Navras
Quick answer: Navras is the nine rasas of Indian poetics, the core emotional flavours a poem can evoke. Learn each rasa and how to build one cleanly into your verse.
Navras, from nava (nine) and rasa (flavour or essence), names the nine emotional tastes that classical Indian aesthetics believes a poem, dance or play can serve to its audience. The idea reaches back to Bharata's Natyashastra, a treatise on performance compiled roughly two thousand years ago. Bharata counted eight rasas; the philosopher Abhinavagupta later added shanta, the flavour of peace, to complete the nine. A rasa is not the raw emotion itself but the refined pleasure a reader relishes when that emotion is well made.
Think of rasa as flavour on the tongue rather than a feeling in the chest. The poet supplies the ingredients: setting, gesture, image and the fleeting moods that flicker across a face. When these combine cleanly, the reader tastes a single dominant emotion. Bhakti poets, ghazal writers and doha makers all worked with this vocabulary long before anyone called it craft, and it still sharpens how you build feeling into a poem.
The poem
Bura jo dekhan main chala, bura na milya koi,
Jo dil khoja aapna, mujhse bura na koi.
Kabir, traditional doha (public domain)
The Nine Flavours
Bharata classified the whole range of aesthetic feeling into these nine tastes. Learning them by name gives you a checklist for the emotion you are actually building.
The Permanent Emotion Beneath Each Taste
Each rasa grows from a sthayi bhava, a stable underlying emotion: rati (love) beneath shringara, shoka (grief) beneath karuna, krodha (anger) beneath raudra. The poet never states this emotion outright. Instead you supply vibhavas, the causes and setting; anubhavas, the visible reactions such as a trembling hand; and vyabhichari bhavas, the passing moods like doubt or jealousy that cross the surface. When these blend, the sthayi bhava ripens into rasa in the reader.
Navras in the Ghazal, Doha and Bhakti Verse
South Asian poets served these flavours for centuries without the textbook. Surdas fills his Krishna poems with vatsalya, the tender love of a parent, a warm branch of shringara. Meera and the viraha songs run on karuna, the ache of separation. Ghalib lets a single ghazal swing from longing to wit. Kabir's plainest couplets aim at shanta, the peace that follows when the ego quiets. His famous doha turns the search for a wicked man inward and finds no one worse than the self.
Using Rasa When You Write Today
You do not need Sanskrit to use this. Pick the one flavour you want to leave on the reader's tongue, then choose every image to feed it and cut whatever muddies it. A poem that tries to serve all nine at once usually serves none. Writory's monthly contest, with entries from the 1st to the 25th and scores shared on the 30th, is a fair place to test whether your chosen rasa truly reaches a reader.
What poets can take from this
- Decide which single rasa you want your reader to taste before you draft, then let every image feed it.
- Build the emotion through concrete setting and gesture rather than naming the feeling outright.
- Let transitory moods like jealousy, doubt or shyness ripple across the surface while one permanent emotion holds beneath.
- To deepen karuna, dwell on separation and absence rather than describing tears directly.
- If a stanza tastes of two rasas at once, decide which serves the other and cut the confusion.
- Read a ghazal couplet aloud and name its rasa; the practice trains your ear quickly.
Try it yourself
Choose one rasa from the nine and write a twelve-line poem that never names the emotion. Build it only from a place, a season, one gesture and one object, and let the reader taste the flavour on their own.
Questions
How many rasas are there, eight or nine?
Bharata's original Natyashastra names eight. Shanta, the rasa of peace, was added later by Abhinavagupta, giving the nine that navras counts today. Some traditions also mention vatsalya, parental love, as a tenth.
Can one poem hold more than one rasa?
Yes. Most longer poems move through several, but classical theory holds that one rasa should dominate while the others serve it. A ghazal often lets each couplet strike a different flavour while the whole still gravitates toward one.
Is rasa the same as mood or tone?
They are close but not identical. Mood is the atmosphere a poem creates; rasa is the distilled emotional pleasure the reader savours from it. Rasa names the reader's experience, not just the colour of the writing.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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