I

• Bhamaha, in his Kāvyālaṁkāra, asserts that any object in nature, thought, or imagination can serve as content of art.
• This view has been widely accepted and not challenged.
• Art can be based on facts (vastu), imagination (alaṁkāra), or emotions (rasa), as long as it does not conflict with nature and is connected to actual life.
• Objects not derived from nature and lacking any reference to it fail to command trust from the audience and lose their artistic value.
• Vishnudharmottaram states that an intelligent artist represents what looks probable and commands trust, not what transcends it.
• One important principle in Indian painting, according to Yaśodhara, is sādṛśyam, which refers to a verisimilitudewith life and nature, not an exact likeness, to ensure general consent from the beholder.
• Silparatna stresses that resemblance in art should be like a reflex in a mirror.
• Once verisimilitude is achieved, there are no limits to the content choice of the artist.
• The lists of themes in technical writings on art, poetics, and dramaturgy show a vast range of human life, ideas, feelings, and experiences.
• The artist’s world of vastu, alaṁkāra, and rasa is as limitless as that of nature and human life.
• Even the ugly or hideous has a place in art, serving the artist’s purpose alongside the joyous and sublime.
• Singara (love and desire) and vibhatsa (abhorrently ugly) emotional moods have their place in Indian art.
• Modern Indian rejection of sex and the nude in art is influenced by 19th-century puritanical views and Western education, not traditional Indian attitudes.
• In traditional Indian art, sex, fertility, and sensuousness are celebrated, as seen in mithuna imagery and depictions of gods and goddesses.
• Content in art represents both the explicit and implicit meaning, while form is the method by which the meaning is expressed.
• Content and form are inseparable in art experience, as they co-function in the creative process.
• The artist’s view of content is shaped by their notions of form, and vice versa.
• In any significant artistic work, content and form form a single integrated unit, though they can be analyzed separately.
• The function of form is to bring out the meaning of content, making it explicit and implicit.
• When form overemphasizes itself or transgresses its function, the artwork fails in its ultimate purpose.
• Form varies between different arts (e.g., poetry, music, plastic arts), and even within the same art, form can vary based on technique or notion of form.
• The meaning of the same content differs across different arts due to the varying forms employed.
• The chapter focuses on the principles of technique rather than enumerating specific artistic techniques.
• A subsequent chapter will discuss traditional notions of form with theoretical implications, using illustrations.

II

• Content in art can be drawn from anywhere in life and nature, human thought, and imagination, with the constraint that it must conform to the laws of nature and reference actual life.
• The real in art is not the same as the real in life or nature; the real in life is objectively real, while the real in art is ideally real.
• The artist selects, adds, subtracts, or distorts parts of reality to serve his purpose, transforming the objectively real according to his vision.
• Mere reproduction or imitation of reality is mechanical and does not belong in art, as it lacks the disinterestednessessential for art experience.
• Idealization or transformation in art adds a new meaning to the objective fact or situation, offering a unique experience for the beholder.
• Idealization should not completely remove the reference to reality, as the object would then be considered unreal and fail to engage the beholder.
• Art raises the objective fact or situation from the particular to the universal, allowing the beholder to achieve impersonality and detachment in their experience.
• The question of reality in art can also be viewed from the perspective that a work of art is not merely a physical substance existing in time and space.
• Rasa, the experience evoked in art, is not a measurable property and cannot be considered a physical substance.
• Art experience is neither purely physical nor purely metaphysical, but human in nature, grounded in experiencing a state of being.
• Art experience is described as alaukika (extraordinary) and anirvachaniya (defying verbal definition), belonging to a higher order of consciousness beyond ordinary experience.
• Reality in art does not refer to transcendent reality or empirical facts, but to the inner meaning of life as experienced by the beholder.
• Objects in art, such as a character in a drama or a figure in a painting, are true-to-life, meaning they reflect our experience of life.
• Art reveals the sūkshma (subtle) aspects of life, which are understood only through lived experience, not through logical or rational categories.
• Classical images like the Buddha or Nataraja Śiva present the inner laws of life and the subtler states of human existence.
• The reality of art does not depend on its correspondence to external facts, but on its correspondence to our inner experience of life, as lived through in the depths of our being.