Indian literature in translation course plan

Sanskrit Drama- Introduction

Introduction to Sanskrit Drama

Sanskrit poetry can be generally classified into:

1) Drishya - which can be seen or enacted


2) Shravya - which can be heard (shloka)

So, all dramas are Drishya. 

In Sanskrit, drama is called rupaka and one-act plays are known as upa rupakas.

The 3 Elements of Rupakas are:

• Vastu or the plot of the play.
• Rasa or the 
• Neta or the hero.




The Plot may be divided into

The principal plot (adhikarik): It refers to the main characters and pervades throughout the story.

The sub-plot or the accessory plot (prasangik): It is an added information to the main plot. All except the hero are the characters of the sub-plot.

Subplot is again divided into 2 parts i.e. Prakara and Pataka. 

These are episodes written to hinder and develop the normal flow of the story. Pataka may be of considerable length extending till the end of the play where as Prakara is an incident of limited duration and no major characters are involved in it. Eg. In Shakuntala, Durvasa cursing Shakuntala is the Pataka and Shakuntala losing her ring is the Pataka.

The principal plot has Bija, Bindu, and the Karya. Literally, bija means the seed or the plot, bindu means the drop or the fall, and karya refers to the climax or the final issue.

The Bija, Bindu, Karya, Pataka and Prakara together are called the Arthaprakritis.

The source or derivation of the plot may be from the history or mythology, it may be fictious or the mixture of both. Shakuntala is of the third kind, a mixture of mythology and fiction.

There are 5 avasthas or stages of development of a dramatic plot:


• Aarambh or the beginning.

• Yatna or the effort (to bring out the rasa).

• Prapthyasha or the prospect.

• Niyatapti or the removal of obstacles.

• Phalagam which refers to obtaining the desired result.

These 5 avasthas have to be united by samdhis or junctures.

There are 5 samdhis:

• 
Mukh or the Protasis (Introduction)

• Pratimukh or the Epistasis - an effort or the yatna for the progress of the play's plot.

• Garba or the Catastatis - attainment or non-attainment of the end (Patakas   may end).
• 
Avamarsh or Peripeteia - it goes along with the niyatapti and it is a conscious effort to postpone the end.

• Nirvahan or Upasanha - catastrophe or the final fall of events.

There are 4 types of Neta in Sanskrit drama:

•       Dhirodaatta - the ideal neta, with all the 8 manly characteristics (Dushyant - in Abhigyana Shakuntalam).
•       Dhirolalitha - soft-spoken and good-looking but he is not very serious.
•       Dhiroshantha - peace-loving and patient.
•       Dhirodatta - Lacks one of the 8 manly characteristics (Ravana, Karan).

The 8 characteristics are:

•         Shobha or the handsome.
•        Bilaas or with a broad outlook and open thought.
•        Maadhurya or sweet in behaviour.
•        Gambhirya or combination of pride and strength
•        Dhairya or courageous.
•        Tejas or charismatic.
•        Laalitsya or humorous,fun and adorable.
•        Audharya or generous and magnanimous.

Then the plot has Pithmards, assistants to the characters. They should have inferior qualities than the hero. Nayika or the heroine should come in relation with the hero. Then there is the Vidushak who gives comic relief to the play.

The Rasa or the sentiment is the base of all Sanskrit plays. It arises theThe natural bhavas are called satvika and there are 8 satvika in all. From the 8 bhavas, there are 8 rasas. The permanent sentiment that is present throughout the play is called the sthai bhava. In actuality, there are 9 rasas or bhavas but the shantha bhava cannot be enacted on stage.

The 8 bhavas are:

          

         1 . Shringar (erotic)

         2. Hasya (humour)

         3. Karuna (pity)

         4. Veer (courage)

         5. Adhbhudh (wonder)

         6. Bhayanak (fearful)

         7. bhibatsya (disgust)

         8. Raudra (anger)

Alambana: This is the base of rasa, reference to person or things, to whom or which a sentiment arises.

Uddipana: what excites or enhances

Anubhava: outward manifestation of the internal feelings

Sattvika: natural bhavas

Every drama opens with a prelude or a prolouge call known as ' Nandi'. It is given either by the 'Sutradhar' (the play writer) , 'Stupaka' (manager) or the one of the main characters. 

Down points of a Sanskrit drama are:



1. It is very patronising and favouring males in nature.


2. The use of Sanskrit for the men of high caste and Prakrit for women and other lower caste people is very caste and gender discriminating.


3. There is no presence of violence, tragedy or comedy.




Formalism

Formalism

Formalism mainly started with two movements.

First movement was started by Edmund Husserl. The movement insisted on not seeing art and literature as a window to see the work rather look at the artistic piece itself, just like we would do to a painting. Give art its own value and not label it as a representation or mere copy of our world. This concept was followed by Russian Formalists namely Roman Jakobson etc.

Second movement was started by Benedetto Croce. He said that science is not the only truth in this world. There lot of other truths that literature can cover through its literary devices and science cannot. But that does not mean that what science cannot prove is false. This movement was followed by The American New Critics namely Cleanth Brooks etc.

Any formalist would concentrate only on the text, analyzing literature into its components, it’s literary devices, language, narratives and other literary techniques like euphemism, metaphor, onometapia, paradox etc. the text would be first divided into story (the content) and plot (the sequence in which the story is being narrated). They also distinguished language into literary (used for writing literature) and non-literary (generally used for normal interactions) languages. Thus Roman Jakobson rightly put it literature as organized violence on ordinary speech.

Literary evolution is a concept that is agreed by both formalists and non-formalist but both of them look at it differently. Non-formalists say literary evolution is obvious as the world is evolving and literature being a representation of it is also changing. But formalists argue that literary evolution is autonomous. It is evolving on its own and not as a reflection to the evolving world.

There is a strong historical and methodological link between structuralism and formalism. Roman Jackobson one of the major Roman formalists in 1920’s migrated to France and became a part of French structuralism in 1930 and 1940’s.

There are certain differences between Roman formalists and New American criticism. Roman formalists concentrated on modes of operation of the entire genre like novels and were more scientific in their methods where as American new critics used methods like close reading to explain the universal truths in the text and generally focused on individual work like poetries and use rather unscientific methods.

Intentional fallacy: While analyzing the text formalists don’t care about the author’s intention behind writing the statement. They only concentrate on the literal meaning of the sentences.

Affective fallacy: here the affect on the reader after reading the text is not taking into consideration as it doesn’t help in the analysis of text anyway, and the objective structure of the text is only important.

Thus American New Critics describes literary devices signifying universal meaning which was a direct attack on modern positivist science. Russian Formalists found a value-free mode of critical description for finding the literariness in literature.

Formalism springs from phenomenology by Edmund Husserl which sets out to analyse human consciousness as experienced in the lived world irrespective our prior suppositions through common sense or philosophy.

Almost all that you need to know for mid semester exams!!

http://anilpinto.blogspot.com/2010/08/mid-semester-portions-for-v-semester.html

Humanist literary theory

What is literature? -By Terry Eagleton

This is my understanding of the essay "What is Literature" by Terry Eagleton. If you have read the text and understood it there is no need to waste your time reading this post before the exam.

What is literature?- Terry Eagleton

Mr. Pinto said "if there is any theory answers this question it must encompass all its dimensions, and even if one of the dimensions is missing the theory fails. 

Terry Eagleton, in his essay challenges all the definitions of Literature that have been put forth and challenges the basic understanding of literature that we have. In fact he rejects the idea of any "basic understanding" of what is literature.

Literature as Imaginative writing

• He begins with Literature being defined as imaginative writing.
• With imaginative/fictional/creative writing such as works by Shakespeare, Milton etc. other works which were not exactly fiction or imaginative writing were included as a part for English Literature. Example: Sermons of John Donne,  Madame De Sevigne's letters to her daughter, philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. 
• There was no clear distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction'. 
• In the late 16th and early 17th century 'novel' used both factual and fictional events and even news reports were not considered purely factual. 
• Genesis read as fact by some and fiction by others. Therefore no clear cut difference between fact and fiction.
• Moreover  if one still goes by this definition, there are many works of fiction that are not considered to be Literature. Example: Mills and boon, Superman comics, Sidney Sheldon.
• "If literature is 'creative' or 'imaginitive' writing, does this imply that history, philosophy and natural science are uncreative and unimaginative?"

Literature as 'writing' that uses peculiar language

• It is because Literature uses the language in peculiar ways that it is different from everyday 'normal' way of speech.
• Roman Jakobson, speaks of Literature as  "organised violence committed on ordinary speech".
• Disproportion between signifier and signified: A mismatch between the signifier and the signified. For example when in Macbeth you read the line "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..." you know that the character is talking of eternal bore dome and not of the literal meaning of the word 'tomorrow' therefore creating a mismatch in the signifier (tomorrow) and the signified (the next day).
• By bringing in peculiarity the language draws attention to itself. This is the reason when you read a fairy tale that starts with "Once upon a time..." you know that there is no real history associated with the line but it refers to a time in the story therefore drawing attention to itself or the text present in front of you.
• "The formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more of less arbitrary assemblage of 'devices' , and only later came to see these devices as interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual system. 
• These devices included imagery, sound, rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative techniques etc.
• These devices were used as literary elements to 'defamiliarise' or 'estragement'.  
• In other words "It was language 'made strange'; and because of this estrangement, the everyday world was also suddenly made unfamiliar".
• What he is trying to imply here is that in our everyday routine we get so used to the usual things that we hardly notice them, we become "as Formalists would say 'automatised', Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more perceptile."
• By defamiliarising or alienating us from the text or ordinary speech gives a fuller understand or a kind of revelation or the same experience. Its like after you have a fight or an argument, you sit alone and do a flashback of what happened and you try to hear your own words and put yourself in the other person's shoes and realise the damage that you might have done by saying certain things. In this process you are looking at your behaviour from outside, or other person's perspective, hence estranging yourself from you, and in the process gaining a better understanding of yourself.
• "Most of the time we breathe in air without being conscious of it: like language, it is the very medium in which we move. But if the air is suddenly thickened or infected we are forced to attend to our breathing with new vigilance and the effect of this may be a heightened experience of our bodily life.”

Literature as something special

• Then literature was looked by the formalists as a 'special' kind of language in contrast to the 'ordinary' language that we commonly use. 
• But the problem here arises is that there is no universal 'ordinary' language. In other words the so called ordinary/common language is different for different classes, gender, region, status and so on.
• "One person's norm may be another deviation"
•  Same is the case with 'estrangement' mentioned earlier. A piece of writing might estranging is one context or community but not so in certain other. Example: in a particular society if everyone uses the sentence "shall I compare thee to a summer's day.." in everyday life it will not be estranging to that society anymore.
• "Anyone who believes that 'literature' can be defined by such special uses of language has to face the fact that there is more metaphor in Manchester than there is in Marvell. There is no 'literary' device - metonymy, synecdoche, litotes and so on- which are not quite intensively used in daily discourse"
• Another reason why considering 'estrangement' as the definition is problematic is that any piece of writing or sentence can be read as estranging. 
• Example: a sign that reads -'Dogs must be carried on the escalator.' as unambiguous as it seems at first a close look at it reveals its ambiguity. Does it mean that you must carry a dog on the escalator, and in failing to do so you will be banned from the escalator?
• Also a drunk person may see hidden meanings in various hoardings or even road signs giving it cosmic significance.  

Literature as a non-pragmatic discourse

• When we read a poem referring to a woman as lovely as a rose, the poet is telling about women and love in general. Therefore we look at literature as non-pragmatic/practical as against a physics textbook.
• The problem with this way of defining is that non-practicality of a text cannot be defined objectively. Which means that it depends on how a reader prefers to read the text. 
• A reader can prefer to read Gibbon's account of Roman empire for information or prose style and so on. 
• "A piece of writing may start off like life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature; or it may start off as literature and them come to be valued for its archaeological significance."
• "What matters may not be where you came from but how people treat you."
• Therefore, Eagleton says, there is no essence of literature because any writing can be read non-pragmatically.

Value-Judgements

• Consider literature as being a highly valued kind of writing. If this were true, then any writing can be considered as literature. For me a letter written by my mother to be will hold a value higher than any piece of writing by Shakespeare. Therefore a value given to any writing must be subjective.
• Values on the other hand are variable and change from time to time.
• "The so-called 'literary canon', the unquestioned 'great tradition' of the 'national literature', has to be recognised as a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular time. There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it."
• By which Eagleton suggests that the value that any writing enjoys is the value given to it by certain literary canon, or authority and is subject to change. 
• Yet here he also says that value- judgements are unstable does not mean that they are subjective. 
• Value-judgements depends on the value system and social ideologies that one belongs to. 

For conclusion please read the last paragraph of the essay.

I think that this a very clear case of what Derrida calls Deconstruction, where Terry Eagleton has picked 'literature' and by taking all the existing definitions he has proved that there is nothing called literature.

Humanist Literary Theory

Humanist literary theory

Text can be read in 4 ways

• 
  
  
  Context (historicism)
• 
  
  
  
  
  
  Author centric
• 
  
  
  
  
  
  Text centric
• 
  
  
  
  
  
  Reader centric

Historicism: when a text is read taking the place and time into consideration. Eg. Look Back In anger

Text centric criticism: when we believe text has a life and meaning of its own. The story takes charge of itself. This also lead to genre criticism giving birth to formalism and structuralism.

Reader response theory: when there is a scope for the reader to interpret the text. It can be subjective. Eg. Hills like white elephant.

Author centric criticism: when deliberate efforts are made to draw parallels between author’s personal life, his character and the plot of the story, and characters of the text. We can see reflection of author’s personal life.

Liberal humanists thought formed the concept of literature as universal significance, eternal and timeless.

Ben Jhonson view on Shakespear’s work is ‘…..of all people and all time’

This is the limitation of liberal humanism approach that all works are not always of universal significance. For instance Shakespear’s work is of no significance to a Dalit women, working in a construction site, to feed her 4 children.

Few questions posed were;

What is poetry or literature and art in general?

To answer this question Plato states theory of mimesis and theory of form .

Theory of Mimesis: Mimesis is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include: imitation, representation, mimicry, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self. 

It is the representation of nature. Poetry is the art of divine madness and the poet is subject to this divine madness, it is not his/her function to convey the truth. There is a possibility of emotional identification moving away from what we actually are.

Theory of Form: 

It is a metaphysical hierarchy of three worlds.

Ideal world of forms: it is the idealistic world in which all object has Real existence and it possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality

Material world of objects. This is the world we see and feel through our senses and perception. Here objects have real existence and is a mere copy of the ideal world is our search of a perfect world.

World of representation: It is the world which represents the material world through art and literature. This world is the copy of the copy. It is copied from the material world which is again a copy of the ideal world. Thus its copy detoriates progressively.

Should literature be banished or censored as it conveys bad values,negative notions of god and does psychological damage?

There is no definite answer to this question (at least with me) but the augments made in favor of censoring poetry or warning one who is reading it by Plato are given as follows: Art is a realm of lies and is twice removed from the world of truth and perfection. And since artists only evoke emotions they don’t have anything to do with rationality or truth. Some of the poetrys convey unconventional ideas of life or aspects of violence and anger, one can identify himself to the negative character in a poem and these factors can influence the reader’s negatively as poetry has the power to evoke the emotions. Thus it can have a negative impact on the society. So he says, Literature is important, and needs to be regulated or supervised because it has the power to affect its readers.

Immediate question arising in your mind would be that poetry also conveys positive thoughts, good ways of living etc. but Plato never took a note of these aspects of poetry and thus questions are left unanswered by him.

On the contrary, Sir Philip Sydney wrote An Apology for Poetry (or, The Defence of Poesy) in approximately 1579, and it was published in 1595, after his death. The essence of his defense is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. The significance of the nobility of poetry is its power to move readers to virtuous action . True poets must teach and delight – a view that dates back to Horace.

The question posed is why denying other writers from other lands and different time zones by only sticking to Shakespeare.

Binary understandings by Plato

Some set of binaries are;

Reason vs emotion

Ideal world vs sensory world

Philosophy vs art

Actual vs representation

Eternal vs transient

Rational vs irrational.

Examples:

Ideal world is better than sensory world because it gives us the idea of chairness which is beyond physical boundaries where as the sensory world only apply it as chair.

In the same way reason is better than emotion as it helps us to reach the ideal world where as emotions take us no where.

Limitations of binary understanding

In such a concept we deny the scope for things that come in between and only concentrate on the extremities. Eg. In the fight of black and white we ignore the concept of grey. It also rules out other ambiguities. Narsimha shows acceptance of ambiguities in eastern culture where as western culture heavily believes in binary understanding. With binaries we are trained to think that one is superior over the other.

(Inputs are from P.K. sir’s; Renu mam’s classes and Internet. It also contains my understandings about the topic.)