Hâsya: Towards a poetics of the comic

Abstract

Amidst a whole range of criticism and derision that laughter has received down the ages, the question still lingers: why “One daren’t even laugh any more”? The comic, according to Aristotle, is associated with the ridiculous or the ugly. It constitutes a deformity or an error and leans towards something which is mean. The comedy, on the other hand, is a form of low art consisting of what is base or inferior. This view of the comic and comedy has largely been accepted and forwarded by the West. They have looked down upon the comic with a one-dimensional view of derision and condemnation. As Lisa Trahair correctly states, “to comprehend the comic is to risk overlooking the structure of incomprehensibility that is crucial to its operation”. Although often considered as a synonym for humour or laughter, hâsya, on the other hand, is much more than that. Hâsya always enabled us to understand comic’s implications in the object world and vice versa. It is not only enigmatic but also esoteric in nature. Through a select study of VidûSaka (the deformed clown in Sanskrit theatre) and two poems— one a Sanskrit Muktaka and the other a Nindā-stuti, this paper intends to read the potentialities of hâsya as an-other laughter, not just as a mode of gay affirmation or subversion but as a mode of “free play” (ju), within the space that exists between the self and the other(s). This, however, by no means is an attempt to conceive hâsya only as a disruptive event with the intentions of the ‘Empire writing back’, rather a wish to hermeneutically comprehend the harmony of the comic within the dimensions of Indian aesthetics, so that the poetics of laughter can be retrieved and reclaimed.