UC Santa Barbara

This study focuses on the ways in which various forms of embodied performances—dramatic, devotional, ritual, and dancing—engender bhāva in South Asia. Bhāva is variously understood as a mode of being, an emotional change, a disposition, a mode of distributed experience in relationship, a processural transformation or becoming, and a substance that can be shared and that emerges in performance. In its various manifestations bhāva involves affective changes, embodied practices, and heightened awareness of lived experiences, sociality, and relationships, and it thus serves as a means of reshaping the world. The range of bodies that temporarily hold and are shaped by bhāvas include human and divine, organism and landscape, material and virtual in form. This study attempts to chart how bhāvas function as affective forms in performances, modulating the bodies and relationships that emerge in the process of enactment across thresholds that separate domains and worlds normally seen as distinct. I refer to performances therefore as affective ecologies.

My methodology examines key text in South Asian theories of rasa, including Bharata’s Nāṭya-śāstra, Bhoja’s formal work on literary analysis (Śṛngāra-prakāśa), Abhinavagupta’s “new dramatic art” (Abhinava-bhāratī) that utilizes an audience-response stance, and Rūpa Gosvāmin’s aesthetic theological text on developing devotion to Kṛṣṇa, (Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu). I examine these framings of bhāva show performance is a medium of modulating affects toward culturally-recognizable forms as dispositions (sattvas). Next I examine one dramatist and poet, the seventeenth-century Bengali Gauḍīya devotee Kavikarṇapūra and his works on Caitanya, the Caitanya-candrodaya. In this hagiography, the author imbues his devotional affect into its creation alongside his techniques from aesthetics. In particular I examine how līlā functions as a semblance to allow for variation in the stable forms of the tradition. Next I turn to an inset play within the Caitanya-candrodaya to examine audience and performer relationships. As mutually-implicated in a larger constellation of embodied forces, both sets of performative roles have to engage persons affectively in a shared habit or style (vṛtti). In particular I examine costuming, economic theories of affectivity, and how we are shaped by social forces in performance. Lastly, I turn to the performed works of the famed twentieth-century Bharatanāṭyam dancer, Thanjavure Balasaraswati to examine the way a single person could master these strategies of personal, social, and national affectivity to carve out a space for living in the modernizing world around the time of Indian Independence. In particular, I focus on how her mastery of abhinaya (“gesture”) allowed her to consciously adapt her subaltern position as a devadāsī banned from her traditional way of life into one of the most recognized subaltern performers in the world. In the conclusion, I extend these findings to suggest how illness and other forms of non-aesthetic affectivity are combined with performance traditions in the worship of the regional goddess Śītalā, the “Cooling Lady.” As pandemics and epidemics are becoming a common concern for the entire world, I suggest this goddess’s textual and performed embodiments suggest ways of radically reorienting social values and norms following a more interconnected, ecological view of the world we find ourselves in today.