Bharata Muni's foundational treatise on drama, dance, and music — the text that gave Sanskrit literature its theory of rasa, the aesthetic emotion a performance is meant to evoke in its audience.
लगभग २री शताब्दी ई.पू. – २री शताब्दी · circa 2nd century BCE - 2nd century CE
Spanning some 36 chapters, the Natya Shastra covers everything from stagecraft and character types to precise hand gestures (mudras) and the eight, later nine, rasas, principal emotional flavors a performance should draw from its audience, a framework still taught in classical Indian dance forms like Bharatanatyam, Kathak, and Odissi today.
Its influence reaches well beyond formal drama into how Sanskrit poetry itself came to be judged, with later poetics scholars building directly on its rasa theory. Alongside it, poets like Kalidasa, author of Abhijnanashakuntalam and Meghaduta, and epic compilers like Valmiki and Vyasa, already covered in this site's Rishi Parampara chapter, form the backbone of classical Sanskrit literature.