Abstract
The concepts of ‘Bhava’ in acting and ‘Rasa’ in drama, as discussed in the Nātyasāstra, have served as valuable parameters for reviewing the merits of a play, directors’ intentions, and actors’ achievements for over two millennia in India. Their influence on meaning-making in Indian cinema is equally significant, given theatre’s continuing influence on its narrative and performance aesthetics, most evident in films of the mythological genre. Of all Indian cinemas, the ‘mythological film’ survived for the longest time in Telugu cinema, until the 1970s, with K.V. Reddy’s Mayabazar (1957) being its most influential landmark. The highlight of the film, a magical love story from the Mahabharata, is its heroine’s dual-personality premise. A plot twist has her character get impersonated by an illusionist demon, who ‘as-a-man-trapped-in-a-woman’s-body’, is a reveal of how ‘ideal’ notions of masculine and feminine bhavas in acting are perpetuated by an Indian actor’s portrayal of different reactions to similar situations based on the character’s gender. This article will establish how in her choice from the nine prescribed Sthayibhavas (primary human emotions) that the actress Savitri selects and rejects to distinguish, personify and limit her ‘woman-as-woman’ part from a ‘man-as-woman’ character that Mayabazar makes a test case for studying the selection, categorization and prioritization of major human emotions on the basis of gender in a performance.
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Notes
- 1.
Sanskrit words and terms when translated into English often suffer a loss in translation, especially those endowed with multiple cultural meanings. Hence, occasional use of multiple words to explain a term’s best possible meaning will recur.
- 2.
Bharata’s fundamental rasa sutra—Vibhavanubhava vyabhicharin–sanyogat rasanispattih—provides the essence of the birth of a rasa. Nātyasāstra and its subsequent commentaries (like Abhinavagupta’s Abhinavabharati) distinguish a total of 50 emotions, divided into three categories in a hierarchy, in which the higher category encompasses the one below. At the bottom are eight involuntary emotional reactions (satvikabhavas) like sweating, trembling, weeping, paralysis, horripilation, fainting, change of colour and change of voice. Above them are 33 transitory mental states (vyabhicharibhavas) like apprehension, stupor, joy, cruelty, anxiety, shame, etc., which represent minor incidental feelings. Finally on top are the permanent emotions or sthayibhavas (rati, hasa, etc.). The 41 emotions (8 + 33) in the third and second category, respectively, in various combinations, feed and contribute to the creation of a permanent emotion, which are compared to kings surrounded by a large retinue of servant sub-emotions. For example, the transitory mental states manifesting bhayanaka rasa are cruelty, anxiety, etc. with their satvikabhavas being sweating, trembling, etc. Or a work pervading with the permanent emotion of love may have jealousy, anxiety, joy, sadness, anger and other vyabhicharibhavas functioning as its transient accessories, all suggesting and sustaining the shringararasa. It is because of this superiority among emotions that the permanent emotions can generate rasas. (Tieken 2000 pp. 121–122; Gnoli 1956, pp. 29–30; Rayan 1965, p. 251; Marchand 2006, p. 7).
- 3.
A term added by later commentators, “Dhvani assigns critical importance to the concept of suggestion in a work of art over the normal expression of something merely depicted or explicitly stated” (Cooper 2000, pp. 19–20).
- 4.
“The conception of rasa is general and furnishes the criterion by which the worth of all forms of fine art, including cinema, may be judged” (Hiriyanna 1997, p. 72).
- 5.
The poll was conducted and published by CNN-IBN (May 2013).
- 6.
The Nātyasāstra lists six types of laughter for actors depending on the nature of their characters—smita (gentle smile) and hasita (slight laughter) for noble men and women, vihasita (open laughter) and uphasita (ridiculing laughter) for common men and women, and apahasita (obscene laughter) and atihasita (boisterous laughter) for the loud and demonic.
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Roy, P. (2016). Gendered Bhavas: Perpetuating Notions of “Ideal” Male and Female Behaviour Through Specific Emotions Highlighted in Acting in Mayabazar . In: Bhaduri, S., Mukherjee, I. (eds) Transcultural Negotiations of Gender. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2437-2_14
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