01 Introduction

CHAPTER 1

1. Introduction

This thesis adopts a qualitative Indian psychological approach to study three mental states - asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā - that are listed, described, and illustrated through vignettes in Sanskrit poetics. By “Indian psychological approach” is meant an approach to psychology founded on ideas and practices that developed over several centuries in India (Cornelissen, Misra, & Varma, 2011). For more than two millennia, the classical Indian language of Sanskrit has been enriched by the works of several aestheticians. Many among them rearranged existing textual material, some produced commentaries that can aid us in understanding primary texts, yet others critiqued age-old tenets, a few reinterpreted canons on the basis of their own philosophical orientations, a small number of them employed aesthetics as a tool to understand religious doctrine, and a handful came up with path-breaking theories capable of integrating diverse concepts. One important topic which a majority of them, if not all, focused was on the communication by and through literary works of myriad mental states, including emotions.

In spite of this fact, psychology in general and emotion studies in particular have not taken serious note of Sanskrit poetics. It is only recently, with the recognition of emotion studies as “a highly multidisciplinary field” (Sanders, 2014, p. 1) and the appreciation of literature as an important source of knowledge about emotions (Oatley, 2009), that Sanskrit poetics is making inroads into psychology. Even so, when compared to psychological studies on emotions in classical Greek and Roman literature, those that prioritize Sanskrit literature and poetics are few and far between. It is not difficult to see why this is so. Psychologists in India, as observed by Mishra (2006), are more or less completely dependent on Western psychological theories and ideas.(4) They are not particularly conversant with the Sanskrit language or its literary and aesthetic traditions. On the other side, Sanskrit pundits, immersed though they may be in the study of texts from a bygone era, cannot see the relevance of those texts for present times. This thesis is an attempt to bridge the gap that exists between contemporary psychology and traditional Sanskrit aesthetics, thereby initiating a dialogue between the scholars belonging to these two knowledge domains.

The three target mental states of this thesis’s investigation have been chosen keeping in mind not only their correspondence to certain categories of emotions that are studied by mainstream psychology but also their importance in Sanskrit poetics and literature. Sanskrit poets have frequently delineated these mental states in their characters and Sanskrit aestheticians have formulated theories that associate them with specific other mental states, distinct personality types and life-goals, and a lesser or greater degree of psychological wellbeing. Since the thesis necessitates interpretation of historically situated and culturally demarcated text from Sanskrit poetics and literature and since such interpretation can gain validity only through the active-reflective engagement of the researcher who allows it to pass through the sieve of lived experience, a qualitative mode of inquiry serves best the task at hand. In particular, the researcher’s familiarity with the world of Sanskrit poetry as a poet himself and his acquaintance as a practising psychiatrist with the trials and tribulations of everyday people have endowed him with an enriched awareness of lived experience that can find its fulfilment in the sort of qualitative inquiry that this thesis demands. The sections that follow discuss the scope of emotions and self-conscious emotions in Western psychology and Sanskrit poetics; specify the thesis’s objectives; and provide an outline of the thesis.

1.1 Scope of emotions and self-conscious emotions in Western psychology

Amidst debates about whether the word ’emotion’ describes a naturally occurring category or not (e.g., Barrett, 2006; Griffiths, 1997, 2004; Dixon, 2012; Shweder, 2012), there is recently a pronounced expansion in the field of emotion research (Tracy & Robins, 2007). Whereas emotion was a long-neglected subject in Western psychology, partly because of the view that it represented a destructive force capable of subverting cognition, the recent accumulation of evidence to the contrary – in the form of research highlighting the adaptive function of emotion and cognition-emotion interaction – has been responsible for fuelling the field of emotion studies (Forgas, 2008). So much so, that we now speak of an “emotion revolution” (Caldwell-Harris, 2008) or an “affective turn” (Hogan, 2011, p. 9). While there is an “affective turn” in psychology on the one hand, the field, on the other hand, has also been witnessing a “narrative turn” that emphasizes study of narrative as a way of gaining deeper insights into personhood and psychological processes (Schiff, 2017).

These “turns” have helped bring together emotion and narrative under the rubric of “affective narratology” (Hogan, 2010, 2011) though, as pointed by Schiff (2017), reductionist approaches to mental processes still rule the roost in psychology and more complex ways of looking at life, as for example, through the narrative lens, are relegated to the periphery.

The field of emotion studies now recognizes a two-fold classification of emotions into the ‘basic’ and ‘self-conscious’ emotions. The former group of emotions (sadness, fear, anger, etc.) have a well-documented neurobiological basis, emerge early in life, perform a survival-related function, are associated with a universally recognizable facial expression, and recruit fewer cognitive processes in comparison to the latter group (the commonly studied of which are shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, and envy) that have a less clear-cut neurobiological basis, emerge later in life, perform a social function, are not associated with a universally recognizable facial expression, and require complex cognitive mechanisms (Tracy & Robins, 2007).(5)

Research on self-conscious emotions has not progressed at the same pace as that on basic emotions. Theoretical and methodological reasons such as the preferential focus of researchers on basic emotions, the subsuming of self-conscious emotions within basic emotions category, the difficulty involved in eliciting self-conscious emotions under laboratory conditions, and the effort required to measure self-conscious emotions even after successfully eliciting them have been cited for explaining this difference (Tracy & Robins, 2004). The discussion carried on till now presents the following five binaries:

• (a) Western psychological approach and Indian psychological approach;
• (b) Reductionist approaches and non-reductionist approaches to studying psychological processes;
• (c) Cognition and emotion;
• (d) Basic emotions and self-conscious emotions; and
• (e) Classical Western (Greek, and Roman) literature and Sanskrit literature.

In each of these binaries, the second element was or continues to be low-priority in psychology. This thesis represents a meeting point of all the low-priority elements. It adopts an Indian psychological, non-reductionist approach to study a triad of self-conscious emotions documented in Sanskrit poetics and illustrated by aestheticians through vignette verses culled out from Sanskrit literature. However, this very fact also presents a unique challenge to research.

1.2 Scope of emotions and self-conscious emotions in Sanskrit poetics

Sanskrit poetics’ engagement with mental states, including emotions, is historically rooted in dramaturgy - in Bharata’s (c. 2nd century BC to c. 2nd century AD) ‘Nāṭyaśāstra’, a comprehensive treatise dealing with drama and its allied arts. Sanskrit aestheticians, beginning with Bharata, have enumerated at least 49 modes (vṛtti-s) in which the mind (citta) can exist.¹ In the parlance of Sanskrit poetics, each mental mode is called ‘bhāva’, a term that can be translated as ‘mental state’. The purpose of any literary work must be to communicate, through its characters, some of these mental states to the audience. From one vantage point, not all mental states are capable of being communicated to the same degree. Some mental states are long-lasting and therefore pervade an entire narrative or larger portions of it. Such mental states, to put simply, form the take-home message of a literary work. Sanskrit aestheticians recognize eight (or nine) such enduring mental states (sthāyibhāva-s).

Examples of enduring mental states include love, anger, fear, and sorrow. The remaining 41 mental states can be classified into two groups: 33 accessory transient mental states (vyabhicāri-bhāva-s) and eight accessory transient psychophysical states (sāttvika-bhāva-s). Examples of the former are pride, jealousy, recollection, shame, and apprehension. The latter includes states such as tear flow, perspiration, palpitation, and goose bumps that are understood as having an internal (psychophysiological) and an external(physical) aspect to them.²

The 41 mental states described above are short-lived and do not have the inherent capacity to pervade larger sections of a narrative. However, they can function as accessories to the enduring mental state and make its communication more effective. The more such accessory states an enduring mental state manages to bring within its ambit, the more effective will its communication be.(4) Highly efficient communication of an enduring mental state transforms it into its aesthetic counterpart - its ‘rasa’.(4) Traditionally, it is understood that the eight (or nine) enduring mental states can alone graduate to the level of rasa whereas the 41 accessory mental states cannot.

Figuring out the most important mental states that are communicable through literary works and fixing their number is only one part of the story. A more important question is how mental states, internal to real-life persons and literary characters alike and therefore inaccessible, can even be communicated. According to Sanskrit aestheticians, it is possible to infer real-life mental states by accessing information about their antecedent stimuli (kāraṇa-s) and consequent responses (kārya-s).³

Unlike real-life mental states, the mental states of literary characters are known not through inference but a process called ‘dhvani’ - translated by Pollock (2016, p. 12) as “implicature”. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to discuss implicature in greater detail.

However, to put in a nutshell, an everyday mental state and the stimulus-response pair from which it is inferred are personally relevant to real-life individuals. For example, when we infer another person’s sorrow through our knowledge about his loss and by observing him cry, we are aware that his loss, sorrow, and act of crying are his and not ours or somebody else’s. On the other hand, the mental state that a literary character is depicted as having and the stimulus-response pair that implicates it are of a generalized nature⁴, neither belonging to the character nor to the audience alone. ⁵

Secondly, there is a phenomenological difference between inferred and implicated mental states. While inferring the mental states of real-life others, we ourselves experience pleasurable or displeasurable mental states. Alternatively, we may assume a neutral stance and not experience any mental state at all.⁶ However, when the mental states of literary characters are communicated to us through implicature, we experience aesthetic delight that differs qualitatively from everyday pleasure.⁷(5)

If aesthetic mental states are experientially different from everyday mental states, what can we learn about the latter by studying the former? In other words, can the discipline of psychology, dealing as it does with real-world mental states, be enriched by the study of literature that communicates to us mental states of a different sort?

According to Sanskrit poetics, though mental states communicated by literature are qualitatively different from those we infer in real life, they are still ontologically based in the latter. The same stimulus-response pairs from which we infer the mental states of real-world actors are delineated by poets for communicating the mental states of literary characters.⁸ What must give rise to sorrow in the case of real-world individuals must give rise to sorrow even in the case of literary characters. Likewise, how real-world individuals express their sorrow must also coincide with the way in which literary characters express their sorrow.

If we set aside the observation that stimulus-response pairs graduate from being personal to becoming impersonal and generalized in the case of literary characters but retain their personal nature when it comes to real-world actors and that aesthetically communicated mental states are experientially different from the mental states that we infer in real-world others, it is easy to appreciate how mental states of literary characters are not incommensurate with everyday mental states.

Since this thesis is not particularly about the emotions of literary characters but about how the knowledge of such emotions can help us understand the emotions of realworld individuals, it sidelines the concept of ‘implicature’ in favor of inference. Put differently, it regards mental states of literary characters as inferable in the same way that those of real-world actors are. In doing so, it takes a position consonant with that of Shankuka, an earlier commentator on the Nāṭyaśāstra.⁹

The three self-conscious emotions selected for this study figure among the 33 accessory transient mental states enumerated by Bharata. Here, it is important to note that Bharata does not distinguish mental states into cognitions, emotions, or such other psychological categories. This is so, because, from the practical standpoint of onstage representation, it is not important whether a mental state qualifies as cognition or emotion.

The only thing that actors are concerned with is that they effectively communicate mental states, whatsoever they may be, to the audience.

1.3 Objectives of the thesis

The following two objectives guide this thesis:

1. Using an Indian psychological approach to understand asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā mental states listed, documented, and illustrated through vignettes in Sanskrit poetics
2. Comparing and contrasting asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā with their corresponding selfconscious emotions in contemporary psychology

Towards achieving these objectives, the thesis

• (a) documents existing textual information on asūyā, garva, vrīḍā, and related concepts (self, personality, life-goals, mind, mental states, etc.) from Sanskrit poetics and the larger body of Indian knowledge systems (the Samkhya system of Indian philosophy in particular¹⁰) that have contributed to Sanskrit poetics;
• (b) builds models on the basis of such information;
• (c) applies the models for analyzing three Sanskrit verses provided by Sanskrit aestheticians for illustrating asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā; and
• (d) addresses a set of questions that call our attention to conceptual similarities and differences between asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā on the one hand and their counterpart self-conscious emotions on the other.

1.4 Outline of the thesis

In addition to this introductory chapter, the thesis comprises of four more chapters.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 reviews literature from mainstream Western psychology and Indian psychology on emotions, self-conscious emotions, and a host of other concepts in whose broader context the former two must be understood. These other concepts include mind, mental states, behavior, self, consciousness, personality, personality traits, and goals. Four dominant approaches to understanding emotions – basic emotions approach, cognitive appraisal approach, psychological constructionist approach, and social constructionist approach – are then reviewed. Since the thesis underscores the importance of narratives in emotion research, the narrative methodology of studying emotions is dealt with in some detail. After a general review of self-conscious emotions, there is a summary of studies on specific self-conscious emotions from each of the four dominant approaches mentioned above.

The review on studies from Indian psychology foregrounds the following points:

• the centrality of consciousness in understanding the real nature of phenomena;
• the dualism of matter and consciousness or alternatively, the unity of consciousness;
• the importance of personhood in integrating diverse mental functions;
• usefulness of the Samkhya theory of guṇa-s in studying personality;
• the motivational role of life-goals (puruṣārtha-s);
• the usefulness of Indian aesthetic theory for understanding mental states of literary characters as well as real-world individuals;
• the lack of coherent models as an impediment in the progress of Indian psychology; and
• the absence of studies that have bridges self-conscious emotions and Sanskrit poetics.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 classifies the thesis’s data into two groups: existing textual data and vignette verses. Nine headings are proposed under which existing textual data can be collated. These include

• definitions;
• list of antecedents;
• list of consequents;
• list of enduring mental states in whose context asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā can occur transiently;
• list of other mental states in whose context asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā can figure;
• list of other mental states that can arise in the context of asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā;
• evocation and expression of asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā in different character types;
• terms that are conceptually related to asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā; and
• miscellaneous details.

Three indigenous models that are developed on the basis of pointers in Sanskrit poetics and that can help us understand mental states of literary characters are then presented. Model 1, 2 and 3 respectively study isolated mental states, interacting mental states, and mental states as delimited by personality type (uddhata, lalita, udātta, or śānta type) and personality-specific life-goal (artha, kāma, dharma, or mokṣa).

The schematic representation, as envisioned by model 2, of a character’s interacting mental states can be referred to as his/her current “mental state signature” – a new term introduced in this thesis. A character’s mental state signature remains more or less stable just as our handwritten signatures do. A change in the mental state signature is correlated with a change in life-goal.

After discussing the three models described above, Chapter 3 quotes three Sanskrit vignette verses for analysis and translates them into English. Lastly, three questions are raised that are pertinent to the study of similarities and dissimilarities between the target mental states from Sanskrit aesthetics and their counterpart self-conscious emotions.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 brings together the original contributions of this thesis. In bulk, it is more than all the other four chapters put together. It is divided into three parts.

• The first part documents existing textual data on asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā;
• the second part employs the three models developed in Chapter 3 to analyze three vignette verses, one each for each of the thesis’s three target mental states;
• and the third part compares and contrasts asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā with their counterpart self-conscious emotions by way of addressing the questions that were raised at the end of Chapter 3.

p1

Though the first part of this chapter is predominantly concerned with textual documentation, it also incorporates some analysis, especially to bring out conceptual differences between the thesis’s target mental states and mental states that are closely related to them. The analyses of differences between asūyā, mātsarya, and īrṣyā; between garva, ahaṅkāra and abhimāna; and between vrīḍā, lajjā, and śaṅkā are some examples that can be quoted here. The first part ends with the observation that all the three mental states studied in this thesis have something to do with self-identity. Among individuals experiencing garva, asūyā, and vrīḍā, the first discounts the very possibility of challenge to his/her self-identity, the second is acutely aware of a challenge someone else poses to his/her self-identity, and the third focuses on the fact that his/her self-identity has not just been challenged, but also disrupted.

p2

The analysis of vignette verses in the second part requires isolating dialogue units from the verses and their proximal as well as distal narrative contexts. Some dialogue units inform us about a mental state’s antecedent whereas others perform the function (say, criticism, disrespect, or remorsefulness) of a mental state’s consequent response. In some cases, the same dialogue unit may execute both the functions. Alternatively, a dialogue unit may make direct mention of a character’s mental state. Lastly, dialogue units taken from the larger narrative context of a vignette verse can provide us information about a character’s multiple traits. Thus, dialogue units help us figure out a character’s mental state (by providing information about its stimulus and response) as well as his/her personality type (by providing information about the traits that make up that personality). Under the analyses of vignette verses using model 2, mental state signatures of two characters (Parashurama and Rama) have been provided. These mental state signatures not only situate a given mental state in the midst of other mental states but also specify the sort of relationship shared by each mental state with another. Chapter 4 provides a guide on how to construct such mental state signatures.

p3

The third part of Chapter 4 compares and contrasts asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā with envy/jealousy, pride, and shame/guilt/embarrassment. Some of the important observations made in this section are as follows:

• (a) The relationship between sthāyibhāva-s and vyabhicāribhāva-s is not identical to the one between basic and self-conscious emotions;
• (b) All mental states can be considered as self-conscious on the basis of model 3;
• (c) Several conceptual similarities and differences are evident when asūyā, īrṣyā, and mātsarya are compared and contrasted with envy and jealousy;
• (d) The garva of uddhata and udātta characters can be correlated with the hubristic and authentic forms of pride;
• (e) Among the several stimulus-response pairs that can suggest vrīḍā, some may correlate with shame, others with guilt, and yet some with embarrassment;
• (f) Sanskrit aestheticians appear to employ specific words (such as ‘vailakṣya’ and hrī) to designate vrīḍā that is communicated by specific stimulus-response pairs;
• (g) Model 3 bears affinity to a dominant model of self-conscious emotions but also differs from it in some important respects;
• (h) Model 3 is compatible with recent psychological studies on ‘personality strengths’ (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) and the relationship between personality traits and goals; and
• (i) The personality types discussed under model 3 correlate with Fromm’s (1947/2002) orientations.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 commences with a short overview of the thesis. This is followed by a discussion on the thesis’s original contributions. These include

• (a) bridging the psychology of self-conscious emotions and Sanskrit poetics;
• (b) exhaustive textual documentation on asūyā, garva, and vrīḍā from Sanskrit poetics;
• (c) evolving models that can be used in Indian psychology to study mental states documented by Sanskrit aestheticians;
• (d) developing new approaches for analyzing narratives and understanding the mental states of literary characters;
• (e) connecting the proposed models through the novel concept of ‘mental state signature’; and
• (f) linking the concept of ‘mini-narrative’ (Hogan, 2003), standing for the stimulus-response pair of an emotion, to personality type.

Future implications of this thesis, including the application of its three models for examining other mental states and mental states of characters in languages other than Sanskrit, its usefulness in understanding the mental states of real-world individuals, the need for empirically investigating the relationship between well-being and a set of personality traits discussed under model 3, and the possibility of an Indian psychological approach to psychotherapy, self-reflection, and personal growth are discussed.