Rasa: Performing the Divine in India.

• Author: Gerow, Edwin
• Position: Brief article - Book review

Rasa: Performing the Divine in India. By SUSAN L. SCHWARTZ. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004. Pp. xv + 118. $59.50 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

This little book is not aimed at a scholarly audience, but at "a variety of interested readers, from students of religion and theater to those with an interest in Indian philosophy," and promises not to "overload the text with the jargon of any one of these fields of study" (p. x). Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the book works as an introduction to the practical aesthetics of rasa as well as any I've seen--scholarly or no.

The book's vantage point is not that of an explication de texte or a history of the notion of rasa; it focuses rather on the continued vitality of the notion in surviving Indian dance and theatrical traditions. It is remarkably even-handed and thoroughly well informed, both textually and in terms of the many surviving traditional art forms, even where the necessity of the broad sketch would have defeated most writers. The account, for instance, of...