Natyashastra

A comprehensive Sanskrit treatise on dramaturgy, dance, music, and stagecraft, framed as a divine origin myth in which Brahma creates drama as a 'fifth Veda' open to all four social classes, unlike the Vedas themselves. It introduces the enormously influential theory of rasa, aesthetic emotion, and bhava, the states that produce it, still the reference framework for Indian classical dance, theater, and film criticism; it also covers theater architecture, makeup, and acoustics. The text catalogs eight principal rasas, from the erotic (shringara) and comic (hasya) to the heroic (vira) and terrible (raudra), each generated by a specific combination of physical, vocal, and psychological performance (the four types of abhinaya), and a ninth, the peaceful (shanta), was added by later commentators as the tradition continued to develop the framework. Its exact place of composition is unknown, and even its attribution to Bharata is legendary rather than historical.