Wednesday 6 July 2016

Teaching Design for Comparative Aesthetics Course

Here are some leads to design the teaching for the Comparative Aesthetics course:

1. In Part I of the course, the debate was on figuring out what is beauty in art, what is 'the beautiful' and what is the relationship between the beautiful and the good and such like. However, Indian aesthetics has not raised this question at all. On the contrary, the question in Indian aesthetics is how to evoke the right "response", "emotion" or "rasa" in the connoiseur. 

Broadly, one can say that in the Western tradition, the nature of the object of art is paramount, and in Indian aesthetics, the nature of the experience of art is paramount. So, making students see this distinction when they are reading a couple of ancient texts would be a good exercise. A simple way of doing it is to ask students whether in these Indic texts they see issues like realism, the message inherent in art and such like. The answer most probably would be in the negative. That is, issues like realism will not come up in these texts at all. Then some speculations from students about why do they think this is so would set the tenor of the course. 


2. Another aspect is to understand "rasa" itself. If by using a couple of critical pieces one can arrive at an appreciation of the meaning of "rasa" then it is a success in itself. Here is a pointer: just compare your response to an exquisite brew of tea leaves with that of someone who has no taste for or expertise in tea. While you are able to respond to the tea in many sophisticated ways and the tea is capable of bringing out subtle experiences in you, the other person who is not a connoisseur of tea can only experience a very unsophisticated experience of liquidy-bitterness. All those experiences you are privy to are completely lost on that person. Now, put simply, what you have and what is absent in that other person, is itself rasa. That is, rasa is the cultivation, evocation and experience of taste with respect to a particular field. The field could be anything from cooking to art to music to sport. That is why culinary taste and artistic taste are both referred to by the same name "rasa". 

Getting students to respond to the question, "what is entailed in cultivating a taste for something" is a useful activity. It helps if students can talk about a field in which they have some iota of taste themselves. It could be movies, cooking, cricket anything. But the point is to say what marks off an expert from a novice. Why or how would the expert derive more joy from the taste he has in a field compared to a novice and so on. All the Indian texts in the selection either directly or indirectly reflect on this question itself. 

3. Now to the last aspect: broadly one could say that while trying to understand the world and the human soul (or human mind or human subjectivity or what have you) through art is the aim of western aesthetics, the aim of Indian aesthetics is to educate the novice into accessing richer shades of experience itself and not to educate him about this or that aspect of our reality. This is the thrust of the word "comparative" in our comparative aesthetics". Coomaraswamy or some such reading should help you drive home this point. 

4. Finally, a note about texts: Bharatamuni, Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta could be your selection from the Indic category. You could suggest only a page or two of each and not more (This is for point 1 above). Similarly K Krishnamoorthy, Kathleen Marie Higgins and/or Richard Schechner
​ could help with cracking the rasa problem (Point 2 above). And finally, 
Ananda Coomaraswamy
​, ​
Edwin Gerow
​ and/or 
Chantal Maillard​ for the comparative angle (point 3 above). 

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