An excerpt from a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo van Gogh: “What am I in the eyes of most people – a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person – somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then – even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody has in his heart.” He sold only one painting while he was alive: The Red Vineyard, which went for 400 francs. After his death, his most expensive painting: Portrait of Dr. Gachet was sold for $148 million in 1990. There is another common feature among van Gogh, Raja Ravi Varma, Manto, and various others; apart from the path breaking work in their domain of art. They lived through tough times in doing what they did, but now stand celebrated. Being termed inappropriate, vulgar, or even blaspheme, their work transcended the constraints of censorship. The society which receives art, often questions and confines art; according to its comfort in conforming to set norms, or the fear of privileged forces. Historically, the society has been rather reluctant in crossing its social boundaries. Performing a play on Manto’s or Ismat Chughtai’s stories is finding acceptance and celebration in the contemporary Indian mainstream. During Manto’s lifetime, he was tried for obscenity six times, thrice under the British government and thrice by the Pakistan government. He was even charged (later acquitted) with a fine of PKR 300 and six months of rigorous imprisonment as a judge felt that his story was obscene in accordance with Quranic standards.1 However, the cause of a stir against him was that he openly condemned the India-Pakistan partition which went against the dominant sentiment of that time. Similar was the struggle with Chughtai who decided to stay back in India after partition. Ironically, their stories once tarred as vulgar and put under a legal scanner by the authorities have now become stories of bold, free and enlightened expression. Through this, one can assume that the term “vulgarity” seems considerably subjective. What is vulgarity? One of the phrases in Wikipedia is: The quality of being unrefined or coarse. One can then assume that vulgar art is unrefined art! Further, why classify an art expression as “unrefined”? One answer can be because the “Rasa” or emotion produced within the receiver is “Bibhatsa” or disgust. Why question and categorise Bibhatsa when it hails from the same Navarasa2 paradigm where every rasa is given equal weightage? Natyashastra which is one of the earliest Sanskrit treatise on performing arts principles, mentions “Prekshaka”, which is also referred to as “Sahridaya” in Sanskrit poetics, a term coined for the spectator of an act. By contextual definition, Sahridaya means a person connected to the one on-stage, whose heart travels in the journey together. Interestingly, researchers at The University College London Division of Psychological and Language Sciences have found in a new study that audience’s hearts synchronize watching live theatre.3 Basically, the audience is the one receiving performer’s “bhava” (emotion felt) and receiving this generates an emotional state or rasa within them. There is a trigger, or a condition, which excites the affect, which is called “vibhava”. The vibhava is the cause (karana) of the affect (bhava). It is composed of the excitant (uddipana) and the supportive perception (allambana). Ayurvedic psychology places more emphasis on this supportive perception (allambana).4 Thus, once the bhava is received, it is the receiver’s or spectator’s conditioning which sees vulgarity in it, i.e it is the receivers’ interpretation of what they perceive that gives them a sense of vulgarity. The audience and artist together create a sense of vulgarity through shared experiences.