“Aura” or “Rasa”? Toward an Intercultural Aesthetics of the Quotidian
摘要
This paper explores how the classical Indian aesthetic theory of rasa, traditionally confined to the domains of drama and poetry, might be meaningfully extended to account for aesthetic experience in everyday life. Drawing from seminal texts such as Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra and Pollock’s A Rasa Reader, the essay reconstructs rasa not merely as a dramaturgical outcome but as a perceptual orientation structured by sādhāraṇīkaraṇa (universalization), camatkāra (aesthetic wonder), and āsvāda (relishing). The central question guiding this inquiry is whether rasa, with its insistence on aesthetic distance and impersonal emotion, can emerge in non-art contexts without dissolving into mere sentiment or moral reflection. To this effect, the paper enters into dialogue with contemporary theories of everyday aesthetics, particularly the work of Thomas Leddy, James R. Williams, and Yuriko Saito. The essay argues that when the everyday is perceived with sahr̥dayatva, the cultivated sensibility of the aesthetic subject, it can become alaukika, or wondrous, without recourse to stylization or performance.