Abstract

By correlating literary evidence, avian ethology and neurophysiology I will try to demonstrate why Vālmīki chose a pair of Sārus Cranes, and not any other avian species, to epitomise grief and sorrow in the Rāmāyaṇa. The choice illustrates the importance of personal experience of the living reality (behaviour of Sārus Cranes); but the grief, śoka, as experienced by Vālmīki, became in later critical literature the rasa of karuṇa, the aesthetic appreciation of grief, as suggested by Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta. By emphasising the central importance of affective states (sthāyibhāvas) in life as well as in the arts (rasas), Vālmīki, Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta appear to have had a perception of the human condition that is consistent with recent development in affective neuroscience; and thus it is the pitch and the tonal quality of the cries of grief that convey the depth and the universality (sādhāraṇatvā) of the emotion.