Trails of Rasa: Tracing Hindu Theological Affect Across Postcolonial India

The study of affect has been historically attributed to Western philosophical traditions, beginning with Kant, Spinoza, Husserl, Freud, and Heidegger. In contemporary times, the politics of academic publications on affect invariably involve their ethnographic accounts from the ‘Orient’ but do not engage with these accounts as theories or epistemes in themselves. As a form of the decolonial methodology of undoing the Eurocentrism inherent within the academic study of affect and looking at its pluriversal conceptions, in this paper, I will discuss the Vedic concept of ‘Rasa’ that was first systematically defined by Bharata in the 2nd century BCE, its expansion by later Sanskrit scholars and its relevance in contemporary India.