Natyashastra: The Scripture of All Performing Arts

Attributed to sage Bharata and composed between 200 BCE and 200 CE, the Natyashastra runs to thirty-six chapters covering dance, drama, music, stagecraft, costume and aesthetics.

Its central gift is the theory of rasa: art succeeds when a prepared performer awakens a corresponding feeling in a prepared spectator. Around that idea it codifies hastas, karanas, bhedas and the structure of performance itself.

Every Bharatanatyam class today, whether in Chennai or online, quietly inherits this text. When a teacher corrects an adavu, she is applying a grammar written down two thousand years ago and kept alive in practice.