Long before Stanislavski, Indian theatre had its own theory of acting — and a very sophisticated one. The Natyashastra, a Sanskrit treatise on drama attributed to the sage Bharata Muni and usually dated to somewhere between 200 BCE and 200 CE, describes everything from stage construction to music, movement, costume and the emotional life of a performance.
At its heart is the idea of rasa. For actors in India today — whether you're doing Kannada, Hindi or English theatre, realism or something stylised — it's a framework worth knowing and a practice worth doing.
Rasa and bhava: the actor and the audience
Rasa literally means juice, flavour or essence. In the Natyashastra it is what the audience tastes: the aesthetic experience a performance produces in the people watching.
What the performer works with is bhava — the emotional state they express. The text describes how a lasting emotional state (the sthayi bhava), supported by its causes, by its outward signs and by passing feelings, is turned into rasa for the spectator.
This distinction is a gift for modern actors. It says your job is not to feel things at the audience. Your job is to build the conditions — the circumstances, the behaviour, the expression — that let the audience experience something. That is remarkably close to what Stanislavski would say centuries later.
The nine rasas
Bharata described eight rasas. A ninth, shanta (peace), was argued for by later thinkers and championed by the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta around the tenth and eleventh centuries. Together they are known as navarasa — the nine rasas. Each rests on a dominant emotional state:
- Shringara — love, beauty, longing. Rooted in rati (love).
- Hasya — the comic, laughter. Rooted in hasa (mirth).
- Karuna — compassion, pathos. Rooted in shoka (sorrow).
- Raudra — fury. Rooted in krodha (anger).
- Veera — heroism, courage. Rooted in utsaha (energy, determination).
- Bhayanaka — terror. Rooted in bhaya (fear).
- Bibhatsa — disgust. Rooted in jugupsa (aversion).
- Adbhuta — wonder, amazement. Rooted in vismaya (astonishment).
- Shanta — peace, stillness. Usually linked to shama (calm).
The four kinds of abhinaya
The Natyashastra also names four channels of expression, called abhinaya. Every actor uses all four, whether they know the words or not:
- Angika — the body: posture, gesture, the eyes, the face.
- Vachika — the voice and the spoken word.
- Aharya — costume, make-up, props and the look of the stage.
- Sattvika — the involuntary signs of a real inner state: tears, trembling, a change of colour, a voice that breaks.
Sattvika is the one modern actors recognise most. It can't be faked directly — it arrives when the inner work is real — which is exactly why the tradition treats it as the highest form.
Why navarasa training works for modern actors
Classical forms such as Kathakali and Bharatanatyam train the rasas as a daily discipline, especially through the face and eyes. Contemporary theatre in India borrows from this, and for good reason:
- It widens your range. Most actors have two or three emotional colours they reach for. Navarasa makes you visit all nine, including the ones you avoid (disgust and terror are the usual suspects).
- It builds control. Being able to move cleanly from one state to another is the same skill you need when a scene turns on a single line.
- It connects body and feeling. You learn that a change in breath, eyes or spine can lead you into an emotion — not just express one.
A navarasa practice in four rounds
Give yourself twenty minutes, a mirror if you like, and a quiet room.
- Breath and neutral. Stand or sit with a long spine. Breathe slowly for a minute until your face is soft and neutral. You'll return to this neutral between every rasa.
- Face only. Go through all nine rasas using only your face and eyes — about thirty seconds each. Let the breath change with each one: wonder lifts and opens it, fear catches it high in the chest, peace slows it right down. Return to neutral in between.
- Body only. Now keep the face quiet and express each rasa only through posture, weight and stillness. Heroism lifts the chest and plants the feet; disgust pulls the whole body away from something; compassion softens and reaches.
- One line, nine ways. Choose a neutral sentence — "He's here", or in Hindi, "वो आ गया" — and say it through each rasa in turn, using face, body and voice together. Then try going directly from one rasa to the next without neutral in between: love into fury, fear into laughter.
Scaling it for realistic theatre
Navarasa can look big, because classical training is built for stylised forms and large spaces. In a realistic play in a small studio, you don't need the full classical expression — you need the inner shift behind it. Two adjustments help:
- Do the full version in training, a fraction on stage. The range you built in practice is still there; you just show five per cent of it.
- Anchor every rasa in the scene's circumstances. Combine navarasa with Stanislavski's given circumstances and objectives (see our practical guide to Stanislavski). The rasa tells you the colour; the circumstances tell you why.
Navarasa and the voice
Vachika abhinaya — the voice — is the channel most actors under-train. Try the "one line, nine ways" round with your eyes closed, using only the voice. Can a listener tell karuna from shanta? Raudra from veera? If not, our 15-minute voice and diction warm-up is a good place to build the instrument.
A tradition worth practising
Navarasa is not a museum piece. It is a living vocabulary that dancers, theatre-makers and film actors across India still use. Practise it the way musicians practise scales: a little every day, until the range is simply there when a scene needs it.