IS THERE AN INDIAN WAY OF READING EMOTIONS?

Abstract

The discourse on emotions, one learns, has mostly not fared well in the conceptual history of the Western philosophers. The problem arises because this discourse has always been made within the rhetoric of rationality, and emotion and reason have been characterised as opposing forces in man. Moreover, in the Western philosophical tradition the primacy of reason over emotions has been the shaping principle of conceptual thinking.

Do emotions happen to us or do we create them? Are they biological drives or can they be cognitive, conative, and ethically responsible? The notion of emotion in short has occupied this ambivalent space, and points to an either/or situation. The debate has gone on for centuries.

Pātanjaliyogasūtras apart, Bharata’s Nātyaśāstra studies emotions minutely and in a major way, and visualises their nature, their ontology, as being both fluid and steady. Given the context of both verbal and performing arts, Bharata enables us to envisage how emotions get transformed into the status of rasa, and to realise how aesthetics has ultimately returned to the discourse of the body. Now outside the realm of aesthetics, can there be pure emotions untainted by reason that we can experience in ordinary life? None, only blurred edges!