To anyone who resolves to explore the adjacent fields of Indian drama and dance, a wide range of choices opens up, including the starting point, the way to proceed, its milestones, and its prospective destinations. Viewed from a distance, this study involved much criss-crossing around a central core—Abhinavagupta’s discourse on the nature and aesthetics of dance—which was fixed at the very beginning and remained a constant throughout. Yet it has taken some time to design the strategies to approach such an utterly immaterial object in the most meaningful and methodologically sound way. I first came across Abhinavagupta’s Abhinavabhāratī during my MA studies, as I read Raniero Gnoli’s 1956 pioneering work The Aesthetic Experience according to Abhinavagupta and Lyne Bansat-Boudon’s 1992 Poétique du théâtre indien. Ever since these first encounters, Abhinavagupta’s commentary on Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra, composed in Kashmir at the turn of the first millennium, has struck me as the perfect union of my two passions: philology and dance. At the time, my interest alighted on the ninth chapter, on hastābhinaya (acting with hand gestures), an element that still constitutes one of the major features of forms of Indian performance today, which moreover brings together practices as different as theatre, yoga, ritual, iconography, and story-telling. In particular, I became interested in the process of bringing a Sanskrit play alive on stage, and in the theory of performance that found expression in the scientific discourse of śāstra.
This focus on the performative aspect of theatre led me to investigate those elements, such as acting, dancing, singing, and playing, that fall outside a play’s text, and therefore, in principle, outside the analysis of the poetic process centred on language, such as that developed in the parallel tradition of Alaṃkāraśāstra. For my PhD, I embarked on the study of the fourth chapter of the Abhinavabhāratī, on dance. As a non-verbal code of abstract movement, it seemed to me that dance posed a great challenge to the theoretical analysis of an object, theatre, based on a poetic text and its essence, rasa, itself conceived in linguistic terms by the philosopher Abhinavagupta. Although theatre and dance share the same media, the actor/dancer’s body, they also mark its antipodes: to borrow the modern categories coined in Fischer-Lichte 2008, the use of the body in theatre is mainly semiotic, while in dance, it is mainly phenomenological—whence the title of this book, Theatre and its Other, echoing Antonin Artaud’s quest for theatre’s double, an object freed from the fetters of the text and the dictates of the playwright. But is dance really theatre’s ‘other’? As Abhinavagupta shows in his examination of the nature of dance and dramatic acting, this is not an easy question to answer, especially if one takes into account those twilight zones where the boundaries between these two categories become fuzzy—when, for instance, dance begins to narrate stories in combination with a poetic text that is sung, or when dancing is used within a dramatic performance and is subsumed under its communicative ends.
This book is the result of a complete revision, both in form and in content, of a doctoral dissertation defended in Rome in November 2010: in form, as the work originally contained a much longer portion of the Abhinavabhāratī’s chapter on dance, which was edited and translated on the basis of a limited number of manuscript sources; and in content, as much of the material presented in the annotated translation had to be rearranged in both the introduction and the rest of the study in order to suit the new format. Alterations to the original structure were made necessary by both practical and theoretical needs. Reducing the scope of the text to be critically edited allowed me to take all of the available manuscript evidence into account and thus deepen my understanding of its textual history through the incorporation and perusal of manuscript materials that had not previously been subject to critical study. This resulted in a new introduction to the critical edition, containing a reconstruction of the textual transmission of the fourth chapter of the Abhinavabhāratī. The textual portion selected for translation, though shorter, forms a coherent unity in itself, as it contains the complete argument concerning the question of whether dance should be considered different or non-different from theatre with regard to its nature and purpose. An introduction to the text and its commentary, and a study in two chapters focusing on dance practice and aesthetics in medieval India, provide a framework for contextualizing the emergence of the debate about the nature of dance and dramatic acting.
It is my duty and pleasure to acknowledge a number of people and institutions that have contributed in various ways to the completion of this book. To begin with, my PhD supervisor and Sanskrit teacher, Raffaele Torella, for the trust, support, and freedom he has extended to me ever since I started working on the difficult text of the Abhinavabhāratī for my MA thesis. Without his guidance in the mare magnum of Sanskrit and life, I would never have developed the courage, endurance, and passion necessary to engage with the intricacies of Indian dance and its textual sources. I am further grateful to all of those who have spent time reading parts of the text with me thereafter, sharing valuable suggestions for the interpretation of some difficult passages and sharpening my overall understanding of it: Saroj Deshpande and Manju Deshpande, with whom I started reading the fourth chapter of the Abhinavabhāratī in Pune; Vincenzo Vergiani, with whom I continued reading it in Cambridge; Herman Tieken, who read and discussed parts of the Nāṭyaśāstra with me in Leiden; and Peter Bisschop, who assisted me in the reading sessions organized at Leiden University, and who provided invaluable help in solving many thorny issues of textual criticism. In 2012, I had the pleasure to read the portion edited and translated in this book with H.V. Nagaraj Rao in Mysore; his oceanic knowledge of Sanskrit grammar and literature, combined with the kindest generosity in sharing and transmitting it, has had a great impact on my grasp of the text. These readings at various levels were also an occasion for feedback and thought-provoking questions from peers and students. Other colleagues and friends I would like to thank for their generosity in discussing specific issues addressed in the following pages are Sylvain Brocquet, Jonathan Duquette, Melinda Fodor, Elisa Freschi, Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar, Dominic Goodall, Virginie Johan, Eivind Kahrs, Naresh Keerthi, Andrew Ollett, R.P. Poddar, N. Ramanathan, Julie Rocton, Anna Tosato and Christophe Vielle.
I would like to express my intellectual debt to Lyne Bansat-Boudon, who pioneered studies on the Abhinavabhāratī focusing on the ‘spectacular dimension’ of Sanskrit theatre. Her work inspired me to undertake a serious study of the primary sources of the medieval period. Since 2013, I have regularly taken part—as a guest sahṛdaya—in the full-scale enactments of Sanskrit plays in Kerala’s performance tradition of Kutiyattam, organized by David Shulman and Heike Oberlin with performers from the Nepathya ensemble. These occasions have been most fruitful for discussing many of the issues contained in this book, as well as for getting an idea of how a Sanskrit play might look on the living stage. My teachers in Indian dance and Western acting, too numerous to mention, have given me yet another entry point into the arts of performance by generously sharing their artistic knowledge and by answering my questions in many unexpected ways.
My father Roberto transmitted his love for odd and old books to me, and my mother Margherita gave me my first memory of dance. My deepest gratitude goes to my family for their constant encouragement and support. Last but not least, my most heartfelt thanks go to Daniele Cuneo and Hugo David, who have helped me in innumerable ways, among which discussing, reading, and proofreading the manuscript in different phases of the work. For making my English more elegant and readable, I thank Kristen De Joseph and Robert Leach, as well as Larisa Baumann for a bibliography check. Finally, I would like to express a special word of thanks to Angelika Malinar, with whom I have the pleasure to collaborate in the department of Indian Studies of the University of Zurich since 2014. Apart from the many discussions and brainstorming intellectual exchanges that have left traces in this book, she most strongly urged me—in the sense of the causative as described by Kashmirian non-dualist Śaivas—to put an end to this book. To many other colleagues and friends whom I have not mentioned specifically, I also express my gratitude.
The following institutions have aided me in this project: the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute of Pune, in the person of Saroja Bhate; the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’ Extrême-Orient, especially its director, Dominic Goodall; and the J. Gonda Foundation for granting me two fellowships, by means of which I was first able to finish my thesis in the pleasant and stimulating environment of the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, and to start reworking the thesis into a book. I moreover thank the Oriental Research Institute and Manuscripts Library, Trivandrum; the Sarasvati Bhavan Library, Benares; the Government Oriental Manuscript Library and Adyar Library, Madras; and the National Archives, Delhi, whose manuscripts I consulted for the critical edition. Sheldon Pollock and Andrew Ollett kindly provided me with a copy of the electronic text of the whole Abhinavabhāratī, now accessible on SARIT.
Lastly, I can only look back with deep affection and nostalgia on some of the impassioned—though in a way still somewhat unripe—discussions I had with Sara Rella about the possible applications of the rasa theory to other kinds of art, in particular to Western contemporary art, in the years when I was starting to engage with Abhinavagupta’s aesthetics of dance in Rome. Her premature death at the beginning of August 2018, during the later stages of this book, was cause of deep grief, which, if transferred into this writing, I hope the sensitive reader will be able to taste as a pleasurable rasa. Let her be remembered at the end of this preface.
Zurich, December 2020