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A century later, the greatest exponent of rasa-dhvani theory, Abhinavagupta, wrote about this verse:
The suggestions of other properties … are endless; for example, his banishment from the kingdom, etc. And since these suggestions are countless, they ca
Rasa-dhvani can operate at the level of a word, a sentence, or an entire work. According to Anandavardhana, rasa is “an object on which no words can operate directly,” and therefore dhvani is the only way to manifest rasa.50 So Anandavardhana might have said to an aspiring writer: suggest, don’t tell. Dhvani is literally “reverberation,” and is often compared to the “sounding of a bell” or “a needle falling through a pile of lotus leaves.” If we hear the phrase, “A village on the Ganga” (in Sanskrit, gangayam ghoshah, literally “a village in the Ganga”) we understand that the village ca
Rasadhvani, the “truest” form of dhvani, it is an experience — along the lines of what we would call “a moment of tenderness” or “a pang of sadness.” It is, in short, an experience of rasa … [These rasas] are evoked through the clouds of non-denumerable, non-substitutable, non-propositional suggestions which surround these texts.51
The very sounds and rhythms of language — which preexist meaning — contribute to our experience of rasa. Abhinavagupta says that when we hear poetic language
without waiting for our understanding of the expressed meaning, [the stylistic qualities] set about building up the rasas, giving us a foretaste (āsvāda) of them. This is as much to say that as the rasas are suggested by style (saṅghaṭanā), the ground is laid for the relishing of a rasa at the very begi
Anandavardhana observes, “When ornamented by even one from among the varieties of dhvani, speech acquires a fresh colour, even though it follows a subject matter that has been treated by poets of the past.”53 Since the properties manifested by dhvani are countless, “poetical material … finds no limit …”
Not even Vacaspati [the god of speech] in a thousand efforts could exhaust it, any more than he could exhaust the nature of the universe.
For just as the nature of the universe, although it has manifested this marvellous proliferation of matter through the succession of past ages, ca
Anandavardhana accepted that there may be poetic texts in which the suggested meaning isn’t the dominant pleasure, or even present at all; he rather disdainfully refers to the latter as chitra kavya, picture poetry, flashy poetry: “Poetry which lacks rasa or an emotion (bhāva) as its final meaning, which is composed only by relying on novelties of literal sense and expression, and which gives the appearance of a picture, is citra …” Poetry that “gives the appearance of a picture” refers to very difficult pictorial arrangements in verse, similar to visual pattern poetry and topiary verses in the West — Sanskrit writers wrote stanzas in which interlocking syllables, if co
Now that Anandavardhana has shown us how vyanjana works in poetry to produce dhvani and rasa, he tells us, “Now that instruction is being offered to modern poets in the true principles of poetry, while citra may be much used in the efforts of begi
So rasa is what I felt that afternoon I discovered Hemingway at our kitchen table in Bombay, when the bleak undertow of his stories, roiling with unspoken emotion, flung me into an exaltation, a state of delight. Hemingway’s famous taut rhythms, the stripped simplicity of his diction, those repetitions of sound that he meticulously builds into his prose, all these enhance the iceberg-sized dhvani of what he leaves unsaid. Every word, every pause, every hesitation makes the dhvani of a story.
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The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.58
The only way to explain to you what I experienced when I first read Hemingway is to tell you to read those stories. And even then, you will read different stories. We may read the same texts, but the dhvani that manifests within you will be unique. Your beauty will be your own. If you reread a story that you read ten years ago, its dhvani within you will be new. Poetry’s beauty is infinite.