From Despair to Wonder: Scenes of Transcendence in Indian Cinema

Abstract

This article examines how three classic Hindi films-Pyasaa, The Guide, and Jagate Raho-draw on Indic paradigms of devotional love and śānta rasa and how they use "wonder" as a resolution to distressing emotions experienced by the characters and elicited in the viewer. To this effect, the article emphasizes how socio-cultural models of appraisal elicit various kinds of emotion, and, from this culturally situated but broadly universalist perspective, it traces the journey of the protagonists from fear, dejection, and despair toward amazement and peace. Among contemporary cognitive theories of emotion, the article uses perspectives drawn from the appraisal theory.

Mind and creativity: Insights from rasa theory with special focus on sahṛdaya (the appreciative critic)

“…Aesthetic delight is referred to by Abhinavagupta as “ camatkāra ”—a Sanskrit term he also used for religious experience—which means “wonder” or “astonishment” and implies “the cessation of a world—the ordinary, historical world, the saṃsarā —and its sudden replacement by a new dimension of reality” (as cited in Haberman, 2001, p. 21). This new dimension of reality is the direct consequence of self-transcendence: “When the self is distanced from the world, even from the body and its immediate concerns, non-adaptive goal satisfaction is privileged in favor of interests that are larger than one individual and one particular socio-historical time zone” (Pandit, 2008, p. 82). Thus Oatley (2004) claims that literature in the rasa tradition allows us to see deeply into the nature of things in a way that transcends the egotism of everyday emotions.…”