FROM ONCE READ TO TWICE PERFORMED: EXPLORING THE QUESTIONS OF ERFORMATIVITY AND RASA IN MODERN INDIAN DRAMA

Recognising, analysing, and theorising the convergence and collapse of clearlydemarcated realities, hierarchies, and categories is at the heart of postmodernism:this premise is at the core of this article when mediating two distinctive theories ofcriticism. The paper is drawn on the dualitatem of the critical theories ofPerformativity and Rasa with the objective of initiating deliberations and debates onIndian Aesthetics. Performance studies as an interdisciplinary discourse usesperformance as a lens to engage with social, political, religious questions. The RasaTheory in Indian dramaturgy and aesthetics have been critically analysed andapplied on quite a few western and Indian literary works but seldom has a literarywork been critically studied through the dual critical lenses of performativity inrelation to the Rasa experience. Rasa is a manifestation of emotions translated tothe audience in the form of shared experience. The proposed research is a humbleattempt to engage with the questions: How performance of a drama and its affectiveexperience can be attributed to the Rasa experience? This interdisciplinary researchis contextualised in modern drama where in the complex matrix of performance, itsaffect becomes a shared Rasa experience that resonates in the form of a narrativewith binaries of universality and subjectivity.