cinema from that of the Western world. In the Rasa method, empathetic "emotions are conveyed by the performer and thus felt by the audience," in contrast to the Western Stanislavski method where the actor must become "a living, breathing embodiment of a quality" rather than "simply conveying emotion." The rasa manner of presentation is clearly apparent in Malayalam Cinema and internationally-acclaimed parallel Bengali films directed by Satyajit Ray. The latter is indebted to the Rasa method of classical Sanskrit drama, in the sense that the complicated doctrine of Rasa "centres predominantly on feeling experienced not only by the characters but also conveyed in a certain artistic way to the spectator. The duality of this kind of rasa imbrications" shows in The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), which itself has had a large authority on world cinema.

A Rasa is the urbanized realisable state of a everlasting mood, which is called Sthayi Bhava. This expansion towards a realisable state grades by the interplay on it of helper emotional conditions which are called Vibhavas, Anubhavas and Sanchari Bhavas. Vibhavas means Karana or cause: it is of two kinds - Alambana, the personal or human object and substratum, and Uddipana, the excitants. Anubhava, as the name signifies, means the ensuants or effects following the rise of the emotion. Sanchari Bhavas are those crossing feelings which are secondary to an everlasting mood. Eight more emotional characteristics are to be extra, namely, the Saatvika Bhavas.