The Indian classical arts are organized around rasa — the theory of aesthetic emotion, the idea that the goal of performance is to evoke specific emotional states in the audience through a highly developed formal language of gesture, sound, and image. This places the classical Indian artist in a relationship to tradition unlike the Western model of individual expression: the tradition is not a constraint but a vocabulary, refined over centuries to produce effects that no individual could discover alone. To master a classical Indian art form is to become a conduit for something older than oneself, which requires both complete submission to the tradition and complete aliveness within it.
Each step builds on the last.