Across civilizations, the intimate triad of art, artist, and artistry has invited sustained reflection, anchored in the enduring question of aesthetics: what renders an object or performance beautiful and compelling?
Ovid’s Pygmalion in Metamorphoses remains a luminous emblem of this inquiry. A master sculptor, entranced by his own creation, embodies the paradox of creative lovean idea that has invited reinterpretation for millennia and continues to inspire artists across media.
Myths endure because they carry the power of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa (universalisation), allowing their figures, gestures, and morals to be reshaped across forms and epochs. This pliability, central to Indian aesthetic thought, enables artists to discover fresh resonances in poetry, performance, music, painting, and cinema.
Indian epics and the Puranas have long served as fertile sources for such renewal. In modern literature, S. L. Bhyrappa’s Dāṭu, Parva, Sākṣi, Mandra, Tabbaliyu nīnāde māgane, Nāyī Neralu, and Tantu exemplify how Puranic motifs, metaphors, and symbolism can be reimagined with rigorous craft and psychological depth.
Among these, Mandra offers a profound investigation into the relationship between art, artist, and artistry. Framed by Indian classical music, it traverses learning and discipline, creation and critique, and the inner life of the musician. In doing so, it becomes both art and art criticisma hallmark of classical Indian approaches to aesthetics.
India’s aesthetic tradition, stretching from Bharatamuni’s Natya Shastra to modern scholars such as Prof. M. Hiriyanna, locates the essence of aesthetic experience in rasa. Summarizing Hiriyanna’s insight, kavya is understood as kavi-karmacreation grounded not in mere replication of life, but in imaginative transformation. When self-consciousness recedes, the connoisseur enters rasanubhava, a distinctive detachment that is prized above didactic instruction. This experience is the core aesthetic good; any ethical or social “lessons” constitute secondary benefits.
This framework illuminates all arts, including cinema. In Indian cinema, it enables a reading that privileges aesthetic immersion over instruction, even when films thoughtfully incorporate śāstric references or cultural memory.
Kasināduni Viswanath stands as a consummate practitioner of this approach. In Sagara Sangamam (1983), an emotionally charged sequence evokes the Natya Shastra injunction “yato hastastato dṛṣṭih… yato bhāvaḥstato rasaḥ.” The moment does not lecture; it unfolds organically within character and plot, allowing viewers to experience the verse through narrative life rather than as exposition.
Indian classical art is simultaneously individualistic at the moment of creation and communally oriented at the moment of appreciation. An ālapana in a raga is spontaneous and unrepeatable, yet a sabha of connoisseurs recognizes and delights in its innovations. This dualityprivate making, shared receptionshapes the ecology of Indian arts.
Within this ecology, Marga (search, quest; classical, codified) and Deshi (regional, idiom; that which reveals) are not antagonists but complements. When Marga enters creative practice, it becomes Deshi; when Deshi is crystallized through reflection and pedagogy, it becomes Marga. As with grammar and language, codification and expression sustain each other. This symbiosis is visible across the dharmic traditionsHindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikhwhere regional idioms engage canons to produce living, locally inflected, yet deeply rooted art.
K. Viswanath’s cinema consistently realizes this harmony. In Apadbandhavudu (1992), an unschooled Deshi youth (Chiranjeevi) undertakes arduous, selfless labor to publish the Marga poetry of his revered masteran emblematic act showing how tradition flourishes through devotion, service, and personal sacrifice.
The same fusion animates Deshi diction and song picturizations such as “Govullu tellana Gopayya nallana” (Saptapadi, 1981), “Aura ammaka chella” (Apadbandhavudu), “Suvvi suvvi,” and “Taalibottu testanani” (Swati Muthyam, 1985). These works braid folk textures and classical sensibilities, drawing audiences into rasa through cadence, setting, and character.
Viswanath also threads episodes and allusions from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, classical poetry, and Telugu folklore into dialogue and ambiencetemple precincts, riverbanks, household ritualsoften voiced by Deshi characters. The washerwoman scene in Swati Muthyam and multiple sequences in Sutradharulu exemplify this. “Laali Laali,” the famed lullaby in Swati Muthyam, is crafted with lyrical simplicity grounded in civilizational memory; it soothes the infant and, poignantly, the infant’s father, whose mind is childlikeart holding both in a single compassionate gaze.
From Siri Siri Muvva onward, Marga elements surface with quiet assurance: the solemn recitation of Mantrapushpam; the presence of a Ghanapāṭi in Swarnakamalam; the Vedic benediction “Shatamanam Bhavati”; Bhartrhari’s “Jayanti te sukrtino” woven into Sagara Sangamam; rites, pūja, and the temple culture of the Godavari belt. These are not ornamental; they shape atmosphere, moral stakes, and the inner weather of characters.
Audiences frequently recognize that Sagara Sangamam’s most memorable sequences are meditations on devotion to art, impermanence, and surrenderarousing karuṇa and śānta. This affective palette resonates across dharmic lineages: Hindu bhakti, Buddhist karuṇā, Jain ahiṃsā-inflected sensibility, and Sikh nām-simran aesthetics. In this way, Viswanath’s cinema becomes a shared cultural space where the Indic idea of rasa fosters unity without erasing diversity.
A particularly poignant scene in Sagara Sangamam exemplifies this integrative vision and will be analyzed in a subsequent continuation.
Inspired by this post on Dharma Dispatch.
