Designing Continuity: Nāṭyaśāstra as a Modern Classical
- kiran kulkarni
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Some books don’t just carry content—they carry a civilization’s memory. Bharata Muni’s Nāṭyaśāstra is one of those works: a foundational text for Indian aesthetics and performance traditions, and a living reference point for how we think about art, expression, and human emotion. When Indica chose Nāṭyaśāstra as the inaugural offering of the INDICA Classical Library, the ambition was clear: create an edition that honors the gravitas of the text while making it genuinely readable and usable for contemporary audiences.
Tacit’s design response begins with a practical question that is surprisingly difficult in classical publishing: How do we help more people enter the text without diluting it? The answer was not to “modernize” the work visually, but to build a careful, reader-first system—one that acknowledges how people read today, including the fact that many interested readers may not be able to read Sanskrit fluently.
A reader-first structure: the facing-page translation format
The core editorial design decision is a facing-page translation format, where the Sanskrit/Devanagari text sits side-by-side with the translation, allowing readers to move between original and meaning in a single glance. This supports multiple kinds of readers at once: those who want to engage directly with the original script, those who rely primarily on translation, and those who learn by comparing both. The layout turns each spread into a quiet dialogue—between languages, between time periods, and between scholarship and curiosity.
Building a system, not just a book
Rather than treating Nāṭyaśāstra as a one-off design exercise, Tacit frames it as part of a comprehensive system developed for the Indica Classical Library. The system includes decisions around paragraph width, typographic styles, and hierarchy, ensuring the reading experience stays calm and consistent even when the content becomes dense. This kind of systemic thinking is what helps a classical series build trust over time—each volume feels part of a coherent lineage, not a disconnected artifact.
The designer’s role: establishing historical continuity
A meaningful way to understand the designer’s responsibility in projects like this is as an act of historical continuity. The designer isn’t merely arranging pages; they are helping a classical work continue—from its original cultural moment into the present—without breaking its integrity. That continuity begins with respect for the core functionality of the content and medium: readability, navigation, and a structure that serves study and reference rather than spectacle.
Only after that functional foundation is secure does the deeper design work unfold: research. The designer looks for elements in the text and its visual culture—rhythms, patterns, symbolic cues, or historically resonant aesthetic decisions—that can subtly connect the modern book-object back to the work’s long past. The goal is not nostalgia, and not surface ornamentation, but a careful bridging: allowing today’s reader to feel that they are holding something contemporary in its usability, yet continuous with a much older intellectual and artistic tradition.
Tradition, translated into usability
Indica describes the Classical Library volumes as a tribute—to Bharata Muni and to the broader tradition of Indian Knowledge Systems. In that context, design becomes a form of stewardship. Every major choice—especially the facing-page structure and the typographic system—serves the larger purpose of transmission: keeping the text alive for students, rasikas, researchers, practitioners, and first-time readers who are simply drawn toward the source.
In the end, the Natyasastra project shows what good editorial design can do for classical works: it doesn’t compete with the authority of the text. It clears a path into it, and then quietly builds bridges back to history—so the book can do what it has always done best: teach, provoke, and illuminate.
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