Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Bharata Muni sorts an entire dramatic universe, gods, kings, ascetics, lunatics, harem guards, into three cloth categories and a handful of color codes. If you have ever wondered why a Bharatanatyam Shiva looks different from a Kathakali one, or why a wandering sage on stage always seems to wear the same shade of red costumes, the answer starts here.
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What nepathya covers, and where costume fits inside it
Costume is one strand of what the Natyashastra calls aharya abhinaya, the “external” branch of acting built from makeup, ornaments, and dress rather than the body or voice. Bharata groups all of this under nepathya. If you want the wider picture of how nepathya organizes makeup and adornment alongside costume, that ground is covered in nepathya guide, and the color logic behind aharya gets its own treatment in the colours in aharyabhinaya piece.
We will now discuss the fabric and color rules for costumes.
Three fabric classes
Before assigning colors to characters, the text sorts cloth itself into three kinds: white, variegated (citra, meaning multi-colored or patterned), and soiled (malina).
1. White: for the devout and the disciplined
White goes to anyone in a state of ritual purity or restraint. That covers temple visits, vows, auspicious rites, marriages, and other sacramental occasions, for all genders. It also becomes the default dress for a specific set of dignified professions: older brahmins, guild leaders among bankers, ministers, chaplains, merchants, ascetics, and anyone holding a social rank equivalent to a brahmin, kshatriya, or vaishya within the play. White here is the shorthand for discipline and social gravity.
2. Variegated: for gods, kings, and anyone showing off
Multi-colored, patterned dress belongs to the more spectacular end of the character list: gods, danavas, yakshas, gandharvas, nagas, rakshasas, kings, and people written as foppish or vain. It is the costume of splendor rather than restraint, and kings default to it outside of any misfortune requiring a propitiatory rite (more on that shortly).
3. Soiled: for the broken and the wandering
Malina, or soiled cloth, is reserved for lunatics, intoxicated characters, travelers, and anyone struck by calamity. It is the visual language of disorder. A director cannot swap this for a merely plain or dull-colored costume; the text specifically wants the fabric to read as unclean, not just understated.
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Matching character to costume
| Character or occasion | Costume rule |
|---|---|
| Temple visits, vows, marriages, sacraments | White |
| Gods, danavas, yakshas, gandharvas, nagas, rakshasas | Variegated |
| Kings and foppish characters | Variegated (white during propitiatory rites) |
| Older brahmins, guild leaders, ministers, chaplains, merchants, ascetics | White |
| Lunatics, intoxicated persons, travelers, the calamity-struck | Soiled |
| Sectarian monks (Jain, Buddhist, Yati, Pashupata) | Per their own sect’s dress code |
| Wandering ascetics, sages, Buddhist monks | Dark red (kashaya) |
| Pashupatas | Variegated |
| Warriors in battle | Armor, quiver, bow, fight-ready costume |
| Harem guards | Armor plus dark red clothing |
| Low-born characters | Dress suited to their profession |
There are some exceptions Bharata muni bothers to spell out
Sectarian monks get their own dress code. Jain (Nirgrantha) monks, Buddhist (Shakya) monks, Yatis, and Pashupatas are exempt from the white or variegated split. The text tells the costume designer to follow “their respective sectarian rules,” with an eye to what would actually land with the audience watching. Bharata muni is thinking about recognition here. A Buddhist monk needed to look like one to a second-century crowd, sect-accurate down to the cloth.
Ascetics in general wear tattered cloth, bark, or skin, while wandering ascetics, sages, and Buddhist monks specifically wear kashaya, a dark reddish-ochre that still shows up on renunciate robes across South and Southeast Asia today.
Kings switch to white under duress. A king’s default costume is variegated, befitting the role, but the text pulls that back the moment the character is undergoing a propitiatory rite for an affliction linked to an unfavorable planetary influence. In that scene, and only that scene, the king dresses exclusively in white. This is a genuinely useful detail for anyone staging a court scene involving misfortune.
Harem guards and women in specific life stages share a dress code: armor paired with dark red cloth for the guards, and the same coloring for women the text describes as being in particular conditions during that period. Translators read this as referring to ritual or physiological states requiring seclusion, which the production is expected to signal visually rather than narrate.
Warriors get equipped. Their dress needs to be battle-functional: armor, a quiver, a bow, and weapons appropriate to the fight, not decorative approximations of combat gear.
Masks follow the same logic, briefly
Bharata closes this section with one line on masks, or pratishira: they too should vary by a character’s habitation, birth, and age. He does not expand on it here because the fuller treatment of facial transformation, paint, and disguise sits in the chapters this site covers under makeup in the Natyashastra.
The takeaway for costume designers is that masks were never treated as a separate department from cloth and color. All of aharya abhinaya was meant to read as one coherent visual statement about who a character is before they say a word, which is also the underlying logic behind the ornaments (alankara) rules.
Putting this to work in a real production
Reading the rules is one thing. Using them without turning a stage into a lecture on ancient texts is another. A few ways I have seen this translate well in practice:
Start with status. Before picking a color palette, ask what tier the character occupies: divine, royal, disciplined-professional, or fringe. That decision does most of the work the Natyashastra wants it to do.
Use kashaya sparingly and correctly. Dark reddish-ochre for wandering ascetics and sages reads instantly to an Indian audience. Using it loosely for “any spiritual character” flattens a distinction the text is careful to preserve between renunciates and, say, temple-going householders in white.
Let the king’s costume carry the plot. If your staging includes a scene of royal misfortune or ritual atonement, the shift from variegated to white is a free piece of visual storytelling. Directors skip this far too often.
Treat “soiled” as a design choice. A calamity-struck character in malina cloth should look deliberately disheveled, not simply under-dressed. There is a difference between a costume that reads as poor and one that reads as broken.
Do not conflate sectarian dress with generic asceticism. If a character is written as a specific monk or Pashupata, the rule is to follow that sect’s actual convention, not a generic “holy man” look.
Where the confusion usually starts
Most misreadings of this chapter come from treating “variegated” as simply meaning colorful or festive, when Bharata is using it as a technical class assigned to specific character categories, not a mood.
The same goes for “soiled”: it is an assigned costume type for a defined group of characters, not a catch-all for anyone dressed down. It is closer to a classification system, one built to help an audience read status and state instantly, the same job the rasa and bhava frameworks do for emotion.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Bharata Muni sorts stage costumes into three fabric classes: white, for ritual purity and disciplined professions; variegated (multi-colored), for gods, kings, and spectacle; and soiled (malina), for lunatics, travelers, and calamity-struck characters.
Kashaya, a dark reddish-ochre, is the Natyashastra’s assigned color for wandering ascetics, sages, and Buddhist monks. It signals renunciation specifically, distinct from the white worn by disciplined householders or temple-goers.
No. Kings default to variegated (multi-colored) costumes, but the text switches them to plain white during a propitiatory rite performed for misfortune tied to an unfavorable star or planet.
4. What does “soiled” (malina) costumes mean in Natyashastra terms?
Malina is a defined costume class, not just dull clothing. It’s reserved for lunatics, intoxicated characters, wayfarers, and anyone struck by calamity, meant to visually read as disordered or unclean.
No. The Natyashastra explicitly exempts sectarian monks, Jain, Buddhist, Yati, and Pashupata, from the general white/variegated/soiled system, instructing designers to follow each sect’s own dress convention instead.
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Final thoughts
What strikes me most about this chapter is how little it leaves to instinct. A modern costumes designer might reach for a color because it “feels right” for a god or a king. Bharata Muni had already made that decision two thousand years ago, and he made it based on how an audience reads status, discipline, and disorder on sight.
Using these rules today does not mean recreating a second-century wardrobe. It means understanding why the choices worked, so a variegated robe on a king or a kashaya wrap on a wandering sage still does its job: telling the audience who they are looking at.
For the fuller picture of how these costume rules sit alongside makeup and ornamentation, the nepathya and aharyabhinaya color guides are the natural next stop, and the Natyashastra glossary is useful if any of the Sanskrit terms here need unpacking further.
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