Ritualizing Performance in the Nāṭyaśāstra: Stage Worship, Auspiciousness, and Social Order

This paper examines how the Nāṭyaśāstra—a treatise on drama, performance, music, gesture, and theatrical practice (circa 2nd century CE)—integrates ritual into the theory and practice of theatre. Its central argument is that ritual prescriptions in the text have several functions—they authorize performance, protect the theatrical space, and regulate the social order surrounding the stage. The paper focuses on the construction and consecration of the playhouse, the worship of stage deities, the distribution of offerings, the pūrvaraṅga (preliminary rites before performance), and the consequences attached to correct or incorrect ritual performance. By analyzing these passages, the paper shows that the Nāṭyaśāstra treats theatre as a technically complex art whose efficacy depends not only on dramaturgy, music, gesture, and rasa (aesthetic sentiment) but also on ritual acts that confer auspiciousness and guard against obstruction by divine and potentially disruptive beings. The paper, therefore, argues that the Nāṭyaśāstra sacralizes performance while also presenting ritual as one component within a broader śāstric (treatise-based) framework of theatrical practice, rather than as the whole of performance.