Ami Upadhyay. A Handbook of the Indian Poetics and Aesthetics. Bareilly: Prakash E book Depot, 2017, Web pages 177, Price: Rs. 125/-. ISBN 978-81-7977-601-8
While curiosity in classical Indian poetics has been stay, almost nothing new looks to have been extra or found more than the past 50 %-a-century or more. New publications by professors of English, at most effective, have been repetitive. A scholar of the stature of Ananda Coomaraswamy is awaited to relate Sanskrit poetics to Western theoretical developments in the present century.
Getting mentioned this, I am delighted to search via the guide in hand, a “compendium of delight,” as Ami Upadhyay claims. Ami is a classical dancer and instructor of English language and comparative literature, and knowledgeable to notify us about Indian poetics and aesthetics, which includes theories of Rasa, Riti, Dhvani, Vakrokti, Alankaras, Aucitya, Guna-Dosa, and many others. She certainly dwells on Bharata’s Natya Shashtra and briefly touches on other Sanskrit poeticians and theorists these types of as Dandin, Jagannatha, Kuntaka, Abhinavagupta, Ksemendra Rajasekhara, Vishwanatha, Hemendra and other people, on the just one hand, and Plato, Aristotle, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and other Europeans, on the other.
Organised in three pieces, the very first component seeks to outline aesthetics, poetry, and drama (Natya, Nataka and Kavya) with a temporary description of the history of Indian poetics. The second component promotions with the several educational institutions of Indian poetics, conveying the attribute elements of the Rasa in the Vedas, Upanishads, and Ayurveda rasa as Ananda (pleasure) Sringara rasa (erotic sentiments) Karuna rasa (pathetic sentiment) Raudra and Vira rasa (the awful and the heroic) Hasya rasa and Adbhuta rasa (the comedian and the marvellous) Bhayanak and Vibhatsa rasa (the terrible and the odious) and Santa rasa (the tranquil). Ami also discounts with the principle and framework fundamental the Natya Shashtra in 10 chapters. In the remaining ten chapters of the next component, she discusses the theoretical and explanatory contributions from other well known poeticians and aesthetes. The third section presents a listing of key theorists and their works glossary of vital conditions, and selected bibliography.
The shorter chapters on Coomaraswamy, and Indian and Western Literary criticism and poetics, along with the appendices ought to help new scholars go after further review in a issue which is already aspect of English literature class in quite a few universities in India and overseas.
Ami’s handbook is obviously prepared and nicely-developed, but omission of R S Tiwary’s A Critical Approach to Classical Indian Poetics (1984) from her Bibliography is disappointing.
I am happy to recommend it to Honour’s and M A learners.
–Professor R K Singh