Journal articles on the topic 'Drama. Sanskrit drama Sanskrit'

RATNAVALI Drama was written by SRI HARSHA a famous poet in Sanskrit. It contains four acts. Udayana is the courages Hero and Rarnavali is heroine in this drama. The main sentiment in this drama is SRINGARA, and main Virtham is KOWSIKI. Here the author describes the love between Udayana and Ratnavali in heart touching and beautiful manner. Many types of Alankaras used for this purpose which was taken from Kuvalayananda.

AbstractThe one-act Sanskrit drama Madhyama-vyāyoga or "The Middle Brother" attributed to Bhāsa describes an oedipal encounter between the Pāndava hero Bhīmasena and his half-demon son Ghatotkaca. The author utilizes subtle techniques of word choice and strategic repetition of key words, particularly sadrśa 'like, similar,' to hint at the underlying similarity of the superficially unlike pair. This keyword technique, which is found only sporadically in Sanskrit, is compared to similar techniques in other literatures, particularly the Leitwortstil characteristic of Biblical Hebrew.

Abstract The twenty-four papers delivered at the graduate conference entitled “Sounds on Stage: Musical and Vocal Languages and Experiences” (L’Aquila, 14-16 November 2018) investigated the relationship between music and theatrical performances from a comparative perspective. The presentations dealt with the role of music in several theatrical genres from different cultures and times: ancient Greek drama, musical theater (especially opera), modern and contemporary theater and ancient ritual Sanskrit drama.

All aspects of literary creation, from creation to expression, have been recorded with perceptive insights and in minute detail by the renowned Sanskrit literary critics. The main topics dealt with by these critics are: the definition and classification of literary creation, viz., poetry, prose, drama etc; the figures of speech (alamkaras), the sentiments (rasas), literary merits and defects (gunas and doshas), style (ritis), and purpose (prayojana). They discuss important ingredients of literary creation such as creative talent (pratibha), erudition (vyutpatti) and practice (abhyasa), the problem of coincidence (samvada), inexhaustible resources, etc. A great literary creation is one that has great imageries, natural descriptions, exquisite miniatures, precious maxims and keen observations of men and matter, besides revealing deep understanding of human character. It exhibits precise phrasing, proportion and restraint, delicacy, sensitiveness, and above all, a profound suggestiveness. Sanskrit literary critics’ views on the relative importance of word and sense in literary creation, their concept of poetry which has spontaneous expression of a deeply felt emotion as its essence, their appeal to make new literary creation, their views on what is essential for literary creation-all these are very valuable contributions towards literary creation. The main purpose of this paper is to help budding literary creators in any language irrespective of time and place by providing new insights.

In examining the notion of entelechy – defined by Aristotle as the ‘final cause’ in drama – Zornitsa Dimitrova shows that depictions of ‘unsavoury’ content are only justified insofar as they are part of larger networks of aesthetic codification. The unsavoury cannot be an end in itself; neither can it function as an aesthetic category in its own right. Rather, it is a means related to pathos, or suffering, in Greek tragedy and bībhatsa, the ‘odious sentiment’ of the Sanskrit drama. Within such networks of codification, the purpose of the unsavoury is to carry forward the drama to an emotionally uplifting end: katharsis in the Poetics and ananda in Nāṭyaśāstra. This purposiveness – already visible in the entelechial nature of the dramatic plot – relates to a concept of mimesis implicitly understood as a term actional and interactionist in character. But only with the emergence of postdramatic theatre and the dissolution of plot does the unsavoury begin to function as an aesthetic category in its own right. Zornitsa Dimitrova is a doctoral graduate of Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and holds degrees in Indology, Philosophy, and English Literature from the Universities of Sofia and Freiburg. Her research interests include performance and ritual studies, dramatic theory, and mimesis.

Abstract This paper focuses on the Gulzār-i ḥāl by Banwālīdās (1662–3), a Persian adaptation of the Sanskrit allegorical drama Prabodhacandrodaya composed by Kṛṣṇamiśra (not long after 1065). It is also hypothesised that Banwālīdās may have used a Braj Bhāṣā version of the same text – by the poet Nanddās entitled Prabodhacandrodaya Nāṭaka (c. 1570) –, as intermediary with the original Sanskrit. Regardless of the source that our author used to realise his Gulzār-i ḥāl, the filter used to adapt Advaitic elements to the Islamic mystical context was the Waḥdat al-Wujūd (“Unity of Being”), or the tradition of mysticism that was heavily inspiring Sufi traditions of South Asia at that time. Moreover, a codicological analysis of the Gulzār-i ḥāl’s manuscript tradition has brought to light that both Hindu and Muslim readership received the text. In this paper, I will show that the interpretative engagement of Banwālīdās carried on a tradition of philosophical studies that did not consider Sufi and Vedāntic metaphysics as separated entities but as elements that – in dialogue with each other – searched for a common answer to the ultimate truth.

Literature is considered to be an art form or writing that have Artistic or Intellectual value. Literature is a group of works produced by oral and written form. Literature shows the style of Human Expression. The word literature was derived from the Latin root word ‘Litertura / Litteratura’ which means “Letter or Handwriting”. Literature is culturally relative defined. Literature can be grouped through their Languages, Historical Period, Origin, Genre and Subject. The kinds of literature are Poems, Novels, Drama, Short Story and Prose. Fiction and Non-Fiction are their major classification. Some types of literature are Greek literature, Latin literature, German literature, African literature, Spanish literature, French literature, Indian literature, Irish literature and surplus. In this vast division, the researcher has picked out Indian English Literature. Indian literature is the literature used in Indian Subcontinent. The earliest Indian literary works were transmitted orally. The Sanskrit oral literature begins with the gatherings of sacred hymns called ‘Rig Veda’ in the period between 1500 - 1200 B.C. The classical Sanskrit literature was developed slowly in the earlier centuries of the first millennium. Kannada appeared in 9th century and Telugu in 11th century. Then, Marathi, Odiya and Bengali literatures appeared later. In the early 20th century, Hindi, Persian and Urdu literature begins to appear.

The rasa (emotive aesthetics), one of the major theories of Sanskrit literary criticism, has been expounded and evaluated in many scholarly studies by Indian and other Sanskritists. Some of them maintain that since the rasa deals with the universalized human emotions, it has validity not only for Indian but for other literatures as well. The rasa can be applied to any kind of emotive poetry such as lyric, epic, drama and satire. However, in Thai literature an emotive definition of poetry encompasses a great variety of works. A question is then raised in this paper about whether the rasa can be applied to a Thai poem of didactic nature. Phra Chaisuriya, a versified tale by Sunthon Phu, is selected as an example of study.

My essay synthesizes, and elaborates on, previous research on the overlaps between performative arts and ascetic traditions of the Śaiva Atimārga in South and Southeast Asia. My analysis focuses mainly on textual data from Sanskrit and Old Javanese literature from the 4th to the 15th centuries, with contributions from modern and contemporary ethnography of Java and Bali. Here I will argue that categories of Śaiva practitioners who combined dance, recitation, and drama in both areas may derive from a shared tantric fund, and that those low-status agents characterized by antinomian behaviours were not only driven by ideals of individual salvation or quest for powers, but also contributed to their local social milieus (i.e. as ‘folk’ entertainers) and ritual economies (i.e., as performers attached to temples and royal palaces).

The symposion, a male social gathering that began in ancient Greece, was a social institution by and for men, hence a type of men’s society as we might understand it in modern parlance. Its manifestation on the Indian subcontinent has to date not been fully explored. In its original form, the symposion consisted of three main elements: alcohol, sex, and intellectual pursuits in the form of literature and philosophy, commonly understood by the popular phrase “wine, women, and song”. These sympotic elements find their equivalents in a wide range of Sanskrit litera­ture, which include medicine (Āyurveda), eroticism (Kāmaśāstra), polity (Arthaśāstra), epics, and rhetoric (Alaṃkāraśāstra), as expressed in the Carakasaṃhitā, the Kāmasūtra, the Arthaśāstra, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, and the Kāvyamīmāṃsā. The literary evidence indicates that the three sympotic elements came to full blossom in urban Indian men’s social gatherings or goṣṭhīs dating to a few centuries before the Common Era. The paper combines this literary evidence with archaeological sources to show how a foreign social custom contributed to an indigenous institution of men’s society in ancient India by a process of adaptation. It would appear that as the institution moved into different parts of the Indian subcontinent, it increasingly came under Brahmanic influence, which led to an important ideological change that stressed literary and intel­lectual pursuits over alcohol and sex. Under royal patronage, the goṣṭhī finally became a means for the development of Sanskrit and Indian literature and drama.

Disgust occupies a particular space in Buddhism where repulsive aspects of the human body are visualized and reflected upon in contemplative practices. The Indian tradition of aesthetics also recognizes disgust as one of the basic human emotions that can be transformed into an aestheticized form, which is experienced when one enjoys drama and poetry. Buddhist literature offers a particularly fertile ground for both religious and literary ideas to manifest, unravel, and entangle in a narrative setting. It is in this context that we find elements of disgust being incorporated into two types of Buddhist narrative: (1) discouragement with worldly objects and renunciation, and (2) courageous act of self-sacrifice. Vidyākara’s anthology of Sanskrit poetry (Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa) and the poetics section of Sa skya Paṇḍita’s introduction to the Indian systems of cultural knowledge (Mkhas pa rnams ’jug pa’i sgo) offer two rare examples of Buddhist engagement with aesthetics of emotions. In addition to some developed views of literary critics, these two Buddhist writers are relied on in this study to provide perspectives on how Buddhists themselves in the final phase of Indian Buddhism might have read Buddhist literature in light of what they learned from the theory of aesthetics.

The ancient Indian aesthetic theory identifies bībhatsa, “disgust / aversion”, as one of the nine sensory states that determine the mood of dramatic and poetic works and by means of visual / verbal techniques affect a spectator/a reader. This term from Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra was adopted by Christian missions in India and used as an argument against the cultural traditions of the conquered subcontinent. The translation into Marathi (1864) of The Little Clay Cart, a Sanskrit drama by Shudraka, became the object of violent public controversy initiated by Rev. Henry Ballantine who found the image of the protagonist Vasantasena, a hereditary courtesan, “disgusting” and the play “shameful”. The final subjugation ofIndia after the defeat of the Sepoy Mutiny (1857–1858), and its transition under the British crown rule intensified the process of emotional indoctrination of subjects by resort to the notion of “disgusting” understood as anything not compatible with the Christian morality norms.

Recognizing analogies between the assumptions about theatricality found in the classic Sanskrit treatise on acting, the Natyasastra, and those of the Elizabethan theatre, John Russell Brown suggests that the concept of rasa as the determining emotion of a performance is similar to that of the Elizabethan ‘humour’, or prevailing passion, as defined by Ben Jonson. Here he describes his work exploring what happens when actors draw on their own life experiences to imagine and assume the basic rasa of the character they are going to present, based on experiments in London with New Fortune Theatre; in Bremen with actors of the Bremer Shakespeare Company; and in New Delhi with actors of the National School of Drama. Using actors both young and experienced, familiar and unfamiliar with ensemble playing, and well or poorly acquainted with the concepts involved, he suggests that the results merit further exploration of a technique which could empower actors to bring Shakespeare's plays to new kinds of life. John Russell Brown founded the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. His New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia was published by Routledge in 1999, and his Shakespeare Dancing: a Theatrical Study of the Plays by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. He edited and contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995), and for Routledge has been General Editor of the ‘Theatre Production Studies’, ‘Theatre Concepts’, and forthcoming ‘Theatres of the World’ series.

Sri Aurobindo wrote around eleven verse plays, much in the tradition of the Elizabethan poetic plays. Many similarities and equally numbered distinctions may be traced midst the dramatic output of William Shakespeare and Sri Aurobindo. However, of the eleven plays only five plays are complete, in that they have a five act structure, namely- Viziers of Bassora, Eric, Rodogune, Perseus: The Deliverer and Vasavadutta. The genealogy of all these plays may be traced to the legends or myths, of the various ancient cultures which populated the world and shaped its history. Irrespective of their different myths of origin, Sri Aurobindo, much like Shakespeare employs these stories only as the raw clay, while he mould the statue out of it, according to his own vision, that is the Evolution of Man.
 An analysis of Sri Aurobindo’s plays elucidates the unparalleled range and vision to which his plays bear testimony. The notable feature of Sri Aurobindo’s plays is that they portray diverse cultures and nations in different aeons, populated with an array of characters, moods and sentiments.
 Sri Aurobindo spent almost all his growing years in England, studying English and other classical literatures and the impact of this reading is discernible in his plays. He seems to be particularly impressed by the Elizabethan drama and employs its technique in matters of plot construction and characterisation. He is said to have perfected the English blank verse which he deftly displays in the dialogues of his characters. His plays can thus be said to be a unique blend of the Sanskrit and Western philosophical and aesthetic theories as the plot, the climax, the progression and the theme is unmistakably Indian. He seems to have been influenced by the Sanskrit playwrights like Bhasa, Kalidas and Bhavabhuti and all five plays are imbued with the poetry and romance which is similar in spirit and flavour of the distinctive dramatic type which was the signature style of Bhasa, Kalidas and Bhavabhuti, and simultaneously preserve the Aurobindonian undertones. The paper attempts to elucidate the ‘Evolution of Man’ which Sri Aurobindo mounts through his plays.

The classical theatres of southern Asia are variously treated with the reverence thought due to sacrosanct and immutable forms – or as rich sources for plunder by western theatre-makers in search of intra-cultural building-blocks. The rights and wrongs of this latter approach have been much debated, not least in the pages of NTQ; less so the intrinsic desirability of leaving well alone. At the symposium on Classical Sanskrit Theatre, hosted in Dhaka by the Centre for Asian Theatre in December 1999, an unexpected consensus sought ways in which classical theatre forms might best meet contemporary needs, not only by drawing upon their unique qualities – but also by respecting the injunction in the Natyasastra that the actor must combine discipline with a readiness for improvisation. John Russell Brown here supports the conclusions of the symposium that the qualities of Asian theatre which differentiate it from western forms – of a quest for transformation rather than representation, a concern with emotional truth rather than ideological ‘meaning’ – can best be pursued by such an approach, restoring to the theatre ‘its enabling and necessary role in society’. John Russell Brown was the first professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, and subsequently Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. More recently he has taught and directed in the USA, New Zealand, and Asia, and is now Visiting Professor of Performing Arts at Middlesex University. The most recent of his numerous books is New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (Routledge, 1999).

Changing the tradition of history is a natural process of nature. In the context of the Dhrupad singing style in the Indian classical music world, if we take a historical view, the practice of singing Dhruva and Prabandha songs before this style was prevalent. The ritual form of Dhruva songs is found in Sanskrit drama texts from pre- to late India. Dhruva has an important place in terms of song composition.Even in the exorcisms used in the puvarang before the Natyarambha, the Dhruvas have special importance due to the use of musical instruments. Originally, the verses of songs which are used within the play are called Dhruva to make those situations intensified or to intensify the character of the characters in various situations of the play. They are also related to the lyricists due to their use of various parts of the lyricists.
 इतिहास की परम्परा में परिवर्तन होना प्रकृति की स्वाभाविक प्रक्रिया है। भारतीय शास्त्रीय संगीत जगत में ध्रुपद गायन शैली के सन्दर्भ मं हम ऐतिहासिक दृष्टि डालें तो इस शैली के पूर्व ध्रुवा एवं प्रबन्ध गीतों को गाने का प्रचलन था। ध्रुवा गीतों की परम्परा का क्रियात्मक रूप भरत के पूर्व से लेकर परवर्ती संस्कृत नाटक ग्रंथों में पाया जाता है। गीत रचना की दृष्टि से ध्रुवा का महत्त्वपूर्ण स्थान है।नाट्यारम्भ से पहले पूर्वरंग में प्रयुक्त बहिर्गीतों में भी ध्रुवाएं वाद्यप्रयोग की उपरंजक होने के कारण विशेष महत्व रखती हैं। मूलतः नाट्य की विभिन्न परिस्थितियों में रसानुभूति करा कर उन परिस्थितियों को तीव्र बनाने अथवा पात्रों के चरित्र को उभारने के लिए जिन छन्दोबद्ध गीतों का प्रयोग नाट्य के भीतर किया जाता है वे ध्रुवा कहलताी है। गीतकों के विभिन्न अंगों का इनमें प्रयोग होने के कारण ये गीतकों से भी सम्बन्ध है।

G. Venu, a scholar and practitioner of kutiyattam, responds to contemporary political conditions in Kerala and draws on the work of India's experimental Theatre of Roots movement in his unexpectedly classical production of Sakuntala. Though imbricated in both the traditional and the avantgarde—creating what Venu aptly calls “present-day kutiyattam”—the question remains: will the project's politics be read to the radical or the revolutionary?

The specific place where the artist sits for the presentation of any art or specific ideas is called the stage. This is also called theater because pigmentation is its main subject. In Western countries or the English language, it is called a stage. It seems that theater was prevalent among the deities even before the emergence of humans. Like Kailash festival of Lord Shiva, Mata Vagishwari sitting on a peacock with a veena in her hand and dancing in the court of Indra to Gandharva, Kinnar, and Apsaras only indicate the existence of the stage. According to the tradition of Indian music and drama, theater is first mentioned in the famous scripture Natya Shastra of Sanskrit literature. In ancient times, when the sage Muni used to do penance, he used to be in a tomb at some high place. Similarly, kings and emperors etc. used to address the meeting only after sitting on any highest posture. Because art is an essential part of life, it is natural to develop artistic elements along with the development of civilization and culture. A modern form of stage or theater can be achieved as a result of this long sequence of development.
 किसी भी कला अथवा विशिष्ट विचारों की प्रस्तुति के लिए कलाकार जिस विशिष्ट स्थान पर विराजमान होते हैं उसे मंच कहा जाता है। रंजकता इसका प्रमुख विषय होने के कारण इसी को रंगमंच भी कहते हैं। पाश्चात्य देशों अथवा अंग्रेजी भाषा में इसे स्टेज कहा जाता है। ऐसा प्रतीत होता है कि मानव के उद्भव से पूर्व भी रंगमंच देवी देवताओं में प्रचलित था। जेसे भगवान शिव का कैलाश पर्व, माता वागीश्वरी का हस्त में वीणा लेकर मयूर पर बैठना तथा इन्द्र के दरबार में गांधर्व, किन्नर, एवं अप्सराओं को नृत्य आदि मंच के अस्तित्व की ओर ही संकेत करते हैं। भारतीय संगीत एवं नाट्य परम्परा के अनुसार सर्वप्रथम संस्कृत साहित्य के सुप्रसिद्ध ग्रंथ नाट्य शास्त्र में रंगमंच का उल्लेख मिलता है। प्राचीनकाल में ऋषि मुनि जब तपस्या करते थे तो किसी न किसी उच्च स्थान पर समाधिस्थ होते थे। इसी प्रकार राजा व सम्राट आदि भी किसी उच्चतम आसन पर आसीन होकर ही सभा को संबोधित किया करते थे। क्योंकि कला जीवन का एक अनिवार्य अंग है, अतः सभ्यता एवं संस्कृति के विकास के साथ-साथ कलात्मक तत्वों का विकास होना भी स्वाभाविक है। विकास के इसी लम्बे क्रम के परिणाम स्वरूप मंच अथवा रंगमंच का आधुनिक रूप प्राप्त हो सकता है।

“Experience” is a category that seems to have developed new meaning in European thought after the Enlightenment when personal inwardness took on the weight of an absent God. The inner self (including, a little later, a sub- or unconscious mind) rose to prominence about 200–300 years ago, around the time of the “Counter-Enlightenment” and Romanticism, and enjoyed a rich and long life in philosophy (including Lebensphilosophie) and religious studies, but began a steep descent under fire around 1970. The critique of “essentialism” (the claim that experience is self-validating and impervious to historical and scientific explanation or challenge) was probably the main point of attack, but there were others. The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, et al.) claimed that authentic experience was difficult or impossible in the modern capitalist era. The question of the reality of the individual self to which experience happens also threatened to undermine the concept. This paper argues that the religious experience characteristic of Sāṃkhya and Yoga, while in some ways paralleling Romanticism and Lebensphilosophies, differs from them in one essential way. Sāṃkhyan/Yogic experience is not something that happens to, or in, an individual person. It does not occur to or for oneself (in the usual sense) but rather puruṣārtha, “for the sake of [artha] an innermost consciousness/self”[puruṣa] which must be distinguished from the “solitude” of “individual men” (the recipient, for William James, of religious experience) which would be called ahaṃkāra, or “ego assertion” in the Indian perspectives. The distinction found in European Lebensphilosophie between two kinds of experience, Erlebnis (a present-focused lived moment) and Erfahrung (a constructed, time-binding thread of life, involving memory and often constituting a story) helps to understand what is happening in Sāṃkhya and Yoga. The concept closest to experience in Sāṃkhya/Yoga is named by the Sanskrit root dṛś-, “seeing,” which is a process actualized through long meditative practice and close philosophical reasoning. The Erfahrung “story” enacted in Sāṃkhya/Yoga practice is a sort of dance-drama in which psychomaterial Nature (prakṛti) reveals to her inner consciousness and possessor (puruṣa) that she “is not, has nothing of her own, and does not have the quality of being an ‘I’” (nāsmi na me nāham). This self exposure as “not I” apophatically reveals puruṣa, and lets him shine for them both, as pure consciousness. Prakṛti’s long quest for puruṣa, seeking him with the finest insight (jñāna), culminates in realization that she is not the seer in this process but the seen, and that her failure has been to assert aham (“I”) rather than realize nāham, “Not I.” Her meditation and insight have led to an experience which was always for an Other, though that was not recognized until the story’s end. Rather like McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” the nature or structure of experience in Sāṃkhya and Yoga is also its content, what religious experience is about in these philosophies and practices. In Western terms, we have religious experience only when we recognize what (all) experience (already) is: the unfolding story of puruṣārtha. Experience deepens the more we see that it is not ours; the recognition of non-I, in fact, is what makes genuine experience possible at all.

Engish : In ancient Indian texts, the rules related to painting are mentioned in detail, in which texts of poetry, drama, epic, Puranas, Upanishads and various disciplines describe their popularity in ancient tradition and cultural methods of Indian painting and public opinion. Apart from this, there are some texts in which free and comprehensive painting has been explained in detail. For example, there are 269 chapters in this book composed by Vishnudharmottara Purana Markandeya. Under which, in the third section, Sanskrit subjects are especially important for the fine arts. In which chapters 1 to 118 are told about art. In this book, nine chapters from 35 to 43 are of Chitrasutra. It is very popular and most notable and well-known. In which detailed information related to the painting is given, which is not found in any other book before it.In the same way, in the epic, Ramayana, Mahabharata, there is a description of paintings on chitrashalas, palaces, chariots and the great dramatist Bhasa has described the paintings in his three plays Swapnavasavadattam, Pratigya Yogandharayana and Dutavakya. Apart from this, painting has also been mentioned in texts like Abhilachirtartha Chintamani, Mansar, Samranga Sutradhar.It is only through these ancient Indian texts that the painter has been able to study the artifacts microscopically. That is, following the rules related to the picture in these texts can be seen in miniature paintings of Ajanta, Mughal, Rajasthan. By following these rules, painters have been able to express their artistry by imbibing expressions like harmony, balance and cooperation, effectiveness in their artworks. The example of which can be seen in the artwork made by Bengal school and artists of Calcutta.
 Hindi : प्राचीन भारतीय ग्रन्थों में चित्रकला से सम्बन्धित नियमों का उल्लेख विस्तृत रूप से मिलता है जिसमें काव्य, नाटक, महाकाव्य, पुराण, उपनिषद्‌ व विभिन्न विषयों के ग्रन्थों द्वारा भारतीय चित्र लेखन की प्राचीन परम्परा व सांस्कृतिक विधियों एवं जनमानस में उनकी लोकप्रियता का वर्णन मिलता है। इसके अतिरिक्त कुछ ऐसे ग्रन्थ भी हैं, जिनमें स्वतन्त्र व व्यापक रूप से चित्रकला की व्याख्या विस्तार रूप से की गयी है। उदाहरण स्वरूप विष्णुधर्मोत्तर पुराण मार्कण्डेय द्वारा रचित इस ग्रन्थ में 269 अध्याय हैं। जिसके अन्तर्गत तीसरे खण्ड में संस्कृत विषयों में विशेषकर ललित कलाओं के लिये सर्वाधिक महत्वपूर्ण हैं। जिसमें अध्याय 1 से लेकर 118 तक कला के बारे में बताया गया है। इसी ग्रन्थ में 35 से 43 तक नौ अध्याय चित्रसूत्र के हैं। यह बहुत चर्चित व सर्वाधिक उल्लेखनीय एवं बहुचर्चित हैं। जिसमें चित्रकला से सम्बन्धित विस्तृत जानकारी दी गयी है, जो इससे पहले अन्य किसी ग्रन्थ में नहीं मिलती।
 इसी तरह से महाकाव्य, रामायण, महाभारत में चित्रशालाओं, महलों, रथों पर चित्रकारी का वर्णन मिलता है व महान नाटकार भास ने अपने तीन नाटकों स्वप्नवासवदत्तम्‌, प्रतिज्ञा योगंधरायण तथा दूतवाक्य में चित्रों के बारे में बताया है। इसके अलावा अभिलषितार्थ चिन्तामणि, मानसार, समरांगण सूत्रधार जैसे ग्रन्थों में भी चित्रकला का उल्लेख किया गया है।
 इन प्राचीन भारतीय ग्रन्थों के माध्यम से ही आज चित्रकार कलाकृतियों का अध्ययन सूक्ष्मरूप से करने में सक्षम हो सका है। अर्थात्‌ इन ग्रन्थों में चित्र से सम्बन्धित नियमों का पालन अजन्ता, मुगल, राजस्थान के लघु चित्रों में देखा जा सकता है। इन नियमों का पालन करते हुये ही चित्रकार अपनी कलाकृतियों में सामंजस्य, सन्तुलन व सहयोग, प्रभाविता जैसे भावों को आत्मसात करते हुये अपनी कलाकृति को अभिव्यक्त कर पाने में समर्थ हो सके हैं। जिसका उदाहरण बंगाल स्कूल व कलकत्ता के कलाकारों द्वारा बनायी कलाकृतियों में देखा जा सकता है।

This article examines three Indian films based on King Lear through their reconfigured framing of the Fool: Gunasundari Katha (Tale of the Virtuous Woman, 1949, Telugu), Rui Ka Bojh (Weight of Cotton, 1997, Hindi), and Natsamrat (Actor King, 2016, Marathi). Though the nature and role of the Fool in the play is much debated, this essay argues that he is central and his treatment reflects the divergent views the films take on Shakespeare’s tragedy. The fact that the Fool is also a familiar figure in Indian drama, from the classical Sanskrit, medieval folk and modern plays, conditions the transpositions of the intercultural adaptations.

The sensation produced by nature has been key factor for the development of Gita Govinda. Gita Govinda is a nest lyrical drama of Sanskrit Literature. Gita Govinda is best characterized as a dramatic lyrical poem. It is expressed as a cycle of songs interspersed with recitative metrical forms of classical Kavya verses functioning as independent grammatical and aesthetic entities. The foremost objective of this research paper is to analyze the impacts of Gitagovinda on Odishan spiritualism with its different aspects. The objective of the study is also to explore the spiritual reincarnation of Jayadeva's Gitagovinda and its relevance in contemporary literature. Its poetic greatness is enhanced by its appeal of music, poetry and mystic spiritual content. This is a theoretical research paper, where through review of literature and historic research methods secondary data have been used for the analysis. The study is both empirical and descriptive.

AbstractIt has become customary to refer to traditional Indian performance genres as “dance-theatre” in cases where they patently display techniques of narration or storytelling, carried out through the codified and controlled use of the body in time with the music of instruments and sung lyrics. The Indic vocabulary dedicates a specific term, nṛtya, to those forms in which the narrative element clearly prevails over the abstract dance movements—where gestures and facial expressions are used to communicate emotions but the dialogues or poetic lines are assigned to a singer and not recited by the actor/dancer. However, if we look at the way in which Sanskrit theoreticians have divided the spectacular object into specific genres, things get fuzzy. The ancient theory of Indian theatre (Nāṭyaśāstra, 2nd century BC–4th century AD?), in fact, acknowledges only a binary distinction between “theatre” (nāṭya)—the conjunction of a dramatic text and its representation on stage—and “dance” (nṛtta)—movements set to a rhythm with the sole aim of producing beauty and devoid of a narrative-cum-representational function. From this perspective, the recognition of a narrative capacity in dance looks more like the fruit of great theoretical effort rather than a natural development, which has posed a number of significant challenges to literary critics, who must painstakingly negotiate between the constantly evolving genres of performance, the binding categories reiterated in the śāstras (authoritative treatises), and the newly developed aesthetic theories of drama, requiring an ever more specialized concept of dramatic mimesis. Apart from giving an overview of how the performance genres are divided and classified in the Sanskrit treatises, with an explanation of the relevant vocabulary, this article will focus on some of the theoretical problems that emerge when dance starts to narrate stories, in particular in the work of Abhinavagupta, a prominent Kashmirian philosopher writing at the turn of the first millennium.

Sri Aurobindo is one of the foremost writers in the field of Indian writing in English in general and Indo-Anglian drama in particular. He is an institution in himself; he was a great patriot, the fiery evangelist of Nationalism, a great scholar, the interpreter of the Veda, Upnishadas and The Geeta, the critic of life and literature. Here we consider him as a man of letters in Excelsis, a master of prose art, and a dramatist and poet of great power and adaptability. With his wonderful mastery over languages like English, Sanskrit and Bengali, “Sri Aurobindo produces in one the impression that he is a born lord of language.” All his writings bear testimony to his genius and knowledge of the Eastern and the Western thought. This research paper is focusing on his poetic skills on describing the beauty of meeting of twin souls, being a yogi how wonderfully he painted a beautiful picture of love and its meeting, Satyavan and Savitri meet each other in the forest in where there is a cool and sensible breeze in the air of spring and the love of them groves. Reading this destined meeting of Satyavan and Savitri defiantly leads us into the different word where Shree Ram meets Seeta and Shree Krishna to Radha.

Many researchers of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s works draw attention to the irony which is the significant element of her prose, drama and poetry. It is important that the ironic principle manifests itself not only as an artistic technique but also as a philosophical aspect. Irony demonstrates the ambivalence of reality. On the one hand, it ridicules and profanes everything. On the other hand, irony gives the certitude of the ontological status of reality. We can see a good example of this function of irony in the novel Nas ukrali. Istoriya prestupleniy (2017). This novel shows the common features of Petrushevskaya’s works – the unity of ironic potential and language. In this case, language is not only the style but first of all the ontological element. This is why the language becomes almost a character in Petrushevskaya’s novel. Irony opens the vital potential of the linguistic personality. As a result, one of the heroes imitates foreign speech but doesn’t speak a foreign language. Irony also helps to reveal the ambivalent nature of life. It shows that our “umora” in Sanskrit and in ancient Indian is “humour” and “death”. So, the game and profanity not only reduce the status of the hero, the image, or the reader’s expectations but, first of all, fill the gap between words, ideas, feelings, and people.

Straipsnyje apžvelgiama sanskrito dramos tyrinėjimų Vakaruose ir Indijoje XIX–XX a. istorija bei indologų studijose išryškėjantys kėblumai, susiję su sanskrito dramos kilmės problema. Vadovaujantis komparatyvistinių metodologijų principais, mėginama kritiškai pažvelgti į įvairių autorių sanskrito dramos kilmei tyrinėti taikomas metodologines prieigas is kultūrologo pozicijų. Tokia metodologinė nuostata neišvengiamai verčia sanskrito dramos kilmės problemą analizuoti universalesnėje indologijoje polemizuojančių nuomonių perspektyvoje, kadangi būtent ji leidžia įvertinti, kaip dažnai dramos kilmės problemai bei jos sprendimo būdams turėjo įtakos su drama artimai susijusių filosofinių, lingvistinių, archeologinių bei kultūrologinių tyrinėjimų išvados.


 
 
 From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. 
 
 
 
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This article proposes that the growing popularity of reality television in the southernmost state of India, Kerala – disseminated locally and throughout the Indian diaspora – is not the product of an innocuous nostalgia for a fast-disappearing regional identity but rather a spectacular example of an emergent ideology that displaces cultural memory, collective identity, and secular nationalism with new, globalised forms of public sentiment. Further, it is arguable that this g/local media culture also displaces hard-won secular feminist constructions of gender and the contemporary modern “Indian woman.” Shows like Idea Star Singer (hereafter ISS) (Malayalam [the language spoken in Kerala] television’s most popular reality television series), based closely on American Idol, is broadcast worldwide to dozens of nations including the US, the UK, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, and several nations in the Middle East and the discussion that follows attempts both to account for this g/local phenomenon and to problematise it. ISS concentrates on staging the diversity and talent of Malayalee youth and, in particular, their ability to sing ‘pitch-perfect’, by inviting them to perform the vast catalogue of traditional Malayalam songs. However, inasmuch as it is aimed at both a regional and diasporic audience, ISS also allows for a diversity of singing styles displayed through the inclusion of a variety of other songs: some sung in Tamil, some Hindi, and some even English. This leads us to ask a number of questions: in what ways are performers who subscribe to regional or global models of televisual style rewarded or punished? In what ways are performers who exemplify differences in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, or ability punished? Further, it is arguable that this show—packaged as the “must-see” spectacle for the Indian diaspora—re-imagines a traditional past and translates it (under the rubric of “reality” television) into a vulgar commodification of both “classical” and “folk” India: an India excised of radical reform, feminists, activists, and any voices of multiplicity clamouring for change. Indeed, it is my contention that, although such shows claim to promote women’s liberation by encouraging women to realise their talents and ambitions, the commodification of the “stars” as televisual celebrities points rather to an anti-feminist imperial agenda of control and domination. Normalising Art: Presenting the Juridical as Natural Following Foucault, we can, indeed, read ISS as an apparatus of “normalisation.” While ISS purports to be “about” music, celebration, and art—an encouragement of art for art’s sake—it nevertheless advocates the practice of teaching as critiqued by Foucault: “the acquisition and knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation” (176), so that self-surveillance is built into the process. What appears on the screen is, in effect, the presentation of a juridically governed body as natural: the capitalist production of art through intense practice, performance, and corrective measures that valorise discipline and, at the end, produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. The Foucauldian isomorphism of punishment with obligation, exercise with repetition, and enactment of the law is magnified in the traditional practice of music, especially Carnatic, or the occasional Hindustani refrain that separates those who come out of years of training in the Gury–Shishya mode (teacher–student mode, primarily Hindu and privileged) from those who do not (Muslims, working-class, and perhaps disabled students). In the context of a reality television show sponsored by Idea Cellular Ltd (a phone company with global outposts), the systems of discipline are strictly in line with the capitalist economy. Since this show depends upon the vast back-catalogue of film songs sung by playback singers from the era of big studio film-making, it may be seen to advocate a mimetic rigidity that ossifies artistic production, rather than offering encouragement to a new generation of artists who might wish to take the songs and make them their own. ISS, indeed, compares and differentiates the participants’ talents through an “opaque” system of evaluations which the show presents as transparent, merit-based and “fair”: as Foucault observes, “the perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). On ISS, this evaluation process (a panel of judges who are renowned singers and composers, along with a rotating guest star, such as an actor) may be seen as a scopophilic institution where training and knowledge are brought together, transforming “the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). The contestants, largely insignificant as individuals but seen together, at times, upon the stage, dancing and singing and performing practised routines, represent a socius constituting the body politic. The judges, enthroned on prominent and lush seats above the young contestants, the studio audience and, in effect, the show’s televised transnational audience, deliver judgements that “normalise” these artists into submissive subjectivity. In fact, despite the incoherence of the average judgement, audiences are so engrossed in the narrative of “marks” (a clear vestige of the education and civilising mission of the colonial subject under British rule) that, even in the glamorous setting of vibrating music, artificial lights, and corporate capital, Indians can still be found disciplining themselves according to the values of the West. Enacting Keraleeyatham for Malayalee Diaspora Ritty Lukose’s study on youth and gender in Kerala frames identity formations under colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism as she teases out ideas of resistance and agency by addressing the complex mediations of consumption or consumptive practices. Lukose reads “consumer culture as a complex site of female participation and constraint, enjoyment and objectification” (917), and finds the young, westernised female as a particular site of consumer agency. According to this theory, the performers on ISS and the show’s MC, Renjini Haridas, embody this body politic. The young performers all dress in the garb of “authentic identity”, sporting saris, pawaadu-blouse, mundum-neertha, salwaar-kameez, lehenga-choli, skirts, pants, and so on. This sartorial diversity is deeply gendered and discursively rich; the men have one of two options: kurta-mundu or some such variation and the pant–shirt combination. The women, especially Renjini (educated at St Theresa’s College in Kochi and former winner of Ms Kerala beauty contest) evoke the MTV DJs of the mid-1990s and affect a pidgin-Malayalam spliced with English: Renjini’s cool “touching” of the contestants and airy gestures remove her from the regional masses; and yet, for Onam (festival of Kerala), she dresses in the traditional cream and gold sari; for Id (high holy day for Muslims), she dresses in some glittery salwaar-kameez with a wrap on her head; and for Christmas, she wears a long dress. This is clearly meant to show her ability to embody different socio-religious spheres simultaneously. Yet, both she and all the young female contestants speak proudly about their authentic Kerala identity. Ritty Lukose spells this out as “Keraleeyatham.” In the vein of beauty pageants, and the first-world practice of indoctrinating all bodies into one model of beauty, the youngsters engage in exuberant performances yet, once their act is over, revert back to the coy, submissive docility that is the face of the student in the traditional educational apparatus. Both left-wing feminists and BJP activists write their ballads on the surface of women’s bodies; however, in enacting the chethu or, to be more accurate, “ash-push” (colloquialism akin to “hip”) lifestyle advocated by the show (interrupted at least half a dozen times by lengthy sequences of commercials for jewellery, clothing, toilet cleaners, nutritious chocolate bars, hair oil, and home products), the participants in this show become the unwitting sites of a large number of competing ideologies. Lukose observes the remarkable development from the peasant labor-centered Kerala of the 1970s to today’s simulacrum: “Keraleeyatham.” When discussing the beauty contests staged in Kerala in the 1990s, she discovers (through analysis of the dress and Sanskrit-centred questions) that: “Miss Kerala must be a naden pennu [a girl of the native/rural land] in her dress, comportment, and knowledge. Written onto the female bodies of a proliferation of Miss Keralas, the nadu, locality itself, becomes transportable and transposable” (929). Lukose observes that these women have room to enact their passions and artistry only within the metadiegetic space of the “song and dance” spectacle; once they leave it, they return to a modest, Kerala-gendered space in which the young female performers are quiet to the point of inarticulate, stuttering silence (930). However, while Lukose’s term, Keraleeyatham, is useful as a sociological compass, I contend that it has even more complex connotations. Its ethos of “Nair-ism” (Nayar was the dominant caste identity in Kerala), which could have been a site of resistance and identity formation, instead becomes a site of nationalist, regional linguistic supremacy arising out of Hindu imaginary. Second, this ideology could not have been developed in the era of pre-globalised state-run television but now, in the wake of globalisation and satellite television, we see this spectacle of “discipline and punish” enacted on the world stage. Thus, although I do see a possibility for a more positive Keraleeyatham that is organic, inclusive, and radical, for the moment we have a hegemonic, exclusive, and hierarchical statist approach to regional identity that needs to be re-evaluated. Articulating the Authentic via the Simulacrum Welcome to the Malayalee matrix. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum is our entry point into visualising the code of reality television. In a state noted for its distinctly left-leaning politics and Communist Party history which underwent radical reversal in the 1990s, the political front in Kerala is still dominated by the LDF (Left Democratic Front), and resistance to the state is an institutionalised and satirised daily event, as marked by the marchers who gather and stop traffic at Palayam in the capital city daily at noon. Issues of poverty and corporate disenfranchisement plague the farming and fishing communities while people suffer transportation tragedies, failures of road development and ferry upkeep on a daily basis. Writers and activists rail against imminent aerial bombing of Maoists insurgent groups, reading in such statist violence repression of the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples scattered across many states of eastern and southern India. Alongside energy and ration supply issues, politics light up the average Keralaite, and yet the most popular “reality” television show reflects none of it. Other than paying faux multicultural tribute to all the festivals that come and go (such as Id, Diwaali, Christmas, and Kerala Piravi [Kerala Day on 1 November]), mainly through Renjini’s dress and chatter, ISS does all it can to remove itself from the turmoil of the everyday. Much in the same way that Bollywood cinema has allowed the masses to escape the oppressions of “the everyday,” reality television promises speculative pleasure produced on the backs of young performers who do not even have to be paid for their labour. Unlike Malayalam cinema’s penchant for hard-hitting politics and narratives of unaccounted for, everyday lives in neo-realist style, today’s reality television—with its excessive sound and light effects, glittering stages and bejewelled participants, repeat zooms, frontal shots, and artificial enhancements—exploits the paradox of hyper-authenticity (Rose and Wood 295). In her useful account of America’s top reality show, American Idol, Katherine Meizel investigates the fascination with the show’s winners and the losers, and the drama of an American “ideal” of diligence and ambition that is seen to be at the heart of the show. She writes, “It is about selling the Dream—regardless of whether it results in success or failure—and about the enactment of ideology that hovers at the edges of any discourse about American morality. It is the potential of great ambition, rather than of great talent, that drives these hopefuls and inspires their fans” (486). In enacting the global via the site of the local (Malayalam and Tamil songs primarily), ISS assumes the mantle of Americanism through the plain-spoken, direct commentaries of the singers who, like their US counterparts, routinely tell us how all of it has changed their lives. In other words, this retrospective meta-narrative becomes more important than the show itself. True to Baudrillard’s theory, ISS blurs the line between actual need and the “need” fabricated by the media and multinational corporations like Idea Cellular and Confident Group (which builds luxury homes, primarily for the new bourgeoisie and nostalgic “returnees” from the diaspora). The “New Kerala” is marked, for the locals, by extravagant (mostly unoccupied) constructions of photogenic homes in garish colours, located in the middle of chaos: the traditional nattumparathu (countryside) wooden homes, and traffic congestion. The homes, promised at the end of these shows, have a “value” based on the hyper-real economy of the show rather than an actual utility value. Yet those who move from the “old” world to the “new” do not always fare well. In local papers, the young artists are often criticised for their new-found haughtiness and disinclination to visit ill relatives in hospital: a veritable sin in a culture that places the nadu and kin above all narratives of progress. In other words, nothing quite adds up: the language and ideologies of the show, espoused most succinctly by its inarticulate host, is a language that obscures its distance from reality. ISS maps onto its audience the emblematic difference between “citizen” and “population”. Through the chaotic, state-sanctioned paralegal devices that allow the slum-dwellers and other property-less people to dwell in the cities, the voices of the labourers (such as the unions) have been silenced. It is a nation ever more geographically divided between the middle-classes which retreat into their gated neighbourhoods, and the shanty-town denizens who are represented by the rising class of religio-fundamentalist leaders. While the poor vote in the Hindu hegemony, the middle classes text in their votes to reality shows like ISS. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the “new segregated and exclusive spaces for the managerial and technocratic elite” (143) which is obsessed by media images, international travel, suburbanisation, and high technology. I wish to add to this list the artificially created community of ISS performers and stars; these are, indeed, the virtual and global extension of Chatterjee’s exclusive, elite communities, decrying the new bourgeois order of Indian urbanity, repackaged as Malayalee, moneyed, and Nayar. Meanwhile, the Hindu Right flexes its muscle under the show’s glittery surface: neither menacing nor fundamentalist, it is now “hip” to be Hindu. Thus while, on the surface, ISS operates according to the cliché, musicinu mathamilla (“music has no religion”), I would contend that it perpetuates a colonising space of Hindu-nationalist hegemony which standardises music appreciation, flattens music performance into an “art” developed solely to serve commercial cinema, and produces a dialectic of Keraleeyatham that erases the multiplicities of its “real.” This ideology, meanwhile, colonises from within. The public performance plays out in the private sphere where the show is consumed; at the same time, the private is inserted into the public with SMS calls that ultimately help seal the juridicality of the show and give the impression of “democracy.” Like the many networks that bring the sentiments of melody and melancholy to our dinner table, I would like to offer you this alternative account of ISS as part of a bid for a more vociferous, and critical, engagement with reality television and its modes of production. Somehow we need to find a way to savour, once again, the non-mimetic aspects of art and to salvage our darkness from the glitter of the “normalising” popular media. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1975. ———. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Lukose, Ritty. “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (Summer 2005): 915-35. Meizel, Katherine. “Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol.” Popular Music and Society 32.4 (Oct. 2009): 475-88. Rose, Randall L., and Stacy L. Wood. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (Sep. 2005): 284-96.