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The Poetics of Theatre in Early India

by: Dhananjay Singh

This book critiques the poetics of theatre in early India by interpreting a system of theatre and performance along several themes such as theatre’s place in the premodern interdisciplinary knowledge systems, theatre space and architecture, cognition and emotion, performance, experience and consciousness, human and social behaviour, and music.

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ISBN: 9788124610909
Year Of Publication: 2021
Edition: 1st
Pages : x, 218
Bibliographic Details : Bibliography, Index
Language : English
Binding : Hardcover
Publisher: D.K. Printworld Pvt. Ltd.
Size: 22
Weight: 450

Overview

Theatre discourses of early India present theatre (natya) as an integrated art form, and the poetics of theatre as an interdisciplinary system of thought and performance. Theatre functions as a composite art production comprising dance (nrtya), song (gana), instrumental music (Atodya) and enactment (abhinaya). The poetics of this theatre provides thoughts, techniques, and instrumental frameworks for performance, based on an interdisciplinary reflection upon space, body, mind, motion, sound, memory, consciousness and theatre in relation to the other disciplines of knowledge.
This book attempts to examine the poetics of theatre in early India by interpreting a system of theatre and performance along several themes such as theatre’s place in the premodern interdisciplinary knowledge systems, theatre space and architecture, cognition and emotion, performance, experience and consciousness, human and social behaviour, and music. While focusing mainly on the aphoristic statements on theatre by Bharata in his Natyasastra (third century bce), the book responds to the principles of theatre and literature discussed and debated in a tradition of texts such as Nandikesvara’s Abhinaya Darpana (fifth-fourth century bce), Rajasekhara’s Kavyamimasa (tenth century ce) and Abhinavagupta’s Abhinavabharata (tenth-eleventh century ce). The major concepts elaborated in the book consist of the types of theatre space (ranga), forms of mental/emotive states (bhavas), forms of consciousness (rasas), human and regional variations of performance (vrtti and pravrtti), forms of vocal and instrumental music (gana and atodya), and various others. Divided into eight chapters, each addressing an aspect of theatre, the book is premised upon the argument that theatre poetics of early India presents a coordinated world of inner experience rooted in the self (citta) formed by cognition, emotion and consciousness, but that which develops on stage into an artistic network created by the primitive human behaviour, body, senses, space, sound and the external world, including the varieties of the social world.

Contents

Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Theatre and Knowledge Systems
2. Theatre and Theatre Architecture
3. Theatre, Cognition and Emotion
4. Theatre, Experience and Consciousness
5. Theatre and Performance
6. Theatre and Human Behaviour
7. Theatre and Social Behaviour
8. Theatre and Music
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Meet the Author
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Dhananjay Singh is Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he teaches courses on comparative poetics, Indian aesthetics, Indian philosophy of language and theatre, South Asian Fiction, and Modern Irish literature. He has published research articles and essays in these areas. He is the author of Fables in the Indian Narrative Tradition: An Analytical Study (2011). He was Visiting Professor at University of Bergamo, Italy in 2014; International Visiting Fellow at Grinnell College, Grinnell, IOWA, USA, in 2015; and Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin in 2017. For his research on Seamus Heaney and Buddhist epistemology in a comparative framework, he was awarded Research Secondment by the European Union’s Marie Curie International Research Exchange Scheme to the Project “Social Performance, Cultural Trauma and Reestablishing Solid Sovereignties (SPECTRESS)”, at Trinity College Dublin in May–July 2017. Professor Singh’s poems have appeared in literary journals Muse India and South Asian Ensemble. His debut short story “The Train and the Tunnel’’ was published in The Bombay Review in August 2020.
Books of Dhananjay Singh

“The Poetics of Theatre in Early India”

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