The peaceful feeling of transcendence palpable in the NBCLC chapel isśānta, therasaof peace.Śāntawon a place as the ninthrasa, in addition to the eight enumerated by Bharata, after long debate. Abhinavagupta (tenth century), possibly India’s greatest literary theorist, championsśāntaas the ninth and most importantrasa, the one into which all other aesthetic emotions eventually resolve. We shall consider Abhinavagupta’s notion ofśāntaas it evolves in his works of literary criticism: theLocana(Loc), a commentary on Ānandavardhana’sDhvanyāloka(DhĀ);² and theAbhinavabhāratī(ABh), a commentary on theNāṭya Śāstra.³ As not only...

In the work of Jyoti Sahi, a contemporary Indian Christian artist who resides near Bangalore, the peaceful sentiment has a special place among therasas. Much of Sahi’s work explores the interplay of opposites in relation to Indian culture and religion. His bookThe Child and the Serpent, for example, looks for symbols of unconscious structures (the serpent) and their birth into consciousness (the child). His use of Jungian psychology grounds his keen interest in Hindu art and mythology in pre-Aryan themes and rituals, so that he draws inspiration both from high Sanskritic culture and from Dalit and Tribal folk...

The followers of the medievalbhaktisaint Caitanya, known as the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, cultivate love for Kṛṣṇa by contemplating scenes from his life. Among the favorite scenes for contemplation are the five chapters of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa that narrate the story of therāsa līlā, the dance Kṛṣṇa performs with his belovedgopīs. In this celebrated passage, Kṛṣṇa calls the cowmaidens to him with the sound of his flute. They abruptly leave home in the middle of their activities (getting dressed, applying makeup, milking cows, nursing babies) to go to him. After enjoying themselves with him for a while, the...

Like Rūpa Gosvāmin, the medieval Christian theologian Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) elevates love over all other emotions in the devotional life. He finds ample material for the devotional sentiment of love in the biblical Song of Songs. He writes no fewer than eighty-six sermons on the first chapters of this short book of Hebrew wisdom literature, which consists of a series of poetic exchanges between two lovers. Bernard ranks “reverence” and its attendant emotions of “horror or stupor or fear or wonder” (characteristic ofśāntain Rūpa’s system) far below the intimacy of love (Serm. 83.3).¹ For him, nuptial...

The four distancing strategies discussed in the last chapter set fences around appropriate devotional feeling, but they also set the devotional community apart from persons suspected of inappropriate love for God. This dynamic is most clear with regard to rival religious groups. Bernard of Clairvaux projects perverse practices upon heretical groups, and later church officials view with profound suspicion unauthorized women who claim Christ as their lover. These moves anticipate the Fourth Lateran Council’s careful circumscription of the real presence and body of Christ to the institutional Church and its sacraments.¹ The rivalry of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas with other sects around...

Eight women take the stage against a backdrop depicting a rural Indian village. Each holds aparai, the round, flat hand drum with which their “untouchable” ancestors announced the deaths of members of the wider community. They step, kick, and stomp their feet in identical choreography, ankle bells jangling, punctuating their dance with calls of “Hey! Hey!” as a wake-up call to their audience. As they weave among one another in two lines, they beat complex rhythms on their drums, posture erect, smiling broadly.

After an extended period of vigorous, exuberant dancing and drumming, a middle man, who arranges labor...

The Rural Education for Development Society (REDS) in Karnataka, South India, produces the piece of street theatre just described. The organization works for the promotion of Dalits, the current preferred name for the group formerly known as Untouchables or Harijans. REDS works in over one thousand villages, with pro-Dalit projects ranging from the organization of democratic community councils (Panchayats) to the construction and distribution of solar-powered lamps to families without electricity. There are seventy-seven Dalit groups in the South Indian state of Tamilnadu alone, and these groups include a variety of professions, religions, and ideological approaches to Dalit liberation. In...

The REDS dancers drum up a cauldron of emotions: joy in communal celebration, fear and confusion in the face of violence, courage and defiance toward oppressors, and pride in their victory. The beat of the drum communicates the impetus of these emotions, as do the force of the physical actions of pushing, kicking, and stomping. One of the important emotions that fuels their efforts is anger, which, when distilled into its pure form, can be savored as therasaof fury (raudra).¹ Fury is integral to the composition, performance, and reception of Dalit arts for liberation. In the REDS street...

There is no inherent reason that European philosophical traditions must govern Christian theology across the globe. The cultures of Asia, Africa, and South America, where the majority of Christians now live, offer categories for imagining the life of faith, not only for local or indigenous theologies but for the theological “mainstream” as well. As an aesthetic perspective that relates contextual and bodily aspects of emotion to religious experience,rasasheds light on human flourishing and has much to offer a holistic theology of the emotions.

This venture into the realm of emotion and the arts has opened a discursive space...

The sight of celestial beings evokes wonder. So does the expression of religious devotion in monuments of paint and stone. Mary trembles before the appearance of the angel. Arjuna gasps in astonishment when Kṛṣṇa, his charioteer, is revealed in his true divine form. The tourist pauses, awestruck, as she enters the halls of the Meenakshi Temple, just as she does when she sets foot in a great cathedral. She cannot take it all in.

Faced with eruptions of the wondrous across the world’s religious traditions, we seek manageable strategies for making them comprehensible. Interreligious dialogue often takes its point of...