In Rasagaṅgādhara c. 1650, Jagannātha reports the position of certain "New Scholars" (Navyas) on the nature of rasa. The position is unlike anything else in the rasa tradition. The framework's source-texts have completely vanished. We know the position only through Jagannātha's account, who reports it neutrally enough that contemporary readers can reconstruct its core claims.1
Pollock identifies the New Scholars position as one of the most genuinely novel and interesting contributions to late-medieval rasa-theory — and one of the most thoroughly lost. The other positions Jagannātha enumerates ("11 positions" total) include some that are extrapolations to fill out conceptual possibility-space, almost certainly never actually defended by anyone. The New Scholars position is different: it shows specific signs of having been defended by real theorists with real arguments. But their works have not survived.1
The New Scholars' framework:1
When the aesthetic elements are brought to light by the author of a poem or the actor in a drama, and the stable emotion — say, Duṣyanta's desire for Śakuntalā — is grasped by the process of manifestation, a particular kind of "actualization," which the New Scholars understand as the cognitive error of superimposition, emerges thanks to the viewer's or reader's receptivity, and by virtue of this erroneous superimposition, his self is veiled by the illusion of being Duṣyanta. In the self delimited by this kind of unknowing there arises a desire for Śakuntalā, apparent only to the witnessing subject and ontologically undecidable as to its reality.
The framework's central move: rasa depends on cognitive error (adhyāsa / superimposition). The audience-member's self gets temporarily veiled by the illusion of being the character. While the veiling lasts, the audience-member experiences the character's emotional content as their own. The desire arising in this veiled self is ontologically undecidable — neither real (it's not actually the reader's own desire for Śakuntalā) nor unreal (it's experientially present and producing affective effects).
The framework explicitly invokes the adhyāsa operation that Vedānta uses for sense-perception illusions (mistaking a rope for a snake; mistaking mother-of-pearl for silver). The aesthetic apparatus produces an analogous cognitive error: the audience-member mistakenly identifies with the character. This error is the constitutive mechanism of rasa-experience.
The framework's most distinctive claim: rasa is the effect of an error, not a positive cognitive operation. The discipline's dominant frameworks (utpatti, anumiti, abhivyakti, bhukti) all treat rasa as a kind of cognition that operates correctly — production, inference, manifestation, experientialization are all forms of veridical cognitive engagement. The New Scholars say no: rasa is what happens when cognition operates erroneously, specifically through the adhyāsa / superimposition error.1
The framework's explanatory power: it accounts for several features the dominant frameworks struggle with.
The reader-character identification problem: How can the audience-member experience the character's emotions without being the character? The New Scholars answer: through cognitive error. The audience-member temporarily misidentifies themselves with the character. The error is what makes the empathetic engagement possible.
The ontological-status problem: What kind of thing is the audience-member's desire for Śakuntalā? It's not real-world desire (Śakuntalā doesn't exist in their world). It's not nothing (the affective response is real). The New Scholars answer: it's ontologically undecidable. It's the kind of cognition that error-states produce — affectively real but ontologically suspended.
The tragic-rasa paradox: How can painful content produce engagement? The New Scholars frame: the affective response is genuinely painful (because the error makes the audience-member experience the painful content as their own), but the framework also includes mechanisms for why the engagement continues despite the pain (which Jagannātha works out in detail in his report).
Jagannātha is the dominant theorist whose framework the New Scholars are operating against. He should be expected to refute their position. He does work through some objections, but his reporting is largely sympathetic — he gives the New Scholars space to develop their position and works through the implications.
The implication: Jagannātha knew real theorists who held this position. His extensive reporting and partial engagement suggest a living school whose works he could consult. The school's works are not extant for us; they were extant for Jagannātha.
Pollock notes Jagannātha's neutrality of tone is unusual.
The other positions Jagannātha discusses (some of which are almost certainly never-actually-defended extrapolations) get dispatched more quickly. The New Scholars position gets a long careful treatment that reads as engagement with a real opposing school.
The framework structurally anticipates contemporary cognitive-science discussions of pretense-cognition, as-if-cognition, and fictional-emotion theories.1 Contemporary philosophy of fiction asks: what kind of mental state is the reader in when they "feel sad for Anna Karenina"? Several positions exist:
The New Scholars' framework is closest to the error-emotion position. The audience-member's self is temporarily veiled by the illusion of being the character; the desire that arises is ontologically undecidable; the framework treats the engagement as a cognitive-error event rather than as a special kind of veridical cognition.
The framework's 350-year priority over the contemporary cognitive-science debate is striking. The New Scholars articulated a position that contemporary philosophers of fiction are still working out, with apparatus the contemporary debate has not fully developed.
The framework's defining tension is its dependence on a doctrine of adhyāsa (superimposition) that has Vedāntic-philosophical commitments. The framework can be defended within Vedānta-style epistemology but is harder to defend in epistemologies that treat cognitive operations as primarily veridical-or-failed-veridical rather than as involving systematic error-states. The framework's universality is limited by its philosophical context.
A second tension: the framework's claim that rasa depends on error has uncomfortable implications. If rasa is an error, then sophisticated readers who recognize the fictional status of literature should NOT experience rasa (because their cognition is not erroneous). But sophisticated readers DO experience rasa, often more deeply than naive readers. The framework needs to explain how cognition-that-knows-it-is-cognition-of-fiction can also be erroneous in the relevant sense — a structural challenge the framework's reported version does not fully address.
A third tension: the framework's lost-status is consequential. We do not have the New Scholars' own arguments; we have Jagannātha's report. The report may be more sympathetic than refutational, but it is still a hostile reporting in the sense that Jagannātha is committed to his own framework. The specific arguments the New Scholars would have made are unknown.
The New Scholars and Jagannātha represent the discipline's clearest case of contemporary-doctrinal-rivalry preserved through hostile-but-fair reporting. Jagannātha holds the Vedānta-rasa framework (rasa is veil-removed bliss-of-self with stable-emotion-coloring). The New Scholars hold the cognitive-error framework (rasa is adhyāsa-mediated illusory desire in a veiled self). The convergence: both treat aesthetic experience as involving non-ordinary cognitive operations. The divergence: WHAT KIND of non-ordinary cognition. Jagannātha's framework is positive (revealing what was already there); the New Scholars' is negative (operating through error-state). The split reveals a fundamental disagreement about whether aesthetic cognition is fundamentally veridical (revealing truth) or fundamentally non-veridical (operating through productive error). The discipline never resolved this question. (See Jagannātha and the Vedānticization of Rasa.)
The New Scholars and Śaṅkuka are separated by roughly 800 years but operate in the same cognitive-frame. Śaṅkuka c. 850 had argued that rasa is an inferential cognition operating on the actor's behavior as premises. The New Scholars argue that rasa is an error-cognition operating through superimposition. The convergence: both refuse special-aesthetic-cognition frameworks and ground rasa in ordinary cognitive operations (inference for Śaṅkuka; error for the New Scholars). The divergence: which ordinary operation is doing the work. The split shows that the discipline's reductionist tendency — refusing sui generis aesthetic cognition in favor of general cognitive operations — had multiple iterations across the centuries. (See Śrī Śaṅkuka and the Anumiti-Vāda.)
The cognitive-error framework operates as a model of cognition-through-productive-error. The pattern has direct adjacents in contemporary cognitive science, philosophy of fiction, and any domain where mental states that don't fit standard veridical-vs-failed-veridical taxonomy are at stake.
Psychology: Personality Typology and Individual Differences Hub — The New Scholars' framework corresponds closely to contemporary cognitive-science discussions of cognitive fluency under temporary self-displacement. Recent research on narrative-transportation and fictional-immersion has documented that engaged readers show specific patterns of self-other boundary blurring during deep engagement — patterns the New Scholars' framework predicts and explains. The handshake reveals: contemporary research is empirically validating what the New Scholars articulated 350 years ago. The framework's prediction — that aesthetic engagement involves temporary self-veiling and character-superimposition — corresponds to documented findings about default-mode-network activity during narrative immersion, self-other boundary blurring in empathetic engagement, and the suspension of mind-wandering during absorbed reading. The framework offers contemporary cognitive science a precise theoretical vocabulary for what current research operates with implicitly.
AI-Collaboration: AI-Assisted Creator Hub — The New Scholars' framework has direct application to questions about AI-engagement. When readers engage with AI-generated text, are they engaging in the cognitive-error mode the framework names? The framework offers a diagnostic question: does the AI-generated text produce temporary self-veiling and character-superimposition in the reader? If yes, the engagement is full-rasa-engagement in the New Scholars' framework. If no, the engagement is content-consumption without the depth-cognition the framework names. The handshake produces an evaluation criterion: AI outputs should be evaluated for whether they produce the cognitive-error state, not just for whether they communicate content. This is a more demanding standard than current AI evaluation typically uses.
Creative-Practice: Non-Fiction Writing Craft Hub — The framework offers writers a precise account of what successful narrative literature does at the cognitive level. The handshake reveals: writing that produces deep engagement structurally requires the cognitive-error operation the framework names. The writer's task is to produce text that triggers the temporary self-veiling and character-superimposition in the reader. Skilled narrative craft is structurally the engineering of cognitive-error-states in readers. The framework licenses a precise craft principle: design narrative so that the reader's self-identification slips into the character's perspective. Where this slippage fails to occur, the rasa-engagement does not happen, regardless of how well-executed the surface craft is. The Sanskrit framework's precision exceeds contemporary craft-pedagogy vocabulary for what character-immersion requires. The framework also produces a craft-diagnostic: a piece of writing succeeds at the New-Scholars depth level if the reader, post-engagement, can report having had the temporary-self-veiling experience. Most contemporary readers can articulate when they have had this experience and when they have not; the difference is reliable. The framework lets craft-pedagogy organize around producing it reliably rather than treating it as a serendipitous outcome of unspecified writing virtues.
Eastern-Spirituality: Sādhana Practice Hub — The framework's grounding in adhyāsa (superimposition error) connects it to the central Advaita Vedānta apparatus for explaining how phenomenal reality misrelates to ultimate reality. In Advaita, the entire phenomenal world is adhyāsa — the superimposition of qualifying-features onto the unqualified self. The New Scholars' framework extends this apparatus to aesthetic engagement: rasa is a small-scale adhyāsa event, structurally identical to the cosmic-scale adhyāsa that produces phenomenal life. The handshake reveals: aesthetic engagement and ordinary cognition operate on the same cognitive mechanism (adhyāsa); the difference is scope and intentionality. The framework licenses recognizing that aesthetic experience does not require special metaphysical apparatus; it deploys the same superimposition-machinery that constitutes everyday phenomenal cognition, but in a controlled and aesthetically-productive configuration. This is a stronger structural claim than either standard rasa-theory or standard contemplative theory makes alone.
The Sharpest Implication
The New Scholars' framework reveals that aesthetic engagement may depend on cognitive operations that conventional cognitive analysis would categorize as ERRORS. The discomfort: contemporary culture tends to valorize cognition that operates correctly — accuracy, truth-tracking, veridical perception. The framework suggests that some of the most valuable mental states (aesthetic absorption, deep narrative engagement, the productive imagination) require cognitive operations that are structurally error-states. The implication: a strictly truth-tracking cognitive economy is incomplete. Some of the cognitive operations that produce the deepest aesthetic and imaginative engagement require allowing temporary cognitive errors. The framework licenses the productive use of error-cognition as a feature, not a bug, of advanced cognition. This is a stronger claim than most contemporary cognitive theory makes, and it has implications for how we evaluate cognitive operations across multiple domains.
Generative Questions