Dhvani Theory in Indian Aesthetics

Abstract

Two texts have made significant contributions to Indian Aesthetics throughout the history of Indian literary criticism: Dhvanyāloka by Ānandavardhana and Locana, a commentary on the first text by Abhinavagupta. Both works have had a direct or indirect influence on all Indian Sanskrit critics. One of Ānandavardhana’s significant contributions is that he incorporates emotions and other association meanings into language meaning. As a result, the poetics expanded on conceptions of primary and secondary meaning. Given that Ānandavardhana was influenced by Bharathari, the proponent of the sphota theory, he highlighted the need of considering the entire utterance as an important unitary linguistic symbol. He had also demonstrated that the meaning of an utterance is influenced by context, and that the logical interpretation of meaning of a sentence based on individual word meanings is often fallacious. He also asserted that the overall meaning of an utterance may differ from the meaning of the individual words. Bharathari influenced Ānandavardhana to build his theory of language, but his attempt was limited to poetic meaning. In this research article, we shall make an attempt to comprehend the suggestive sense, also known as dhvani, along with its various forms, as described by Ānandavardhana