This thesis argues that rasa theory, an Indian classical aesthetic framework describing both the distilled emotional "flavors" experienced by an audience and the performative process by which they are evoked, offers a robust and underrecognized model of embodied cognition. Through a combination of autoethnographic reflection, fieldwork with practitioners of kūṭiyāṭṭam, a Sanskrit theatre tradition in Kerala, India dating back to the 10th Century CE, textual analysis of the Nāṭyaśāstra and The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta, foundational Sanskritic texts on dramaturgy and aesthetic philosophy, and interdisciplinary engagement with cognitive science, I examine rasa not as a metaphor for mood or emotion, but as a structured epistemological process. The project traces how performance traditions across India cultivate rasa through embodied discipline, somatic resonance, and aesthetic transmission, and demonstrates how these practices align with and often exceed contemporary theories of intersubjectivity, entrainment, and affective cognition. Rasa emerges as a method that insists on the centrality of bodymind processes in the construction of shared knowledge. By returning to the visceral moment of rasa, as both object and event, this thesis claims aesthetic experience as a legitimate and rigorous site of knowing.
Courtney Kain (Fri,) studied this question.