{"id":3243,"date":"2013-07-13T01:46:54","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3243"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:46:54","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:46:54","slug":"16-indian-art-vol-the-foundations-of-indian-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/02-other-editions\/the-foundations-of-indian-culture\/16-indian-art-vol-the-foundations-of-indian-culture","title":{"rendered":"-16_Indian Art.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\n
\nCHAPTER VI<\/b> <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\nINDIAN ART <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nA GOOD<\/font> deal of hostile or unsympathetic western criticism
\nof Indian civilisation has been directed in the past against
\nits aesthetic side and taken the form of a disdainful or violent
\ndepreciation of its fine arts, architecture, sculpture and painting.
\nMr. Archer would not find much support in his wholesale and
\nundiscriminating depreciation of a great literature, but here
\ntoo there has been, if not positive attack, much failure of
\nunderstanding : but in the attack on Indian art, his is the
\nlast and shrillest of many hostile voices. This aesthetic side of
\na people’s culture is of the highest importance and demands
\nalmost as much scrutiny and carefulness of appreciation as
\nthe philosophy, religion and central formative ideas which
\nhave been the foundation of Indian life and of which much of
\nthe art and literature is a conscious expression in significant
\naesthetic forms. Fortunately, a considerable amount of work
\nhas been already done in the clearing away of misconceptions
\nabout Indian sculpture and painting and, if that were all, I
\nmight be content to refer to the works of Mr. Havell and Dr.
\nCoomaraswamy or to the sufficiently understanding though
\nless deeply informed and penetrating criticisms of others who
\ncannot be charged with a prepossession in favour of oriental
\nwork. But a more general and searching consideration of
\nfirst principles is called for in any complete view of the essential
\nmotives of Indian culture. I am appealing mainly to that new
\nmind of India which long misled by an alien education, view
\nand influence is returning to a sound and true idea of its past and future, but
\nin this field the return is far from being as pervading,    <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-225<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ncomplete or luminous as it should be. I shall confine
\nmyself therefore first to a consideration of the sources of misunderstanding and pass from that to the true cultural significance of Indian aesthetic creation. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nMr. Archer pursuing his policy of Thorough devotes a
\nwhole chapter to the subject. This chapter is one long torrent
\nof sweeping denunciation. But it would be a waste of time
\nto take his attack as serious criticism and answer all in detail.
\nHis reply to defenders and eulogists is amazing in its shallowness and triviality, made up mostly of small, feeble and sometimes irrelevant points, big glaring epithets and forcibly senseless phrases, based for the rest on a misunderstanding or a
\nsheer inability to conceive the meaning of spiritual experiences
\nand metaphysical ideas, which betrays an entire absence of the
\nreligious sense and the philosophic mind. Mr. Archer is of
\ncourse a rationalist and contemner of philosophy and entitled
\nto his deficiencies; but why then try to judge things into the
\nsense of which one is unable to enter and exhibit the spectacle
\nof. a blind man discoursing on colours ? I will cite one or two
\ninstances which will show the quality of his criticism and amply
\njustify a refusal to attach any positive value to the actual points
\nhe labours to make, except for the light they throw on the psychology of the objectors. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nI will give first an instance amazing in its ineptitude. The Indian ideal figure of the masculine body insists on two
\nfeatures among many, a characteristic width at the shoulders
\nand slenderness in the middle. Well, an. objection to broadness of girth and largeness of belly\u2014allowed only where they
\nare appropriate as in sculptures of Ganesha or the Yakshas
\n\u2014is not peculiar to the Indian aesthetic sense; an emphasis,
\neven a pronounced emphasis on their opposites is surely
\nintelligible enough as an aesthetic tradition, however some
\nmay prefer a more realistic and prosperous presentation of
\nthe human figure. But Indian poets and authorities on art have
\ngiven in this connection the simile of the lion, and lo and <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-226<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nbehold Mr. Archer solemnly discoursing on this image as a
\nplain proof that the Indian people were just only out of the semi-savage state ! It is only too clear that they drew the ideal of
\nheroic manhood from their native jungle, from theriolatry,
\nthat is to say, from a worship of wild beasts ! I presume, on
\nthe same principle and with the same stupefying ingenuity
\nhe would find in Kamban’s image of the sea for the colour
\nand depth of Sita’s eyes clear evidence of a still more primitive
\nsavagery and barbaric worship of inanimate nature, or in
\nValmiki’s description of his heroine’s "eyes like wine," madireksanā,<\/i> evidence of a chronic inebriety and the semi-drunken
\ninspiration of the Indian poetic mind. This is one example of
\nMr. Archer’s most telling points. It is by no means an isolated
\nthough it is an extreme specimen, and the absurdity of that
\nparticular argument only brings out the triviality of this manner
\nof criticism. It is on a par with the common objection to the
\nslim hands and feet loved of the Bengal painters which one
\nhears sometimes advanced as a solid condemnation of their
\nwork. And that can be pardoned in the average man who under
\nthe high dispensation of modem culture is not expected to have
\nany intelligent conception about art,\u2014the instinctive appreciation has been already safely killed and buried. But what are
\nwe to say of a professed critic who ignores the deeper motives
\nand fastens on details in order to give them this kind of
\nsignificance ? <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nBut there are more grave and important objections in this
\ncriticism; for Mr. Archer turns also to deal with philosophy
\nin art. The whole basis of Indian artistic creation, perfectly
\nconscious and recognised in the canons, is directly spiritual
\nand intuitive. Mr. Havell rightly lays stress on this essential
\ndistinction and speaks in passing of the infinite superiority
\nof the method of direct perception over intellect, an assertion
\nnaturally offensive to the rationalistic mind, though it is now
\nincreasingly affirmed by leading western thinkers. Mr. Archer
\nat once starts out to hack at it with a very blunt tomahawk, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-227<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nHow does he deal with this crucial matter ? In a way which
\nmisses the whole real point and has nothing whatever to do with
\nthe philosophy of art. He fastens on Mr. Havell’s coupling of
\nthe master intuition of Buddha with the great intuition of
\nNewton and objects to the parallel because the two discoveries
\ndeal with two different orders of knowledge, one scientific
\nand physical, the other mental or psychic, spiritual or philosophic in nature. He trots out from its stable the old objection that Newton’s intuition was only the last step in a long
\nintellectual process, while according to this positive psychologist and philosophic critic the intuitions of Buddha and
\nother Indian sages had no basis in any intellectual process
\nof any kind or any verifiable experience. It is on the contrary
\nthe simple fact, well-known to all who know anything of the
\nsubject, that the conclusions of Buddha and other Indian
\nphilosophers (I am not now speaking of the inspired thought
\nof the Upanishads which was pure spiritual experience enlightened by intuition and gnosis,) were preceded by a very
\nacute scrutiny of relevant psychological phenomena and a
\nprocess of reasoning which, though certainly not rationalistic,
\nwas as rational as any other method of thinking. Hs clinches
\nhis refutation by the sage remark that these intuitions which
\nhe chooses to call fantasies contradict one another and therefore, it seems, have no sort of value except their vain metaphysical subtlety. Are v\/e to conclude that the patient study of
\nphenomena, the scrupulous and rigidly verifiable intellectual
\nreasonings and conclusions of western scientists have led
\nto no conflicting or contradictory results ? One could never
\nimagine at this rate that the science of heredity is torn by
\nconflicting "fantasies" or that Newton’s "fantasies" about
\nspace and gravitational effect on space are at this day in danger
\nof being upset by Einstein’s "fantasies" in the same field.
\nIt is a minor matter that Mr. Archer happens to be wrong
\nin his idea of Buddha’s intuition when he says that he would
\nhave rejected a certain Vedantic intuition, since Buddha neither <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-228<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\naccepted nor rejected, but simply refused at all to speculate on
\nthe supreme cause. His intuition was confined to the cause
\nof sorrow and the impermanence of things and the release by
\nextinction of ego, desire and samskāra,<\/i> and so far as he chose
\nto go, Ills intuition of this extinction. Nirvana, and the Vedantic
\nintuition of the supreme unity were the seeing of one truth
\nof spiritual experience, seen no doubt from different angles
\nof vision and couched in different intellectual forms, but
\nwith a common intuitive substance. The rest was foreign to
\nBuddha’s rigidly practical purpose. All this leads us far afield
\nfrom our subject, but our critic has a remarkably confused
\nmind and to follow him is to be condemned to divagate. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThus far Mr. Archer on intuition. This is the character
\nof his excursions on first principles in art. Is it really necessary
\nto point out that a power of mind or spirit may be the same
\nand yet act differently in different fields ? or that a certain
\nkind of intuition may be prepared by a long intellectual training,
\nbut that does not make it a last step in an intellectual process,
\nany more than the precedence of sense activity makes intellectual reasoning a last step of sense-perception ? The reason
\novertops sense and admits us to other and subtler ranges of
\ntruth, the intuition similarly overtops reason and admits us to
\na more direct and luminous power of truth. But very obviously,
\nin the use of the intuition the poet and artist cannot proceed
\nprecisely in the same way as ‘the scientist or philosopher.
\nLeonardo da Vinci’s remarkable intuitions in science and his
\ncreative intuitions in art started from the same power, but the
\nsurrounding or subordinate mental operations were of a different character and colour. And in art itself there are different
\nkinds of intuition. Shakespeare’s seeing of life differs in its
\ncharacter and aids from Balzac’s or Ibsen’s, but the essential
\npart of the process, that which makes it intuitive, is the same.
\nThe Buddhistic, the Vedantic seeing of things may be equally
\npowerful starting-points for artistic creation, may lead one to
\nthe calm of a Buddha or the other to the rapture dance or majestic <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-229<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nstillness of Shiva, and it is quite indifferent to the purposes
\nof art to which of them the metaphysician may be inclined to
\ngive a logical preference. These are elementary notions and
\nit is not surprising that one who ignores them should misunderstand the strong and subtle artistic creations of India. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe weakness of Mr. Archer’s attack, its empty noise
\nand violence and exiguity of substance must not blind us
\nto the very real importance of the mental outlook from which
\nhis dislike of Indian art proceeds. For the outlook and the
\ndislike it generates are rooted in something deeper than themselves, a whole cultural training, natural or acquired temperament and fundamental attitude towards existence, and it measures, if the immeasurable can be measured, the width of the
\ngulf which till recently separated the oriental and the western
\nmind and most of all the European and the Indian way of
\nseeing things. An inability to understand the motives and
\nmethods of Indian art and a contempt of or repulsion from it
\nwas almost universal till yesterday in the mind of Europe.
\nThere was little difference in this regard between the average
\nman bound by his customary first notions and the competent
\ncritic trained to appreciate different forms of culture. The
\ngulf was too wide for any bridge of culture then built to span.
\nTo the European mind Indian art was a thing barbarous, immature, monstrous, an arrested growth from humanity’s
\nprimitive savagery and incompetent childhood. If there
\nhas been now some change, it is due to the remarkably sudden
\nwidening of the horizon and view of European culture, a partial
\nshifting even of the standpoint from which it was accustomed
\nto see and judge all that it saw. In matters of art the western
\nmind was long bound up as in a prison in the Greek and
\nRenascence tradition modified by a later mentality with only
\ntwo side rooms of escape, the romantic and the realistic motives,
\nbut these were only wings of the same building; for the base
\nwas the same and a common essential canon united their
\nvariations. The conventional superstition of the imitation of <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-230<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nNature as the first law or the limiting rule of art governed
\neven the freest work and gave its tone to the artistic and critical intelligence. The canons of western artistic creation
\nwere held to be the sole valid criteria and everything else
\nwas regarded as primitive and half-developed or else strange
\nand fantastic and interesting only by its curiosity. But a remarkable change has begun to set in, even though the old
\nideas still largely rule. The prison, if not broken, has at least
\nhad a wide breach made in it; a more flexible vision and a more
\nprofound imagination have begun to superimpose themselves
\non the old ingrained attitude. As a result, and as a contributing
\ninfluence towards this change, oriental or at any rate Chinese
\nand Japanese art has begun to command something like
\nadequate recognition. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nBut the change has not yet gone far enough for a thorough
\nappreciation of the deepest and most characteristic spirit and
\ninspiration of Indian work. An eye or an effort like Mr. Havell’s
\nis still rare. For the most part even the most sympathetic
\ncriticism stops short at a technical appreciation and imaginative
\nsympathy which tries to understand from outside and penetrates into so much only of the artistic suggestion as can be at
\nonce seized by the new wider view of a more accomplished
\nand flexible critical mentality. But there is little sign of the
\nunderstanding of the very well-spring and spiritual fountain
\nof Indian artistic creation. There is therefore still a utility in
\nfathoming the depths and causes of the divergence. That is
\nespecially necessary for the Indian mind itself, for by the
\nappreciation excited by an opposing view it will be better able
\nto understand itself and especially to seize what is essential
\nin Indian art and must be clung to in the future and what is
\nan incident or a phase of growth and can be shed in the advance to a new creation. This is properly a task for those
\nwho have themselves at once the creative insight, the technical
\ncompetence and the seeing critical eye. But everyone who
\nhas at all the Indian spirit and feeling, can at least give some <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-231<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\naccount of the main, the central things which constitute for
\nhim the appeal of Indian painting, sculpture and architecture.
\nThis is all that I shall attempt, for it will be in itself the best
\ndefence and justification of Indian culture on its side of aesthetic significance. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe criticism of art is a vain and dead thing when it
\nignores the spirit, aim, essential motive from which a type of
\nartistic creation starts and judges by the external details only
\nin the light of a quite different spirit, aim and motive. Once
\nwe understand the essential things, enter into the characteristic
\nway and spirit, are able to interpret the form and execution
\nfrom that inner centre, we can then see how it looks in. the light
\nof other standpoints, in the light of the comparative mind.
\nA comparative criticism has its use, but the essential understanding must precede it if it is to have any real value. But
\nwhile this is comparatively easy in the wider and more flexible
\nturn of literature, it is, I think, more difficult in the other arts,
\nwhen the difference of spirit is deep, because there the absence of the mediating word, the necessity of proceeding direct
\nfrom spirit to line and form brings about a special intensity
\nand exclusive concentration of aim and stress of execution.
\nThe intensity of the thing that moves the work is brought out
\nwith a more distinct power, but by its very stress and directness
\nallows of few accommodations and combined variations of
\nappeal. The thing meant and the thing done strike deep home
\ninto the soul or the imaginative mind, but touch it over a smaller
\nsurface and with a lesser multitude of points of contact. But
\nwhatever the reason, it is less easy for a different kind of mind to appreciate. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe Indian mind in its natural poise finds it almost or
\nquite as difficult really, that is to say, spiritually to understand the arts of Europe, as the ordinary European mind to
\nenter into the spirit of Indian painting and sculpture. I have
\nseen a comparison made between a feminine Indian figure
\nand a Greek Aphrodite which illustrates the difficulty in an <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-232<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nextreme form. The critic tells me that the Indian figure is
\nfull of a strong spiritual sense\u2014here of the very breath and
\nbeing of devotion, an ineffable devotion, and that is true, it is
\na suggestion or even a revelation which breaks through or
\noverflows the form rather than depends on the external work,
\n―but the Greek creation can only awaken a sublimated carnal
\nor sensuous delight. Now having entered somewhat into the heart
\nof meaning of Greek sculpture, I can see that this is a wrong
\naccount of the matter. The critic has got into the real spirit
\nof the Indian, but not into the real spirit of the Greek work; his criticism from that moment, as a
\ncomparative appreciation,
\nloses all value. The Greek figure stresses no doubt the body,
\nbut appeals through it to an imaginative seeing inspiration
\nwhich aims at expressing a certain divine power of beauty
\nand gives us therefore something which is much more than
\na merely sensuous aesthetic pleasure. If the artist has done
\nthis with perfection, the work has accomplished its aim and
\nranks as a masterpiece. The Indian sculptor stresses something
\nbehind, something more remote to the surface imagination,
\nbut nearer to the soul, and subordinates to it the physical
\nform. If he has only partially succeeded or done it with power
\nbut with something faulty in the execution, his work is less
\ngreat, even though it may have a greater spirit in the intention :but when he wholly succeeds, then his work too is a masterpiece, and we may prefer it with a good conscience, if the
\nspiritual, the higher intuitive vision is what we most demand
\nfrom art. This however need not interfere with an appreciation of both kinds in their own order. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nBut in viewing much of other European work of the very
\ngreatest repute, I am myself aware of a failure of spiritual
\nsympathy. I look for instance on some of the most famed
\npieces of Tintoretto,\u2014not the portraits, for those give the
\nsoul, if only the active or character soul in the man, but say,
\nthe Adam and Eve, the St. George slaying the dragon, the
\nChrist appearing to Venetian Senators, and I am aware of <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-233<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nstanding baffled and stopped by an irresponsive blankness
\nsomewhere in my being. I can see the magnificence and
\npower of colouring and design, I can see the force of externalised imagination or the spirited dramatic rendering of action, but I strive in vain to get out any significance below the
\nsurface or equivalent to the greatness of the form, except
\nperhaps an incidental minor suggestion here and there and
\nthat is not sufficient for me. When I try to analyse my failure,
\nI find at first certain conceptions which conflict with my expectation or my own way of seeing. This muscular Adam,
\nthe sensuous beauty of this Eve do not bring home to me the
\nmother or the father of the race, this dragon seems to me only
\na surly portentous beast in great danger of being killed, not
\na creative embodiment of monstrous evil, this Christ with
\nhis massive body and benevolent philosophic visage almost
\noffends me, is not at any rate the Christ whom I know. But
\nthese are after all incidental things; what is really the matter
\nis that I come to this art with a previous demand for a kind of
\nvision, imagination, emotion, significance which it cannot
\ngive me. And not being so self-confident as to think that
\nwhat commands the admiration of the greatest critics and
\nartists is not admirable, I can see this and pause on the verge
\nof applying Mr. Archer’s criticism of certain Indian work
\nand saying that the mere execution is beautiful or marvellous
\nbut there is no imagination, nothing beyond what is on the
\nsurface. I can understand that what is wanting is really the
\nkind of imagination I personally demand; but though my
\nacquired cultured mind explains this to me and may intellectually catch at the something more, my natural being will
\nnot be satisfied, I am oppressed, not uplifted by this triumph
\nof life and the flesh and of the power and stir of life,\u2014not
\nthat I object to these things in themselves or to the greatest
\nemphasis on the sensuous or even the sensual, elements not
\nat all absent from Indian creation, if I can get something at
\nleast of the deeper thing I want behind it,\u2014and I find myself <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-234<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nturning away from the work of one of the greatest Italian masters to satisfy myself with some "barbaric" Indian painting
\nor statue, some calm unfathomable Buddha, bronze Shiva
\nor eithteen-armed Durga slaying the Asuras. But the cause
\nof my failure is there, that I am seeking for something which
\nwas not meant in the spirit of this art and which I ought not
\nto expect from its characteristic creation. And if I had steeped
\nmyself in this Renascence mind as in the original Hellenic
\nspirit, I could have added something to my inner experience
\nand acquired a more catholic and universal aesthesis. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nI lay stress on this psychological misunderstanding or
\nwant of understanding, because it explains the attitude of the
\nnatural European mind to the great works of Indian art and
\nputs on it its right value. This mind catches only what is kin
\nto European effort and regards that too as inferior, naturally
\nand quite rightly since the same thing is more sincerely and
\nperfectly done from a more native fountain of power in western work. That explains the amazing preference of better
\ninformed critics than Mr. Archer for the bastard Gandharan
\nsculpture to great and sincere work original and true in its
\nunity,\u2014Gandharan sculpture which is an unsatisfying, almost an impotent junction of two incompatible motives, incompatible at least if one is not fused into the other as here
\ncertainly it is not fused,\u2014or its praise otherwise incomprehensible of certain second-rate or third-rate creations and
\nits turning away from others noble and profound but strange
\nto its conceptions. Or else it seizes with appreciation\u2014but
\nis it really a total and a deeply understanding appreciation ?
\n\u2014on work like the Indo-Saracenic which though in no way
\nakin to western types has yet the power at certain points to
\nget within the outskirts of its circle of aesthetic conceptions.
\nIt is even so much struck by the Taj as to try to believe that it
\nis the work of an Italian sculptor, some astonishing genius,
\nno doubt, who Indianised himself miraculously in this one
\nhour of solitary achievement,\u2014for India is a land of miracles, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-235<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n\u2014and probably died of the effort, for he has left us no other
\nwork to admire. Again it admires, at least in Mr. Archer,
\nJavanese work because of its humanity and even concludes
\nfrom that that it is not Indian. Its essential unity with Indian
\nwork behind the variation of manner is invisible to this mind
\nbecause the spirit and inner meaning of Indian work is a blank
\nto its vision and it sees only a form, a notation of the meaning,
\nwhich, therefore, it does not understand and dislikes. One
\nmight just as well say that the Gita written in the Devanagari
\nis a barbaric, monstrous or meaningless thing, but put into some
\ncursive character at once becomes not Indian, because human and intelligible ! <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nBut, ordinarily, place this mind before anything ancient,
\nHindu, Buddhistic or Vedantic in art and it looks at it with a
\nblank or an angry incomprehension. It looks for the sense and
\ndoes not find any, because either it has not in itself the experience and finds it difficult to have the imagination, much
\nmore the realisation of what this art does really mean and
\nexpress, or because it insists on looking for what it is accustomed to see at home and, not finding that, is convinced that
\nthere is nothing to see or nothing of any value. Or else if there
\nis something which it could have understood, it does not
\nunderstand because it is expressed in the Indian form and the
\nIndian way. It looks at the method and form and finds it unfamiliar, contrary to its own canons, is revolted, contemptuous,
\nrepelled, speaks of the thing as monstrous, barbarous, ugly or
\nnull, passes on in a high dislike or disdain. Or if it is overborne by some sense of unanalysable beauty of greatness or
\npower it still speaks of a splendid barbarism. Do you want an
\nilluminating instance of this blankness of comprehension ?
\nMr. Archer sees the Dhyani Buddha with its supreme, its
\nunfathomable, its infinite spiritual calm which every cultured
\noriental mind can at once feel and respond to in the depths of
\nhis being, and he denies that there is anything,\u2014only drooped
\neyelids, an immobile pose and an insipid, by which I suppose <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-236<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nhe means a calm passionless face.1<\/sup> He turns for comfort to the
\nHellenic nobility of expression of the Gandharan Buddha, or
\nto the living Rabindranath Tagore more spiritual than
\nany Buddha from Peshawar to Kamakura, an inept misuse of
\ncomparison against which I imagine the great poet himself
\nwould be the first to protest. There we have the total incomprehension, the blind window, the blocked door in the mind,
\nand there too the reason why the natural western mentality
\ncomes to Indian art with a demand for something other than
\nwhat its characteristic spirit and motive intend to give, and,
\ndemanding; that, is not prepared to enter into another kind of
\nspiritual experience and another range of creative sight, imaginative power and mode of self-expression. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThis once understood, we can turn to the difference in the
\nspirit and method of artistic creation which has given rise to the
\nmutual incomprehension; for that will bring us to the positive
\nside of the matter. All great artistic work proceeds from an act
\nof intuition, not really an intellectual idea or a splendid imagination,\u2014these are only mental translations,\u2014but a direct intuition of some truth of life or being, some significant form of
\nthat truth, some development of it in the mind of man. And so
\n‘far there is no difference between great European and great
\nIndian work. Where then begins the immense divergence ?
\nIt is there in everything else, in the object and field of the
\nintuitive vision, in the method of working out the sight or
\nsuggestion, in the part taken in the rendering by the external
\nform and technique, in the whole way of the rendering to the
\nhuman mind, even in the centre of our being to which the work
\nappeals. The European artist gets his intuition by a suggestion <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> In a note Mr. Archer mentions and very rightly discounts an absurd
\napology for these Buddhas, viz., that the greatness and spirituality are not
\nat<\/i> all in the work, but in the devotion of the artist ! If the artist cannot put
\ninto his work what was in him\u2014and here it is not devotion that is expressed,
\n\u2014his work is a futile abortion. But if he has expressed what he has felt,
\nthe capacity to feel it must also be there in the mind that looks at his work, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-237<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nfrom an appearance in life and Nature or, if it starts from
\nsomething in his own soul, relates it at once to an external
\nsupport. He brings down that intuition into his normal mind
\nand sets the intellectual idea and the imagination in the intelligence to clothe it with a mental stuff which will render its
\nform to the moved reason, emotion, aesthesis. Then he missions
\nhis eye and hand to execute it in terms which start from a colourable "imitation" of life and Nature\u2014and in ordinary hands
\ntoo often end there\u2014to set at an interpretation that really
\nchanges it into the image of something not outward in our
\nown being or in universal being which was the real thing seen.
\nAnd to that in looking at the work we have to get back through
\ncolour and line and disposition or whatever else may be part
\nof the external means, to their mental suggestions and through
\nthem to the soul of the whole matter. The appeal is not direct
\nto the eye of the deepest self and spirit within, but to the
\noutward soul by a strong awakening of the sensuous, the
\nvital, the emotional, the intellectual and imaginative being,
\nand of the spiritual we get as much or as little as can suit
\nitself to and express itself through the outward man. Life,
\naction, passion, emotion, idea. Nature seen for their own sake
\nand for an aesthetic delight in them, these are the object and
\nfield of this creative intuition. The something more which
\nthe Indian mind knows to be behind these things looks out, if
\nat all, from behind many veils. The direct and unveiled presence of the Infinite and its godheads is not evoked or thought
\nnecessary to the greater greatness and the highest perfection. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe theory of ancient Indian art at its greatest\u2014and the
\ngreatest gives its character to the rest and throws on it something of its stamp and influence\u2014is of another kind. Its highest business is to disclose something of the Self, the Infinite,
\nthe Divine to the regard of the soul, the Self through its expressions, the Infinite through its living finite symbols, the
\nDivine through his powers. Or the Godheads are to be revealed,
\nluminously interpreted or in some way suggested to the soul’s <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-238<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nunderstanding or to its devotion or at the very least to a spiritually or religiously aesthetic emotion. When this hieratic art
\ncomes down from these altitudes to the intermediate worlds
\nbehind ours, to the lesser godheads or genii, it still carries into
\nthem some power or some hint from above. And when it comes
\nquite down to the material world and the life of man and the
\nthings of external Nature, it does not altogether get rid of
\nthe greater vision, the hieratic stamp, the spiritual seeing,
\nand in most good work\u2014except in moments of relaxation and a
\nhumorous or vivid play with the obvious\u2014there is always something more in which the seeing presentation of life floats as in
\nan immaterial atmosphere. Life is seen in the self or in some
\nsuggestion of the infinite or of something beyond or there is
\nat least a touch and influence of these which helps to shape
\nthe presentation. It is not that all Indian work realises this
\nideal; there is plenty no doubt that falls short, is lowered, ineffective or even debased, but it is the best and the most characteristic influence and execution which gives its tone. to an
\nart and by which we must judge. Indian art in fact is identical
\nin its spiritual aim and principle with the rest of Indian culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nA seeing in the self accordingly becomes the characteristic
\nmethod of the Indian artist aid it is directly enjoined on him
\nby the canon. He has to see first in his spiritual being the
\ntruth of the thing he must express and to create its form in his
\nintuitive mind; he is not bound to look out first on outward
\nlife and Nature for his model, his authority, his rule, his
\nteacher or his fountain of suggestions. Why should he when it
\nis something quite inward he has to bring out into expression?
\nIt is not an idea in the intellect, a mental imagination, an
\noutward emotion on which he has to depend for his stimulants,
\nbut an idea, image, emotion of the spirit, and the mental
\nequivalents are subordinate things for help in the transmission
\nand give only a part of the colouring and the shape. A material
\nform, colour, line and design are his physical means of the
\nexpression, but in using them he is not bound to an imitation, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-239<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof Nature, but has to make the form aid all else significant of
\nhis vision, and if that can only be done or can best be done by
\nsome modification, some pose, some touch or symbolic variation which is not found in physical Nature, he is at perfect
\nliberty to use it, since truth to his vision, the unity of the thing
\nhe is seeing and expressing is his only business. The line, colour
\nand the rest are not his first, but his last preoccupation, because
\nthey have to carry on them a world of things which have
\nalready taker spiritual form in his mind. He has not for instance
\nto re-create for us the human face and body of the Buddha or
\nsome one passion or incident of his life, but to reveal, the calm
\nof Nirvana through a figure of the Buddha, and every detail
\nand accessory must be turned into a means or an aid of his
\npurpose. And even when it is some human passion, or incident
\nhe has to portray, it is not usually that alone, but also or more
\nsomething else in the soul to which it points or from which it
\nstarts or some power behind the action that has to enter into
\nthe spirit of his design and is often really the main thing. And
\nthrough the eye that looks on his work he has to appeal not
\nmerely to an excitement of the outward soul, but to the inner
\nself, antarātman.<\/i> One may well say that beyond the ordinary
\ncultivation of the aesthetic instinct necessary to all artistic
\nappreciation there is a spiritual insight or culture needed if
\nwe are to enter into the whole meaning of Indian artistic creation, otherwise we get only at the surface external things or
\nat the most at things only just below the surface. It is an
\nintuitive and spiritual art and must be seen with the intuitive
\nand spiritual eye. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThis is the distinctive character of Indian art and to ignore
\nit is to fall into total incomprehension or into much misunderstanding. Indian architecture, painting, sculpture are nor only
\nintimately one in inspiration with the central things in Indian
\nphilosophy, religion. Yoga, culture, but a specially intense
\nexpression of their significance. There is much in the literature
\nwhich can be well enough appreciated without any very deep <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-240<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nentry into these things, but it is comparatively a very small
\npart of what is left of the other arts, Hindu or Buddhistic, of
\nwhich this can be said. They have been very largely a hieratic
\naesthetic script of India’s spiritual, contemplative and religious
\nexperience. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-241<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n
\nCHAPTER VII <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nARCHITECTURE<\/font>, sculpture and painting, because they are the
\nthree great arts which appeal to the spirit through the eye,
\nare those too in which the sensible and the invisible meet
\nwith the strongest emphasis on themselves and yet the greatest
\nnecessity of each other. The form with its insistent masses,
\nproportions, lines, colours, can here only justify them by
\ntheir service for the something intangible it has to express,
\nthe spirit needs all the possible help of the material body to
\ninterpret itself to itself through the eye, yet asks of it that it
\nshall be as transparent a veil as possible of its own greater
\nsignificance. The art of the East and the art of the West,
\n\u2014each in its characteristic or mean, for there are always
\nexceptions,\u2014deal with the problem of these two interlocking
\npowers in a quite different way. The western mind is arrested and attracted by the form, lingers on it and cannot get
\naway from its charm, loves ii for its own beauty, rests on the
\nemotional, intellectual, aesthetic suggestions that arise directly
\nfrom its most visible language, confines the soul in the body; it might almost be said that for this mind form creates the
\nspirit, the spirit depends for its existence and for everything
\nit has to say on the form. The Indian attitude to the matter
\nis at the opposite pole to this view. For the Indian mind
\nform does not exist except as a creation of the spirit and
\ndraws all its meaning and value from the spirit. Every line,
\narrangement of mass, colour, shape, posture; every physical
\nsuggestion, however many, crowded, opulent they may be,
\nis first and last a suggestion, a hint, very often a symbol <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-242<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nwhich is in its main function a support for a spiritual emotion,
\nidea, image that again goes beyond itself to the less definable,
\nbut more powerfully sensible reality of the spirit which has
\nexcited these movements in the aesthetic mind and passed
\nthrough them into significant shapes. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThis characteristic attitude of the Indian reflective and
\ncreative mind necessitates in our view of its creations an
\neffort to get beyond at once to the inner spirit of the reality
\nit expresses and see from it and not from outside. And in
\nfact to start from the physical details and their synthesis
\nappears to me quite the wrong way to look at an Indian work
\nof art. The orthodox style of western criticism seems to be
\nto dwell scrutinisingly on the technique, on form, on the
\nobvious story of the form, and then pass to some appreciation
\nof beautiful or impressive emotion and idea. It is only in
\nsome deeper and more sensitive minds that we get beyond  things. A criticism of that kind
\napplied to Indian art leaves it barren or poor of significance. Here the only right way to get at once through a total
\nintuitive or revelatory impression or by some meditative dwelling on the whole, dhyāna<\/i> in the technical Indian term, to
\nthe spiritual meaning and atmosphere, make ourselves one
\nwith that as completely as possible, and then only the helpful
\nmeaning and value of all the rest comes out with a complete
\nand revealing force. For here it is the spirit that carries the
\nform, while in most western art it is the form that carries
\nwhatever there may be of spirit. The striking phrase of
\nEpictetus recurs to the mind in which he describes man as a
\nlittle soul carrying a corpse, psiicharion ei bastazon nekron.
\n<\/i>The more ordinary western outlook is upon animate matter
\ncarrying in its life a modicum of soul. But the seeing of
\nthe Indian mind  and of Indian art is that of a great, a limitless
\nself and spirit, mahān ātmā,<\/i> which carries to us in the sea of
\nits presence a living shape of itself, small in comparison to
\nits own infinity, but yet sufficient by the power that informs <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-243<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthis symbol to support some aspect of that infinite’s self-expression. It is therefore essential that we should look here
\nnot solely with the physical eye informed by the reason and
\nthe aesthetic imagination, but make the physical seeing a passage to the opening of the inner spiritual eye and a moved
\ncommunion in the soul. A great oriental work of art does
\nnot easily reveal its secret to one who comes to it solely in
\na mood of aesthetic curiosity or with a considering critical
\nobjective mind, still less as the cultivated and interested tourist
\npassing among strange and foreign things;<\/i> but it has to be
\nseen in loneliness, in the solitude of one’s self, in moments
\nwhen one is capable of long and deep meditation and as little
\nweighted as possible with the conventions of material life.
\nThat is why the Japanese with their fine sense in these things,
\n\u2014a sense which modern Europe with her assault of crowded
\nart galleries and over-pictured walls seems\u2014to have quite lost,
\nthough perhaps I am wrong, and those are the right conditions for display of European art,\u2014have put their temples
\nand their Buddhas as often as possible away on mountains
\nand in distant or secluded scenes of Nature and avoid living
\nwith great paintings in the crude hours of daily life, but
\nkeep them by preference in such a way that their undisputed
\nsuggestions can sink into the mind in its finer moments or
\napart where they can go and look at them in a treasured secrecy
\nwhen the soul is at leisure from life. That is an indication
\nof the utmost value pointing to the nature of the appeal made
\nby eastern art and the right way and mood for looking at its
\ncreations. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIndian architecture especially demands this kind of
\ninner study and this spiritual self-identification with its
\ndeepest meaning and will not otherwise reveal itself to us.
\nThe secular buildings of ancient India, her palaces and places
\nof assembly and civic edifices have not outlived the ravage
\nof time, what remains to us is mostly something of the great
\nmountain and cave temples, something too of the temples <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-244<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof her ancient cities of the plains, and for the rest we have
\nthe fanes and shrines of her later times, whether situated in
\ntemple cities and places of pilgrimage like Srirangam and
\nRameshwaram or in her great once regal towns like Madura,
\nwhen the temple was the centre of life. It is then the most
\nhieratic side of a hieratic art that remains to us. These sacred
\nbuildings are the signs, the architectural self-expression of an
\nancient spiritual and religious culture. Ignore the spiritual
\nsuggestion, the religious significance, the meaning of the
\nsymbols and indications, look only with the rational and
\nsecular aesthetic mind, and it is vain to expect that we shall
\nget to any true and discerning appreciation of this art. And
\nit has to be remembered too that the religious spirit here is
\nsomething quite different from the sense of European religions; and even mediaeval Christianity, especially as now looked
\nat by the modem European mind which has gone through
\nthe two great crises of the Renascence and recent secularism,
\nwill not in spite of its oriental origin and affinities be of much
\nreal help. To bring in into the artistic look on an Indian
\ntemple occidental memories or a comparison with Greek
\nParthenon or Italian church or Duomo or Campanile or
\neven the great Gothic cathedrals of mediaeval France, though
\nthese have in them something much nearer to the Indian
\nmentality, is to intrude a fatally foreign and disturbing element or standard in the mind. But this consciously or else
\nsubconsciously is what almost every European mind does
\nto a greater or less degree,\u2014and it is here a pernicious immixture, for it subjects the work of a vision that saw the immeasurable to the tests of an eye that dwells only on measure. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIndian sacred architecture of whatever date, style or
\ndedication goes back to something tunelessly ancient and
\nnow outside India almost wholly lost, something which belongs to the past, and yet it goes forward too, though this the
\nrationalistic mind will not easily admit, to something which
\nwill return upon us and is already beginning to return, something <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-245<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nwhich belongs to the future. An Indian temple, to
\nwhatever godhead it may be built, is in its inmost reality an
\naltar raised to the divine Self, a house of the Cosmic Spirit,
\nan appeal and aspiration to the Infinite. As that and in the
\nlight of that seeing and conception it must in the first place
\nbe understood, and everything else must be seen in that
\nsetting and that light, and then only can there be any real
\nunderstanding. No artistic eye however alert and sensible
\nand no aesthetic mind however full and sensitive can arrive
\nat that understanding, if it is attached to a Hellenised conception of rational beauty or shuts itself up in a materialised
\nor intellectual interpretation and fails to open itself to the
\ngreat things here meant by a kindred close response to some
\ntouch of the cosmic consciousness, some revelation of the
\ngreater spiritual self, some suggestion of the Infinite. These
\nthings, the spiritual self, the cosmic spirit, the Infinite, are
\nnot rational, but suprarational, eternal presences, but to the
\nintellect only words, and visible, sensible, near only to an
\nintuition and revelation in our inmost selves. An art which
\nstarts from them as a first conception can only give us what
\nit has to give, their touch, their nearness, their self-disclosure,
\nthrough some responding intuition and revelation in us, in
\nour own soul, our own self. It is this which one must come
\nto it to find and not demand from it the satisfaction of some
\nquite other seeking or some very different turn of imagination
\nand more limited superficial significance. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThis is the first truth of Indian architecture and its significance which demands emphasis and it leads at once
\nto the
\nanswer to certain very common misapprehensions and objections. Ail art reposes on some unity and all its details,
\nwhether few and sparing or lavish and crowded and full,
\nmust go back to that unity and help its significance; otherwise
\nit is not art. Now we find our western critic telling us with
\nan assurance which would be stupefying if one did not see
\nhow naturally it arose, that in Indian architecture there is <\/b>no <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-246<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nunity which is as much as to say that there is here no great
\nart at all, but only a skill in the execution of crowded and
\nunrelated details. We are told even by otherwise sympathetic judges that there is an overloading of ornament and
\ndetail which, however beautiful or splendid in itself, stands
\nin the way of unity, an attempt to load every rift with ore,
\nan absence of calm, no unfilled spaces, no relief to the eye.
\nMr. Archer as usual carries up the adverse criticism to its
\nextreme clamorous top notes; his heavily shotted phrases
\nare all a continuous insistence on this one theme. The great
\ntemples of the South of India are, he allows, marvels of massive
\nconstruction. He seems by the way to have a rooted objection
\nto massiveness in architecture or great massed effects in
\n.sculpture, regardless of their appropriateness or need, although he admits them in literature. Still this much there is
\nd with it a sort of titanic impressiveness, but of unity, clarity, nobility there is no trace. This observation seems to
\nmy judgment sufficiently contradictory, since I do not understand how there can be a marvel of construction, whether light
\nor massive, without any unity,\u2014but here is not even, it seems,
\na trace of it,\u2014or a mighty impressiveness without any greatness or nobility whatever, even allowing this to be a titanic
\nand not an Olympian, nobleness. He tells us that everything
\nponderous, everything here overwrought and the most
\nprominent features swarming, writhing with contorted semi-human figures are as senseless as anything in architecture.
\nHow, one might ask, does he know that they are senseless,
\nwhen he practically admits that he has made no attempt to
\nfind what is their sense, but has simply assumed from the
\nself-satisfied sufficiency of his own admitted ignorance and
\nfailure to understand that there cannot be any meaning ?
\nAnd the whole thing he characterises as a monstrosity built
\nby Rakshasas, ogres, demons, a gigantesque barbarism. The
\nnorthern buildings find a little less disfavour in his eyes, but
\nthe difference in the end is small or none. There is the same <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-247<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nponderousness, absence of lightness and grace, an even greater
\nprofusion of incised ornament; these too are barbaric creations. Alone the Mahomedan architecture, called
\nIndo-Saracenic, is exempted from this otherwise universal
\ncondemnation. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIt is a little surprising after all, however natural the first
\nblindness here, that even assailants of this extreme kind,
\nsince they must certainly know that there can be no art, no
\neffective construction without unity, should not have paused
\neven once to ask themselves whether after all there must not
\nbe here some principle of oneness which they had missed
\nbecause they came with alien conceptions and looked at things
\nfrom the wrong end, and before pronouncing this magisterial
\njudgment should not have had patience to wait in a more
\ndetached and receptive way upon the thing under their eye
\nand seen whether then some secret of unity did not emerge.
\nBut it is the more sympathetic and less violent critic who
\ndeserves a direct answer. Now it may readily be admitted
\nthat the failure to see at once the unity of this architecture
\nis perfectly natural to a European eye, because unity in the
\nsense demanded by the western conception, the Greek unity
\ngained by much suppression and a sparing use of detail and
\ncircumstance or even the Gothic unity got by casting everything into the mould of a single spiritual aspiration, is not
\nthere. And the greater unity that really is there can never be
\narrived at all, if the eye begins and ends by dwelling on
\nform and detail and ornament, because it will then be obsessed by these things and find it difficult to go beyond to
\nthe unity which all this in its totality serves not so much to
\nexpress in itself, but to fill it with that which comes out of it
\nand relieve its oneness by multitude. An original oneness,
\nnot a combined or synthetic or an effected unity, is that from
\nwhich this art begins and to which its work when finished
\nreturns or rather lives in it as in its self and natural atmosphere.
\nIndian sacred architecture constantly represents the greatest <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-248<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\noneness of the self, the cosmic, the infinite in the immensity
\nof its world-design, the multitude of its features of self-expression, laksana,<\/i> (yet the oneness is greater than and independent of their totality and in itself indefinable), and all
\nits starting-point of unity in conception, its mass of design
\nand immensity of material, its crowding abundance of significant ornament and detail and its return towards oneness are
\nonly intelligible as necessary circumstances of this poem,
\nthis epic or this lyric\u2014for there are smaller structures which
\nare such lyrics\u2014of the Infinite. The western mentality,
\nexcept in those who are coming or returning, since Europe
\nhad once something of this cult in her own way, to this vision,
\nmay find it difficult to appreciate the truth and meaning of
\nsuch an art, which tries to figure existence as a whole and not
\nin its pieces; but I would invite those Indian minds who are
\ntroubled by these criticisms or partly or temporarily overpowered by the western way of seeing things, to look at our
\narchitecture in the light of this conception and see whether
\nall but minor objections do not vanish as soon as the real
\nmeaning makes itself felt and gives body to the first indefinable
\nimpression and emotion which we experience before the greater
\nconstructions of the Indian builders. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nTo appreciate this spiritual-aesthetic truth of Indian architecture, it will be best to look first at some work where there is
\nnot the complication of surroundings now often out of harmony
\nwith the building, outside even those temple towns which still
\nretain their dependence on the sacred motive, and rather in
\nsome place where there is room for a free background of Nature.
\nI have before me two prints which can well serve the purpose,
\na temple at Kalahasti, a temple at Sinhachalam, two buildings
\nentirely different in treatment and yet one in the ground and
\nthe universal motive. The straight way here is not to detach
\nthe temple from its surroundings, but to see it in unity with
\nthe sky and low-lying landscape or with the sky and hills around
\nand feel the thing common to both, the construction and its <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-249<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nenvironment, the reality in Nature, the reality expressed in
\nthe work of art. The oneness to which this Nature aspires
\nin her inconscient self-creation and in which she lives, the oneness to which the soul of man uplifts itself in his
\nconscious spiritual upbuilding, his labour of aspiration here expressed
\nin stone, and in which so upbuilt he and his work live are the
\nsame and the soul-motive is one. Thus seen this work of man
\nseems to be something which has started out and. detached
\nitself against the power of the natural world, something of the
\none common aspiration in both to the same infinite spirit of
\nitself,\u2014the inconscient uplook and against it the strong single
\nrelief of the self-conscient effort and success of finding ; of
\nthese buildings climbs up bold, massive in projection, <\/i>up-piled <\/i>in the greatness of a forceful but sure ascent,
\npreserving its
\nrange and line to the last, the other soars from the strength of
\nits base, in the grace and emotion of a curving mass to a rounded
\nsummit and crowning symbol. There is in both constant,  subtle yet
\npronounced lessening from the base towards the
\ntop, but at each stage a repetition of the same form, the same
\nmultiplicity of insistence, the same crowded fullness and indented relief, but
\none maintains its multiple endeavour and
\nindication to the last, the other ends in a single id
\nthe significance we have first to feel the oneness of the infinity in
\nwhich this nature and this art live, then see this thronged
\nexpression as the sign of the infinite multiplicity which fills
\nthis oneness, see in the regular lessening ascent of the edifice
\nthe subtler and subtler return from the base on earth to the
\noriginal unity and seize on the symbolic indication of its close
\nat the top. Not absence of unity, but a tremendous unity is
\nrevealed. Reinterpret intimately what this representation means
\nin the terms of our own spiritual self-existence and cosmic
\nbeing, and we have what these great builders saw in themselves
\nand reared in stone. All objections, once we have got at this
\nidentity in spiritual experience, fall away and show themselves
\nto be what they really are, the utterance and cavil of an impotent <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-250<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nmisunderstanding, an insufficient apprehension or a complete
\nfailure to see. To appreciate the detail of Indian architecture
\nis easy when the whole is thus seen and known; otherwise,
\nit is impossible. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThis method of interpretation applies, however different
\nthe construction and the nature of the rendering, to all Dravidian architecture, not only to the mighty temples of far-spread fame, but to unknown roadside shrines in small towns,
\nwhich are only a slighter execution of the same theme, a satisfied
\nsuggestion here, but the greater buildings a grandiose fulfilled
\naspiration. The architectural language of the north !s<\/i> of a
\ndifferent kind, there is another basic style; but here too the same
\nspiritual, meditative, intuitive method has to be used and we
\nget at the same result, an aesthetic interpretation or suggestion
\nof the one spiritual experience, one in all its complexity and
\ndiversity, which founds the unity of the infinite variations of
\nIndian spirituality and religious feeling and the realised union
\nof the human self with the Divine. This is the unity too of all
\nthe creations of this hieratic art. The different styles and
\nmotives arrive at or express that unity in different ways. The
\nobjection that an excess of thronging detail and ornament hides,
\nimpairs or breaks up the unity, is advanced only because
\nthe eye has made the mistake of dwelling on the detail first
\nwithout relation to this original spiritual oneness, which has
\nfirst to be fixed in an intimate spiritual seeing and union and
\nthen all else seen in that vision and experience. When we look
\non the multiplicity of the world, it is only a crowded plurality
\nthat we can find and to arrive at unity we have to reduce, to
\nsuppress what we have seen or sparingly select a few indications or to be satisfied with the unity of this or that separate
\nidea, experience or imagination; but when we have realised the
\nself, the infinite unity and look back on the multiplicity of the
\nworld, then we find that oneness able to bear all the infinity
\nof variation and circumstance we can crowd into it and its unity
\nremains unabridged by even the most endless self-multiplication <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-251<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof its informing creation. We find the same thing in looking
\nat this architecture. The wealth of ornament, detail, circumstance in Indian temples represents the infinite variety and
\nrepetition of the worlds,\u2014not our world only, but all the
\nplanes,\u2014suggests the infinite multiplicity in the infinite oneness.
\nIt is a matter of our own experience and fullness of vision
\nhow much we leave out or bring in, whether we express so
\nmuch or so little or attempt as in the Dravidian style to give
\nthe impression of a teeming inexhaustible plenitude. The largeness of this unity is base and continent enough for any
\nsuperstructure or content of multitude. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nTo condemn this abundance as barbarous is to apply a
\nforeign standard. Where after all are we bound to draw
\nthe line ? To the pure classical taste Shakespeare’s art once
\nappeared great but barbarous for a similar reason,\u2014one
\nremembers the Gallic description of him as a drunken
\nbarbarian of genius,\u2014his artistic unity non-existent or spoilt
\nby crowding tropical vegetation of incident and character, his
\nteeming imaginations violent, exaggerated, sometimes bizarre,
\nmonstrous, without symmetry, proportion and all the other
\nlucid unities, lightnesses, graces loved by the classic mind.
\nThat mind might say of his work in language like Mr. Archer’s
\nthat here there is indeed a titanic genius, a mass of power,
\nbut of unity, clarity, classic nobility no trace, but rather an
\nentire absence of lucid grace and lightness and restraint, a
\nprofusion of wild ornament and an imaginative riot without law
\nor measure, strained figures, distorted positions and gestures,
\nno dignity, no fine, just, rationally natural and beautiful classic
\nmovement and pose. But even the strictest Latin mind has now
\ngot over its objections to the "splendid barbarism" of Shakespeare and can understand that here is a fuller, less sparing and
\nexiguous vision of life, a greater intuitive unity than the formal
\nunities of the classic aesthesis. But the Indian vision of the
\nworld and existence was vaster and fuller than Shakespeare’s,
\nbecause it embraced not merely life, but all being, not merely <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-252<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nhumanity, but all the worlds and all Nature and cosmos. The
\nEuropean mind not having arrived except in individuals at
\nany close, direct, insistent realisation of the unity of the infinite
\nself or the cosmic consciousness peopled with its infinite
\nmultiplicity, is not driven to express these things, cannot
\nunderstand or put up with them when they are expressed
\nin this oriental art, speech and style and object to it as the
\nLatin mind once objected to Shakespeare. Perhaps the day is
\nnot distant when it will see and understand and perhaps even
\nitself try to express the same things in another language. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe objection that the crowding detail allows no calm,
\ngives no relief or space to the eye, falls under the same heading,
\nsprings from the same root, is urged from a different experience and has no validity for the Indian experience. For
\nthis unity on which all is upborne, carries in itself the infinite
\nspace and calm of the spiritual realisation, and there is no
\nneed for other unfilled spaces or tracts of calm of a lesser
\nmore superficial kind. The eye is here only a way of access
\nto the soul, it is to that that there is the appeal, and if the
\nsoul living in this realisation or dwelling under the influence
\nof this aesthetic impression needs any relief, it is not from
\nthe incidence of life and form, but from the immense incidence
\nof that vastness of infinity and tranquil silence, and that can
\nonly be given by its opposite, by an abundance of form and
\ndetail and life. As for the objection in regard to Dravidian
\narchitecture to its massiveness and its titanic construction,
\nthe precise spiritual effect intended could not be given otherwise; for the infinite, the cosmic seen as a whole in its vast
\nmanifestation is titanic, is mighty in material and power.
\nIt is other and quite different things also, but none of these
\nare absent from Indian construction. The great temples of
\nthe north have often in spite of Mr. Archer’s dictum, a singular
\ngrace in their power, a luminous lightness relieving their mass
\nand strength, a rich delicacy of beauty in their ornate fullness. It is not
\nindeed the Greek lightness, clarity or naked nobleness <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-253<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nnor is it exclusive, but comes in in a fine blending of opposites
\nwhich is in the very spirit of the Indian religious, philosophical
\nand aesthetic mind.<\/i> Nor are these things absent from many
\nDravidian buildings, though in certain styles they are boldly
\nsacrificed or only put into minor incidents,\u2014one instance
\nof the kind Mr. Archer rejoices in as an oasis in the desert of
\nthis to him unintelligible mass of might and greatness,\u2014
\nbut in either case suppressed so that the fullness of solemn
\nand grandiose effect may have a complete, an undiminished
\nexpression. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nI need not deal with adverse strictures of a more insignificant kind,\u2014such as the dislike of the Indian form of the
\narch and dome, because they are not the radiating arch and
\ndome of other styles. That is only an intolerant refusal to admit the beauty of unaccustomed forms. It is legitimate to
\nprefer one’s own things, those to which our mind and nature
\nhave been trained, but to condemn other art and effort because it also prefers its own way of arriving at beauty, greatness, self-expression, is a narrowness which with the growth
\nof a more catholic culture ought to disappear. But there is
\none comment on Dravidian temple architecture which is
\nworth noting because it is made by others than Mr. Archer
\nand his kind. Even a sympathetic mind like Professor Geddes
\nis impressed by some sense of a monstrous effect of terror
\nand gloom in these mighty buildings. Such expressions are
\nastonishing to an Indian mind because terror and gloom are
\nconspicuously absent from the feelings aroused in it by its religion, art or literature. In the religion they are rarely awakened
\nand only in order to be immediately healed and, even when
\nthey come, are always sustained by the sense of a supporting
\nand helping presence, an eternal greatness and calm or love
\nor Delight behind; the very goddess of destruction is at the
\nsame time the compassionate and loving Mother; the austere
\nMaheswara, Rudra, is also Shiva, the auspicious, Ashutosha,
\nthe refuge of men, The Indian thinking and religious mind <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-254<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nlooks with cat without shrinking or repulsion, with an understanding
\nborn of its agelong effort at identity and oneness,
\nat all that meets it in the stupendous spectacle of the cosmos. And even its
\nasceticism its turning from the world, which begins not in terror and gloom, but in a sense of vanity and
\nfatigue, or of  something higher, truer, happier than life, soon
\npa y element of pessimistic sadness into the rapture of the peace and bliss. Indian secular poetry 
\nand drama is throughout rich, vital and joyous and there is more tragedy,
\nterror, sorrow and gloom packed into any few
\npages of European work than we can find in the whole mass
\nof Indian literature. It does not seem to me that Indian art is at
\nall different in this respect from the religion and literature. western mind is here thrusting in its own habitual reactions
\nup on things in the indigenous conception in which they have no proper place. Mark the curious misreading of the dance
\nof Shiva as a dance of Death or Destruction, whereas, as any body ought  to be able to see who looks upon the Nataraja, it
\nexpresses on the contrary the rapture of the cosmic dance with the profundities behind of the unmoved eternal and
\ninfinite bliss. So too the figure of Kali which is so terrible
\nto European eyes is, as we know, the Mother of the universe
\naccepting this fierce aspect of destruction in order to slay the Asuras, the powers of evil in man and the world. There are
\nother strands in this feeling in the western mind which seem
\nto spring from a dislike of anything uplifted far beyond the
\nhuman measure and others again in which we see a subtle
\nsurvival of.  the Greek limitation, the fear, gloom and aversion
\nwith which the sunny terrestrial Hellenic mind commonly
\nmet the idea of the beyond, the limitless, the unknown; but
\nthat reaction has no place in Indian mentality. And as for
\nthe strangeness or formidable aspect of certain unhuman
\nfigures or the conception of demons or Rakshasas, it must be
\nremembered that the Indian aesthetic mind deals not only with the  earth but with psychic planes in which these things <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-255<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nexist and ranges freely among them without being overpowered
\nbecause it carries everywhere the stamp of a large confidence
\nin the strength and the omnipresence of the Self or the Divine. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nI have dwelt on Hindu and especially on Dravidian architecture because the latter is the most fiercely attacked as
\nthe most uncompromisingly foreign to European taste. But
\na word too may be said about Indo-Moslem architecture. I
\nam not concerned to defend any claim for the purely indigenous origin of its features. It seems to me that here the Indian
\nmind has taken in much from the Arab and Persian imagination and in certain mosques and tombs I seem to find an
\nimpress of the robust and bold Afghan and Moghul temperament; but it remains clear enough that it is still on the whole
\na typically Indian creation with the peculiar Indian gift. The
\nrichness of decorative skill and imagination has been turned
\nto the uses of another style, but it is the same skill which we
\nfind in the northern Hindu temples, and in the ground we
\nsee, however toned down, something sometimes of the old
\nepic mass and power, but more often that lyric grace which
\nwe see developing before the Mahomedan advent in the indigenous sculpture,\u2014as in the schools of the North-East
\nand of Java,\u2014and sometimes a blending of the two motives.
\nThe modification, the toning down sets the average European
\nmind at ease and secures its suffrage. But what is it that it so
\nmuch admires ? Mr. Archer tells us at first that it is its rational
\nbeauty, refinement and grace, normal, fair, refreshing after
\nthe monstrous riot of Hindu Yogic hallucination and nightmare. That description which might have been written of
\nGreek art, seems to me grotesquely inapplicable. Immediately
\nafterwards he harps on quite another and an incompatible
\nphrase, and calls it a fairy-land of exquisite architecture. A
\nrational fairy-land is a wonder which may perhaps be hereafter
\ndiscovered by some strange intertwining of the nineteenth
\nand twentieth century minds, but I do not think it has yet
\nexisted on earth or in the heavens. Not rational but magical <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-256<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nbeauty satisfying and enchanting to some deeper quite suprarational aesthetic soul in us is the inexpressible charm of these
\ncreations. But still where does the magic touch our critic ?
\nHe tells us in a rapt journalistic style. It is the exquisite marble
\ntraceries, the beautiful domes and minarets, the stately halls
\nof sepulture, the marvellous loggias and arcades, the
\nmagnificent plinths and platforms, the majestic gateways,
\net cetera.<\/i> And is this then all ? Only the charm of an outward
\nmaterial luxury and magnificence ? Yes; Mr. Archer again
\ntells us that we must be content here with a visual sensuous
\nbeauty without any moral suggestion. And that helps him
\nto bring in the sentence of destructive condemnation without
\nwhich he could not feel happy Li dealing with Indian things :this Moslem architecture suggests not only unbridled luxury,
\nbut effeminacy and decadence ! But in that case, whatever
\nits beauty, it belongs entirely to a secondary plane of artistic
\ncreation and cannot rank with the great spiritual aspirations in
\nstone of the Hindu builders. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nI do not demand "moral suggestions" from architecture,
\nbut is it true that there is nothing but a sensuous outward
\ngrace and beauty and luxury in these Indo-Moslem buildings ?
\nIt is not at all true of the characteristic greater work. The
\nTaj is not merely a sensuous reminiscence of an imperial
\namour or a fairy enchantment hewn from the moon’s lucent
\nquarries, but the eternal dream of a love that survives death.
\nThe great mosques embody often a religious aspiration lifted
\nto a noble austerity which supports and is not lessened by the
\nsubordinated ornament and grace. The tombs reach beyond
\ndeath to the beauty and joy of Paradise. The buildings of Fatehpur-Sikri are not monuments of an effeminate luxurious
\ndecadence,\u2014an absurd description for the mind of the time
\nof Akbar;\u2014but give form to a nobility, power and beauty
\nwhich lay hold upon but do not wallow on the earth. There
\nis not here indeed the vast spiritual content of the earlier
\nIndian mind, but it is still an Indian mind which in these <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-257<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ndelicate creations absorbs the West Asian influence, and
\nlays stress on the sensuous as before in the poetry of Kalidasa,
\nbut uplifts it to a certain immaterial charm, rises often from
\nthe earth without quite leaving it into the magical beauty of
\nthe middle world and in the religious mood touches with a
\ndevout band the skirts of the Divine. The all-pervading
\nspiritual obsession is not there, but other elements of life not
\nignored by Indian culture and gaining on it since the classical
\ntimes are here brought out under a new influence and are still
\npenetrated with some radiant glow of a superior lustre. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-258<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n
\nCHAPTER VIII <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHE<\/font> sculpture and painting of ancient India have recently
\nbeen rehabilitated with a surprising suddenness in the eyes
\nof a more cultivated European criticism in the course of that
\nrapid opening of the western mind to the value of oriental
\nthought and creation which is one of the most significant signs
\nof a change that is yet only in its beginning. There have even
\nbeen here and there minds of a fine perception and profound originality who have
\nseen is a return to the ancient and persistent freedom of oriental art, its refusal to be shackled or debased by an imitative realism, its fidelity to the true theory
\nof art as an inspired interpretation of the deeper soul-values
\nof existence lifted beyond servitude to the outsides of Nature,
\nthe right way to the regeneration and liberation of the aesthetic
\nand creative mind of Europe. And actually, although much of
\nwestern art runs still along the old grooves, much too of its
\nmost original recent creation has elements or a guiding direction which brings it nearer to the eastern mentality and understanding. It might then be possible for us to leave it at that and
\nwait for time to deepen this new vision and vindicate more
\nfully the truth and greatness of the art of India. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nBut we are concerned not only with the critical estimation
\nof our art by Europe, but much more nearly with the evil
\neffect of the earlier depreciation on the Indian mind which
\nhas been for a long time side-tracked off its true road by a
\nforeign, an anglicised education and, as a result, vulgarised and
\nfalsified by the loss of its own true centre, because this hampers
\nand retards a sound and living revival of artistic taste and culture  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-259<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand stands in the way of a new age of creation. It was only a
\nfew years ago that the mind of educated India\u2014"educated"
\nwithout an atom of real culture\u2014accepted contentedly the
\nvulgar English estimate of our sculpture and painting as undeveloped inferior art or even a mass of monstrous and abortive
\nmiscreation, and though that has passed and there is a great
\nchange, there is still very common a heavy weight of second-hand occidental notions, a bluntness or absolute lacking of
\naesthetic taste,1 a failure to appreciate, and one still comes
\nsometimes across a strata of blatantly anglicised criticism which
\ndepreciates all that is in the Indian manner and praises only
\nwhat is consistent with western canons. And the old style of
\nEuropean criticism continues to have some weight with us,
\nbecause the lack of aesthetic or indeed of any real cultural
\ntraining in our present system of education makes us ignorant
\nand undiscriminating receptacles, so that we are ready to take
\nthe considered opinions of competent critics like Okakura or
\nMr. Laurence Binyon and the rash scribblings of journalists
\nof the type of Mr. Archer, who write without authority because
\nin these things they have neither taste nor knowledge, as of
\nequal importance and the latter even attract a greater attention.
\nIt is still necessary therefore to reiterate things which, however
\nobvious to a trained or sensitive aesthetic intelligence, are
\nnot yet familiar to the average mind still untutored or habituated
\nto a system of false weights and values. The work of recovering
\na true and inward understanding of ourselves\u2014our past and our
\npresent self and from that our future\u2014is only in its commencement for the majority of our people. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nTo appreciate our own artistic past at its right value we
\nhave to free ourselves from all subjection to a foreign outlook
\nand see our sculpture and painting, as I have already suggested <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> For example, one still reads with a sense of despairing stupefaction
\n"criticism" that speaks of Ravi Varma and Abanindranath Tagore as artistic
\ncreators of different styles, but an equal power and genius ! <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-260<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nabout our architecture, in the light of its own profound intention
\nand greatness of spirit. When we so look at it, we shall be
\nable to see that the sculpture of ancient and mediaeval India
\nclaims its place on the very highest levels of artistic achievement. I do not know where we shall find a sculptural art of a
\nmore profound intention, a greater spirit, a more consistent
\nskill of achievement. Inferior work there is, work that fails
\nor succeeds only partially, but take it in its whole, in the long
\npersistence of its excellence, in the number of its masterpieces,
\nin the power with which it renders the soul and the mind of a
\npeople, and we shall be tempted to go further and claim for it a
\nfirst place. The art of sculpture has indeed flourished supremely
\nonly in ancient countries where it was conceived against its
\nnatural background and support, a great architecture. Egypt,
\nGreece, India take the premier rank in this kind of creation.
\nMediaeval and modern Europe produced nothing of the same
\nmastery, abundance and amplitude, while on the contrary in
\npainting later Europe has done much and richly and with a
\nprolonged and constantly renewed inspiration. The difference
\narises from the different kind of mentality required by the two
\narts. The material in which we work makes its own peculiar
\ndemand on the creative spirit, lays down its own natural conditions, as Ruskin has pointed out in a different connection, and
\nthe art of making in stone or bronze calls for a cast of mind
\nwhich the ancients had and the moderns have not or have
\nhad only in rare individuals, an artistic mind not too rapidly
\nmobile and self-indulgent, not too much mastered by its own
\npersonality and emotion and the touches that excite and pass,
\nbut founded rather on some great basis of assured thought
\nand vision, stable in temperament, fixed in its imagination on
\nthings that are firm and enduring. One cannot trifle with ease
\nin this sterner material, one cannot even for long or with
\nsafety indulge in them in mere grace and external beauty or
\nthe more superficial, mobile and lightly attractive motives.
\nThe aesthetic self-indulgence which the soul of colour permits <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-261<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand even invites, the attraction of the mobile play of life to which
\nline of brush, pen or pencil gives latitude, are here forbidden
\nor, if to some extent achieved, only within a line of restraint
\nto cross which is perilous and soon fatal. Here grand or profound motives are called for, a more or less penetrating spiritual
\nvision or some sense of things eternal to base the creation.
\nThe sculptural art is static, self-contained, necessarily firm,
\nnoble or severe and demands an aesthetic spirit capable of these
\nqualities. A certain mobility of life and mastering grace of
\nline can come in upon this basis, but if it entirely replaces
\nthe original dharma of the material, that means that the spirit
\nof the statuette has come into the statue and we may be sure
\nof an approaching decadence. Hellenic sculpture following this
\nline passed from the greatness of Phidias through the soft self-indulgence of Praxiteles to its decline. A later Europe has
\nfailed for the most part in sculpture, in spite of some great
\nwork by individuals, an Angelo or a Rodin, because it played
\nexternally with stone and bronze, took them as a medium for
\nthe representation of life and could not find a sufficient basis
\nof profound vision or spiritual motive. In Egypt and in India,
\non the contrary, sculpture preserved its power of successful
\ncreation through several great ages. The earliest recently discovered work in India dates back to the fifth century B.C.
\nand is already fully evolved with an evident history of consummate previous creation behind it, and the latest work of some
\nhigh value comes down to within a few centuries from our own
\ntime. An assured history of two millenniums of accomplished
\nsculptural creation is a rare and significant fact in the life of a
\npeople. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThis greatness and continuity of Indian sculpture is due
\nto the close connection between the religious and philosophical
\nand the aesthetic mind of the people. Its survival into times
\nnot far from us was possible because of the survival of the
\ncast of the antique mind in that philosophy and religion, a
\nmind familiar with eternal things, capable of cosmic vision, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-262<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nhaving its roots of thought and seeing in the profundities of
\nthe soul, in the most intimate, pregnant and abiding experiences
\nof the human spirit. The spirit of this greatness is indeed
\nat the opposite pole to the perfection within limits, the lucid
\nnobility or the vital fineness and physical grace of Hellenic
\ncreation in stone. And since the favourite trick of Mr. Archer
\nand his kind is to throw the Hellenic ideal constantly in our
\nface, as if sculpture must be either governed by the Greek
\nstandard or worthless, it is as well to take note of the meaning
\nof the difference. The earlier and more archaic Greek style
\nhad indeed something in it which looks like a reminiscent
\ntouch of a first creative origin from Egypt and the Orient,
\nbut there is already there the governing conception which
\ndetermined the Greek aesthesis and has dominated the later
\nmind of Europe, the will to combine some kind of expression
\nof an inner truth with an idealising imitation of external
\nNature. The brilliance, beauty and nobility of the work
\nwhich was accomplished, was a very great and perfect thing,
\nbut it is idle to maintain that that is the sole possible method
\nor the one permanent and natural law of artistic creation.
\nIts highest greatness subsisted only so long\u2014and it was not
\nfor very long\u2014as a certain satisfying balance was struck
\nand constantly maintained between a fine, but not very subtle,
\nopulent or profound spiritual suggestion and an outward
\nphysical harmony of nobility and grace. A. later work achieved
\na brief miracle of vital suggestion and sensuous physical
\ngrace with a certain power of expressing the spirit of beauty
\nin the mould of the senses; but this once done, there was no
\nmore to see or create. For the curious turn which impels at
\nthe present day the modem mind to return to spiritual vision
\nthrough a fiction of exaggerated realism which is really a
\npressure upon the form of things to yield the secret of the
\nspirit in life and matter, was not open to the classic temperament and intelligence. And it is surely time for us to see,
\nas is now by many admitted, that an acknowledgment of the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-263<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ngreatness of Greek art in its own province ought not to prevent the plain perception of the rather strait and narrow
\nbounds of that province. What Greek sculpture expressed
\nwas fine, gracious and noble, but what it did not express
\nand could not by the limitations of its canon hope to attempt,
\nwas considerable, was immense in possibility, was that spiritual depth and extension which the human mind needs for
\nits larger and deeper self-experience. And just this is the
\ngreatness of Indian sculpture that it expresses in stone and
\nbronze what the Greek aesthetic mind could not conceive
\nor express and embodies it with a profound understanding of  its right conditions and a native perfection. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe more ancient sculptural art of India embodies in
\nvisible form what the Upanishads threw out into inspired
\nthought and the Mahabharata and Ramayana portrayed by
\nthe word in life. This sculpture like the architecture springs
\nfrom spiritual realisation, and what it creates and expresses
\nat its greatest is the spirit in form, the soul in body, this or
\nthat living soul-power in the divine or the human, the universal and cosmic individualised in suggestion but not lost
\nin individuality, the impersonal supporting a not too insistent
\nplay of personality, the abiding moments of the eternal, the
\npresence, the idea, the power, the calm or potent delight of
\nthe spirit in its actions and creations. And over all the art
\nsomething of this intention broods and persists and is suggested
\neven where it does not dominate the mind of the sculptor.
\nAnd therefore as in the architecture so in the sculpture, we
\nhave to bring a different mind to this work, a different capacity
\nof vision and response, we have to go deeper into ourselves to
\nsee than in the more outwardly imaginative art of Europe.
\nThe Olympian gods of Phidias are magnified and uplifted
\nhuman beings saved from a too human limitation by a certain
\ndivine calm of impersonality or universalised quality, divine
\ntype, guna;<\/i> in other work we see heroes, athletes, feminine
\nincarnations of beauty, calm and restrained embodiments of <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-264<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nidea action or emotion in the idealised beauty of the human
\nfigure. The gods of Indian sculpture are cosmic beings, embodiments of some great spiritual power, spiritual idea and
\naction, inmost psychic significance, the human form a vehicle
\nof this soul meaning, its outward means of self-expression ;everything in the figure, every opportunity it gives, the face,
\nthe hands, the posture of the limbs, the poise and turn of the
\nbody, every accessory, has to be made instinct with the inner
\nmeaning, help it to emerge, carry out the rhythm of the total
\nsuggestion, and on the other hand everything is suppressed
\nwhich would defeat this end, especially all that would mean
\nan insistence on the merely vital or physical, outward or
\nobvious suggestions of the human figure. Not the ideal
\nphysical or emotional beauty, but the utmost spiritual beauty
\nor significance of which the human form is capable, is the
\naim of this kind of creation. The divine self in us is its theme,
\nthe body made a form of the soul is its idea and its secret.
\nAnd therefore in front of this art it is not enough to look at
\nit and respond with the aesthetic eye and the imagination,
\nbut we must look also into the form for what it carries and
\neven through and behind it to pursue the profound suggestion
\nit gives into its own infinite. The religious or hieratic side
\nof Indian sculpture is intimately connected with the spiritual
\nexperiences of Indian meditation and adoration,\u2014those deep
\nthings of our self-discovery which our critic calls contemptuously Yogic hallucinations,\u2014soul realisation is its method
\nof creation and soul realisation must be the way of our response and understanding. And even with the figures of
\nhuman beings or groups it is still a like inner aim and vision
\nwhich governs the labour of the sculptor. The statue of a
\nking or a saint is not meant merely to give the idea of a king
\nor saint or to portray some dramatic action or to be a character
\nportrait in stone, but to embody rather a soul-state or experience
\nor deeper soul-quality, as for instance, not the outward emotion, but the inner soul-side of rapt ecstasy of adoration <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-265<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand God-vision in the saint or the devotee before the presence
\nof the worshipped deity. This is the character of the task
\nthe Indian sculptor set before his effort and it is according
\nto his success in that and not by the absence of something
\nelse, some quality or some intention foreign to his mind and
\ncontrary to his design, that we have to judge of his achievement and his labour. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nOnce we admit this standard, it is impossible to speak
\ntoo highly of the profound intelligence of its conditions which
\nwas developed in Indian sculpture, of the skill with which
\nits task was treated or of the consummate grandeur and beauty
\nof its masterpieces. Take the great Buddhas\u2014not the Gandharan, but the divine figures or groups in cave-cathedral
\nor temple, the best of the later southern bronzes of which there
\nis a remarkable collection of plates in Mr. Gangoly’s book
\non that subject, the Kalasanhara image, the Natarajas. No
\ngreater or finer work, whether in conception or execution,
\nhas been done by the human hand and its greatness is increased by obeying a spiritualised aesthetic vision. The
\nfigure of the Buddha achieves the expression of the infinite
\nin a finite image, and that is surely no mean or barbaric
\nachievement, to embody the illimitable calm of Nirvana in
\na human form and visage. The Kalasanhara Shiva is supreme
\nnot only by the majesty, power, calmly forceful control,
\ndignity and kingship of existence which the whole spirit and
\npose of the figure visibly incarnates,\u2014that is only half or less
\nthan half its achievement,\u2014but much more by the concentrated divine passion of the spiritual overcoming of time and
\nexistence which the artist has succeeded in putting into eye
\nand brow and mouth and every feature and has subtly supported by the contained suggestion, not emotional, but spiritual, of every part of the body of the godhead and the rhythm
\nof his meaning which he has poured through the whole unity
\nof this creation. Or what of the marvellous genius and skill
\nin the treatment of the cosmic movement and delight of the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-266<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ndance of Shiva, the success with which the posture of every
\nlimb is made to bring out the rhythm of the significance, the
\nrapturous intensity and abandon of the movement itself and
\nyet the just restraint in the intensity of motion, the subtle
\nvariation of each element of the single theme in the seizing
\nidea of these master sculptors ? Image after image in the
\ngreat temples or saved from the wreck of time shows the same
\ngrand traditional art and the genius which worked in that
\ntradition and its many styles, the profound and firmly grasped
\nspiritual idea, the consistent expression of it in every curve,
\nline and mass, in hand and limb, in suggestive pose, m expressive rhythm,\u2014it is an art which, understood in its own
\nspirit, need fear no comparison with any other, ancient or
\nmodern, Hellenic or Egyptian, of the near or the far East
\nor of the West in any of its creative ages. This sculpture
\npassed through many changes, a more ancient art of extraordinary grandeur and epic power uplifted by the same spirit
\nas reigned in the Vedic and Vedantic seers and in the epic
\npoets, a later Puranic turn towards grace and beauty and rapture and an outburst of lyric ecstasy and movement, and last
\na rapid and vacant decadence; but throughout all the second
\nperiod too the depth and greatness of sculptural motive supports and vivifies the work and in the very turn towards decadence something of it often remains to redeem from
\ncomplete debasement, emptiness or insignificance. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nLet us see then what is the value of the objections made
\n<\/b>to
\n<\/b>the spirit and style of Indian sculpture. This is the burden of the
\nobjurgations of the devil’s advocate that his self-bound European
\nmind finds the whole thing barbaric, meaningless, uncouth,
\nstrange, bizarre, the work of a distorted imagination labouring
\nmid a nightmare of unlovely unrealities. Now there is in the
\ntotal of what survives to us work that is less inspired or even
\nwork that is bad, exaggerated, forced or clumsy, the production
\nof mechanic artificers mingled with the creation of great nameless artists, and an eye that does not understand the sense, the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-267<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nfirst conditions of the work, the mind of the race or its type of
\naesthesis, may well fail to distinguish between good and inferior
\nexecution, decadent work and the work of the great hands and
\nthe great eras. But applied as a general description the criticism
\nis itself grotesque and distorted and it means only that here are
\nconceptions and a figuring imagination strange to the western
\nintelligence. The line and run and turn demanded by the
\nIndian aesthetic sense are not the same as those demanded
\nby the European. It would take too long to examine the detail
\nof the difference which we find not only in sculpture, but in
\nthe other plastic arts and in music and even to a certain extent
\nin literature, but on the whole we may say that the Indian mind
\nmoves on the spur of a spiritual sensitiveness and psychic curiosity, while the aesthetic curiosity of the European temperament
\nis intellectual, vital, emotional and imaginative in that sense,
\nand almost the whole strangeness of the Indian use of line and
\nmass, ornament and proportion and rhythm arises from this
\ndifference. The two minds live almost in different worlds, are
\neither not looking at the same things or, even where they meet
\nin the object, see it from a different level or surrounded by a
\ndifferent atmosphere, and we know what power the point of
\nview or the medium of vision has to transform the object. And
\nundoubtedly there is very ample ground for Mr. Archer’s
\ncomplaint of the want of naturalism in most Indian sculpture.
\nThe inspiration, the way of seeing is frankly not naturalistic,
\nnot, that is to say, the vivid, convincing and accurate, the
\ngraceful, beautiful or strong, or even the. idealised or imaginative imitation of surface or terrestrial nature. The Indian sculptor is concerned with embodying spiritual experiences and
\nimpressions, not with recording or glorifying what is received
\nby the physical senses. He may start with suggestions from
\nearthly and physical things, but he produces his work only
\nafter he has closed his eyes to the insistence of the physical
\ncircumstances, seen them in the psychic memory and transformed them within himself so as to bring out something <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-268<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nother than their physical reality or their vital and intellectual
\nsignificance. His eye sees the psychic line and turn of things
\nand he replaces by them the material contours. It is not surprising that such a method should produce results which
\nare strange to the average western mind and eye when these are
\nnot liberated by a broad and sympathetic culture. And what is
\nstrange to us is naturally repugnant to our habitual mind and
\nuncouth to our habitual sense, bizarre to our imaginative
\ntradition and aesthetic training. We want what is familiar to
\nthe eye and obvious to the imagination and will not readily
\nadmit that there may be here another and perhaps greater
\nbeauty than that in the circle of which we are accustomed to
\nlive and take pleasure. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIt seems to be especially the application of this psychic
\nvision to the human form which offends these critics of Indian
\nsculpture. There is the familiar objection to such features as
\nthe multiplication of the arms in the figures of gods and goddesses, the four, six, eight or ten arms of Shiva, the eighteen
\narms of Durga, because they are a monstrosity, a thing not in
\nnature. Now certainly a play of imagination of this kind would
\nbe out of place in the representation of a man or woman,
\nbecause it would have no artistic or other meaning, but I
\ncannot see why this freedom should be denied in the representation of cosmic beings like the Indian godheads. The whole
\nquestion is, first, whether it is an appropriate means of conveying a significance not otherwise to be-represented with an
\nequal power and force and, secondly, whether it is capable
\nof artistic representation, a rhythm of artistic truth and unity
\nwhich need not be that of physical nature. If not, then it is an
\nugliness and violence, but if these conditions are satisfied,
\nthe means are justified and I do not see that we have any right,
\nfaced with the perfection of the work, to raise a discordant
\nclamour. Mr. Archer himself is struck with the perfection of
\nskill and mastery with which these to him superfluous limbs
\nare disposed in the figures of the dancing Shiva, and indeed if <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-269<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nwould need an eye of impossible blindness not to see that much,
\nbut what is still more important is the artistic significance
\nwhich this skill is used to serve, and, if that is understood,
\nwe can at once see that the spiritual emotion and suggestions
\nof the cosmic dance are brought out by this device in
\na way which would not be as possible with a two-armed figure.
\nThe same truth holds as to the Durga with her eighteen arms
\nslaying the Asuras or the Shivas of the great Pallava creations
\nwhere the lyrical beauty of the Natarajas is absent, but there
\nis instead a great epical rhythm and grandeur. Art justifies
\nits own means and here it does it with a supreme perfection.
\nAnd as for the "contorted" postures of some figures, the same
\nlaw holds. There is often a departure in this respect from the
\nanatomical norm of the physical body or else\u2014and that is
\na rather different thing\u2014an emphasis more or less pronounced
\non an unusual pose of limbs or body, and the question then
\nis whether it is done without sense or purpose, a mere clumsiness or an ugly exaggeration, or whether it rather serves some
\nsignificance and establishes in the place of the normal physical metric of Nature another purposeful and successful artistic
\nrhythm. Art after all is not forbidden to deal with the unusual or to alter and overpass Nature, and it might almost
\nbe said that it has been doing little else since it began to serve
\nthe human imagination from its first grand epic exaggerations
\nto the violences of modern romanticism and realism, from the
\nhigh ages of Valmiki and Homer to the day of Hugo and
\nIbsen. The means matter, but less than the significance and
\nthe thing done and the power and beauty with which it
\nexpresses the dreams and truths of the human spirit. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe whole question of the Indian artistic treatment of
\nthe human figure has to be understood in the light of its
\naesthetic purpose. It works with a certain intention and ideal,
\na general norm and standard which permits of a good many
\nvariations and from which too there are appropriate departures. The epithets with which Mr. Archer tries to damn <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-270<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nits features are absurd, captious, exaggerated, the forced
\nphrases of a journalist trying to depreciate a perfectly sensible,
\nbeautiful and aesthetic norm with which he does not sympathise. There are other things here than a repetition of
\nhawk faces, wasp waists, thin legs and the rest of the ill-tempered caricature. He doubts Mr. Havell’s suggestion that
\nthese old Indian artists knew the anatomy of the body well
\nenough, as Indian science knew it, but chose to depart from
\nit for their own purpose. It does not seem to me to matter
\nmuch, since art is not anatomy, nor an artistic masterpiece
\nnecessarily a reproduction of physical fact or a lesson  in natural science. I see no reason to regret the absence of telling
\nstudies in muscles, torsos, etc., for I cannot regard these
\nthings as having in themselves any essential artistic value.
\nThe one important point is that the Indian artist had a perfect
\nidea of proportion and rhythm and used them in certain styles
\nwith nobility and power, in others like the Javan, the Gauda
\nor the southern bronzes with that or with a perfect grace
\nadded and often an intense and a lyrical sweetness. The
\ndignity and beauty of the human figure in the best Indian
\nstatues cannot be excelled, but what was sought and what
\nwas achieved was not an outward naturalistic, but a spiritual
\nand a psychic beauty, and to achieve it the sculptor suppressed,
\nand was entirely right in suppressing, the obtrusive material
\ndetail and aimed instead at purity of outline and fineness of
\nfeature. And into that outline, into that purity and fineness
\nhe was able to work whatever he chose, mass of force or delicacy of grace, a static dignity or a mighty strength or a restrained violence of movement or whatever served or helped
\nhis meaning. A divine and subtle body was his ideal, and
\nto a taste and imagination too blunt or realistic to conceive
\nthe truth and beauty of his idea, the ideal itself may well be
\na stumbling-block, a thing of offence. But the triumphs
\nof art are not to be limited by the narrow prejudices of the
\nnatural realistic man; that triumphs and endures which <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-271<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nappeals to the best, sādhu-sammatam,<\/i> that is deepest and
\ngreatest which satisfies the profoundest souls and the most
\nsensitive psychic imaginations. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nEach manner of art has its own ideals, traditions, agreed
\nconventions; for the ideas and forms of the creative spirit
\nare many, though there is one ultimate basis. The perspective, the psychic vision of the Chinese and Japanese
\npainters are not the same as those of European artists; but
\nwho can ignore the beauty and the wonder of their work ?
\nI dare say Mr. Archer would set a Constable or a Turner
\nabove the whole mass of Far Eastern work, as I myself, if
\nI had to make a choice, would take a Chinese or Japanese
\nlandscape or other magic transmutation of Nature in preference to all others; but these are matters of individual,
\nnational or continental temperament and preference. The
\nessence of the question lies in the rendering of the truth and
\nbeauty seized by the spirit. Indian sculpture, Indian art in
\ngeneral follows its own ideal and traditions and these are
\nunique in their character and quality. It is the expression,
\ngreat as a whole through many centuries and ages of creation,
\nsupreme at its best, whether in rare early pre-Asokan, in
\nAsokan or later work of the first heroic age or in the magnificent statues of the cave-cathedrals and Pallava and other
\nsouthern temples or the noble, accomplished or gracious
\nimaginations of Bengal, Nepal and Java through the after
\ncenturies or in the singular skill and delicacy of the bronze
\nwork of the southern religions, a self-expression of the spirit
\nand ideals of a great nation and a great culture which stands
\napart in the cast of its mind and qualities among the earth’s
\npeoples, famed for its spiritual achievement, its deep philosophies and its religious spirit, its artistic taste, the richness
\nof its poetic imagination, and not inferior once in its dealings
\nwith life and its social endeavour and political institutions.
\nThis sculpture is a singularly powerful, a seizing and profound
\ninterpretation in stone and bronze of the inner soul of that <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-272<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\npeople. The nation, the culture failed for a time in life after
\na long greatness, as others failed before it and others will yet
\nfail that now flourish, the creations of its mind have been
\narrested, this art like others has ceased or fallen into decay,
\nbut the thing from which it rose, the spiritual fire within still
\nbums and in the renascence that is coming it may be that this
\ngreat art too will revive, not saddled with the grave limitations
\nof modern western work in the kind, but vivified by the nobility of a new impulse and power of the ancient spiritual motive.
\nLet it recover, not limited by old forms, but undeterred by
\nthe cavillings of an alien mind, the sense of the grandeur and
\nbeauty and the inner significance of its past achievement; for
\nin the continuity of its spiritual endeavour lies its best hope
\nfor the future. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-273<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n
\nCHAPTER IX <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHE<\/font> art of painting in ancient and later India, owing to the
\ncomparative scantiness of its surviving creations, does not
\ncreate‘<\/i> quite so great an impression as her architecture and
\nsculpture and it has even been supposed that this art flourished
\nonly at intervals, finally ceased for a period of several centuries
\nand was revived later on by the Moghuls and by Hindu artists
\nwho underwent the Moghul influence. This however is a
\nhasty view that does not outlast a more careful research and
\nconsideration of the available evidence. It appears, on the
\ncontrary, that Indian culture was able to arrive at a well developed and an understanding aesthetic use of colour and line
\nfrom very early times and, allowing for the successive fluctuations, periods of decline and fresh outbursts of originality
\nand vigour, which the collective human mind undergoes in all
\ncountries, used this form of self-expression very persistently
\nthrough the long centuries of its growth and greatness. And
\nespecially it is apparent now that there was a persistent tradition, a fundamental spirit and turn of the aesthetic sense native
\nto the mind of India which links even the latest Rajput art to
\nthe earliest surviving work still preserved at its highest summit
\nof achievement in the rock-cut retreats of Ajanta. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe materials of the art of painting are unfortunately
\nmore perishable than those of any other of the greater means
\nof creative aesthetic self-expression and of the ancient masterpieces only a little survives, but that little still indicates the
\nimmensity of the amount of work of which it is the fading remnant, It is said that of the twenty-nine caves at Ajanta almost  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-274<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nall once bore signs of decoration by frescoes; only so long
\nago as forty years sixteen still contained something of the
\noriginal paintings, but now six alone still bear their witness
\nto the greatness of this ancient art, though rapidly perishing
\nand deprived of something of the original warmth and beauty
\nand glory of colour. The rest of all that vivid contemporaneous
\ncreation which must at one time have covered the whole country
\nin the temples and viharas and the houses of the cultured
\nand the courts and pleasure-houses of nobles and kings, has
\nperished, and we have only, more or less similar to the work
\nat Ajanta, some crumbling fragments of rich and profuse decoration in the caves of Bagh and a few paintings of female figures
\nin two rock-cut chambers at Sigiriya.1<\/sup> These remnants represent the work of some six or seven centuries, but they
\nleave gaps, and nothing now remains of any paintings earlier
\nthan the first century of the Christian era, except some frescoes,
\nspoilt by unskilful restoration, from the first century before it,
\nwhile after the seventh there is a blank which might at first sight argue a
\ntotal decline of the art, a cessation and disappearance. But there are fortunately evidences which carry back
\nthe tradition of the art at one end many centuries earlier and
\nother remains more recently discovered and of another kind
\noutside India and in the Himalayan countries carry it forward
\nat the other end as late as the twelfth century and help us to
\nlink it on to the later schools of Rajput painting. The history
\nof the self-expression of the Indian mind in painting covers
\na period of as much as two millenniums of more or less intense
\nartistic creation, and stands on a par in this respect with the
\narchitecture and sculpture. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe paintings that remain to us from ancient times are
\nthe work of Buddhist painters, but the art itself in India was
\nof pre-Buddhistic origin. The Tibetan historian ascribes a <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> Since then more paintings of high quality have been found in some
\nsouthern temples; akin in their spirit and style to the work at Ajanta, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-275<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nremote antiquity to all the crafts, prior to the Buddha, and
\nthis is a conclusion increasingly pointed to by a constant accumulation of evidence. Already in the third century before
\nthe Christian era we find the theory of the art well founded
\nfrom previous times, the six essential elements, sadanga,<\/i> recognized and enumerated, like the more or less corresponding six
\nChinese canons which are first mentioned nearly a thousand
\nyears later, and in a very ancient work on the art pointing back
\nto pre-Buddhistic times a number of careful and very well-defined rules and traditions are laid down which were developed into an elaborate science of technique and traditional
\nrule in the later Shilpasutras. The frequent references in the
\nancient literature also are of a character which would have been
\nimpossible without a widespread practice and appreciation of
\nthe art by both men and women of the cultured classes, and
\nthese allusions and incidents evidencing a moved delight in
\nthe painted form and beauty of colour and the appeal both to
\nthe decorative sense and to the aesthetic emotion occur not
\nonly in the later poetry of Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti and other
\nclassical dramatists, but in the early popular drama of Bhasa
\nand earlier still in the epics and in the sacred books of the
\nBuddhists. The absence of any actual creations of this earlier
\nart makes it indeed impossible to say with absolute certainty
\nwhat was its fundamental character and intimate source of
\ninspiration or whether it was religious and hieratic or secular
\nin its origin. The theory has been advanced rather too positively that it was in the courts of kings that the art began
\nand with a purely secular motive and inspiration, and it is
\ntrue that while the surviving work of Buddhist artists is mainly
\nreligious in subject or at least links on common scenes of life
\nto Buddhist ceremony and legend, the references in the epic
\nand dramatic literature are usually to painting of a more
\npurely aesthetic character, personal, domestic or civic, portrait
\npainting, the representation of scenes and incidents in the
\nlives of kings and other great personalities or mural decoration <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-276<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof palaces and private or public buildings. On the other
\nhand there are similar elements in Buddhist painting, as, for
\nexample, the portraits of the queens of King Kashyapa at
\nSigiriya, the historic representation of a Persian embassy
\nor the landing of Vijaya in Ceylon. And we may fairly assume
\nthat all along Indian painting, both Buddhist and Hindu,
\ncovered much the same kind of ground as the later Rajput
\nwork in a more ample fashion and with a more antique greatness of spirit and was in its ensemble an interpretation of
\nthe whole religion, culture and life of the Indian people. The
\none important and significant thing that emerges is the constant oneness and continuity of all Indian art in its essential
\nspirit and tradition. Thus the earlier work at Ajanta has
\nbeen found to be akin to the earlier sculptural work of the
\nBuddhists, while the later paintings have a similar close kinship to the sculptural reliefs at Java. And we find that the
\nspirit and tradition which reigns through all changes of style
\nand manner at Ajanta, is present too at Bagh and Sigiriya, in
\nthe Khotan frescoes, in the illuminations of Buddhist manuscripts of a much later time and in spite of the change of
\nform
\nand manner is still spiritually the same in the Rajput paintings.
\nThis unity and continuity enable us to distinguish and arrive
\nat a clear understanding of what is the essential aim, inner turn
\nand motive, spiritual method which differentiate Indian painting first from occidental work and then from the nearer and
\nmore kindred art of other countries of Asia. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe spirit and motive of Indian painting are in their
\ncentre of conception and shaping force of sight identical with
\nthe inspiring vision of Indian sculpture. All Indian art is a
\nthrowing out of a certain profound self-vision formed by a
\ngoing within to find out the secret significance of form and
\nappearance, a discovery of the subject in one’s deeper self,
\nthe giving of soul-form to that vision and a remoulding of the
\nmaterial and natural shape to express the psychic truth of it
\nwith the greatest possible purity and power of outline and the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-277<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ngreatest possible concentrated rhythmic unity of significance
\nin all the parts of an indivisible artistic whole. Take whatever
\nmasterpiece of Indian painting and we shall find these conditions aimed at and brought out into a triumphant beauty of
\nsuggestion and execution. The only difference from the other
\narts comes from the turn natural and inevitable to its own kind
\nof aesthesis, from the moved and indulgent dwelling on what
\none might call the mobilities of the soul rather than on its
\nstatic eternities, on the casting out of self into the grace and
\nmovement of psychic and vital life (subject always to the reserve
\nand restraint necessary to all art) rather than on the holding back
\nof life in the stabilities of the self and its eternal qualities
\nand principles, guna<\/i> and tattva.<\/i> This distinction is of the very
\nessence of the difference between the work given to the sculptor
\nand the painter, a difference imposed on them by the natural
\nscope, turn, possibility of their instrument and medium. The
\nsculptor must express always in static form, the idea of the spirit
\nis cut out for him in mass aid line, significant in the stability
\nof its, insistence, and he can lighten the weight of this insistence
\nbut not get rid of it or away from it, for him eternity seizes
\nhold of time in its shapes and arrests it in the, monumental
\nspirit of stone or bronze. The painter on the contrary lavishes
\nhis soul in colour and there is a liquidity in the form, a fluent
\ngrace of subtlety in the line he uses which imposes on him
\na more mobile and emotional way of self-expression. The more
\nhe gives us of the colour and changing form and emotion of the
\nlife of the soul, the more his work glows with beauty, masters
\nthe inner aesthetic sense and opens it to the thing his art better
\ngives us than any other, the delight of the motion of the self
\nout into a spiritually sensuous joy of beautiful shapes and the
\ncoloured radiances of existence. Painting is naturally the
\nmost sensuous of the arts, and the highest greatness open to
\nthe painter is to spiritualise this sensuous appeal by making
\nthe most vivid outward beauty a revelation of subtle spiritual
\nemotion so that the soul and the sense are at harmony in the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-278<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ndeepest and finest richness of both and united in their satisfied
\nconsonant expression of the inner significances of things and
\nlife. There is less of the austerity of Tapasya in his way of
\nworking, a less severely restrained expression of eternal things
\nand of the fundamental truths behind the forms of things, but
\nthere is in compensation a moved wealth of psychic or warmth
\nof vital suggestion, a lavish delight of the beauty of the play
\nof the eternal in the moments of time and there the artist arrests
\nit for us and makes moments of the life of the soul reflected in form of man or
\ncreature or incident or scene or Nature full of a permanent and opulent significance to our spiritual
\nvision. The art of the painter justifies visually to the spirit
\nthe search of the sense for delight by making it its own search
\nfor the pure intensities of meaning of the universal beauty it
\nhas revealed or hidden in creation; the indulgence of the eye’s
\ndesire in perfection of form and colour becomes an enlightenment of the inner being through the power of a certain
\nspiritually aesthetic Ananda. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe Indian artist lived in the light of an inspiration which
\nimposed this greater aim on his art and his method sprang
\nfrom its fountains and served it to the exclusion of any more
\nearthly sensuous or outwardly imaginative aesthetic impulse.
\nThe six limbs of his art, the sadanga,<\/i> are common to all work
\nin line and colour : they are the necessary elements and in their
\nelements the great arts are the same everywhere; the distinction
\nof forms, rūpabheda,<\/i> proportion, arrangement of line and
\nmass, design, harmony, perspective, pramāna,<\/i> the emotion
\nor aesthetic feeling expressed by the form, bhāva,<\/i> the seeking
\nfor beauty and charm for the satisfaction of the aesthetic spirit,
\nIāvanya,<\/i> truth of the form and its suggestion, sādrśya,<\/i> the turn,
\ncombination, harmony of colours, varnikābhanga,<\/i> are the first
\nconstituents to which every successful work of art reduces itself
\nm analysis. But it is the turn given to each of the constituents
\nwhich makes all the difference in the aim and effect of the
\ntechnique and the source and character of the inner vision <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-279<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nguiding the creative hand in their combination which makes
\nall the difference in the spiritual value of the achievement,
\nand the unique character of Indian painting, the peculiar
\nappeal of the art of Ajanta springs from the remarkably inward, spiritual and psychic mm which was given to the artistic
\nconception and method by the pervading genius of Indian culture. Indian painting no more than Indian architecture and
\nsculpture could escape from its absorbing motive, its transmuting atmosphere, the direct or subtle obsession of the
\nmind that has been subtly and strangely changed, the eye
\nthat has been trained to see, not as others with only the external eye but by a constant communing of the mental parts
\nand the inner vision with the self beyond mind and the spirit
\nto which forms are only a transparent veil or a slight index
\nof its own greater splendour. The outward beauty and
\npower, the grandeur of drawing, the richness of colour, the
\naesthetic grace of this painting is too obvious and insistent
\nto be denied, the psychical appeal usually carries something
\nin it to which there is a response in every cultivated and
\nsensitive human mind and the departures from the outward
\nphysical norm are less vehement and intense, less disdainful
\nof the more external beauty and grace,\u2014as is only right in
\nthe nature of this art,\u2014than in the sculpture : therefore we
\nfind it more easily appreciated up to a certain point by the
\nwestern critical mind, and even when not well appreciated,
\nit is exposed to milder objections. There is not the same
\nblank incomprehension or violence of misunderstanding and
\nrepulsion. And yet we find at the same time that there is
\nsomething which seems to escape the appreciation or is only
\nimperfectly understood, and this something is precisely that
\nprofounder spiritual intention of which the things the eye
\nand aesthetic sense immediately seize are only the intermediaries. This explains the remark often made about Indian
\nwork of the less visibly potent and quieter kind that it lacks
\ninspiration or imagination or is a conventional art : the spirit <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-280<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nis missed where it does not strongly impose itself, and is not
\nfully caught even where the power which is put into the expression is too great and direct to allow of denial. Indian
\npainting like Indian architecture and sculpture appeals
\nthrough the physical and psychical to another spiritual vision
\nfrom which the artist worked and it is only when this is
\nno less awakened in us than the aesthetic sense that it can be
\nappreciated in all the depth of its significance. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe orthodox western artist works by a severely conscientious reproduction of the forms of outward Nature; the external world is his model, and he has to keep it before
\nhis eye and repress any tendency towards a substantial departure from it or any motion to yield his first allegiance to a
\nsubtler spirit. His imagination submits itself to physical
\nNature even when he brings in conceptions which are more
\nproperly of another kingdom, the stress of the physical world
\nis always with him, and the Seer of the subtle, the creator
\nof mental forms, the inner Artist, the wide-eyed voyager in the
\nvaster psychical realms, is obliged to subdue his inspirations
\nto the law of the Seer of the outward, the spirit that has embodied itself in the creations of the terrestrial life, the material
\nuniverse. An idealised imaginative realism is as far as he can
\nordinarily go in the method of his work when he would fill
\nthe outward with the subtler inner seeing. And when, dissatisfied with this confining law, he would break quite out
\nof the circle, he is exposed to a temptation to stray into intellectual or imaginative extravagances which violate the universal rule of the right distinction of forms, rūpabheda,<\/i> and
\nbelong to the vision of some intermediate world of sheer
\nfantasia. His art has discovered the rule of proportion, arrangement and perspective which preserves the illusion of
\nphysical Nature and he relates his whole design to her design
\nin a spirit of conscientious obedience and faithful dependence.
\nHis imagination is a servant or interpreter of her imaginations,
\nhe finds in the observation of her universal law of beauty <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-281<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nhis secret of unity and harmony, and his subjectivity tries to
\ndiscover itself in hers by a close dwelling on the objective
\nshapes she has given to her creative spirit. The farthest
\nhe has got in the direction of a more intimately subjective
\nspirit is an impressionism which still waits upon her models
\nbut seeks to get at some first inward or original effect of them
\non the inner sense, and through that he arrives at some more
\nstrongly psychical rendering, but he does not work altogether
\nfrom within outward in the freer manner of the oriental
\nartist. His emotion and artistic feeling move in this form
\nand are limited by this artistic convention and are not a pure
\nspiritual or psychic emotion but usually an imaginative
\nexaltation derived from the suggestions of life and outward
\nthings with a psychic element or an evocation of spiritual
\nfeeling initiated and dominated by the touch of the outward.
\nThe charm that he gives is a sublimation of the beauty that
\nappeals to the outward senses by the power of the idea and
\nthe imagination working on the outward sense-appeal and
\nother beauty is only brought in by association into that frame.
\nThe truth of correspondence he depends upon is a likeness
\nto the creations of physical Nature and their intellectual,
\nemotional and aesthetic significances, and his work of line
\nand wave of colour are meant to embody the flow of this
\nvision. The method of this art is always a transcript from the
\nvisible world with such necessary transmutation as the aesthetic mind imposes on its materials. At the lowest to illustrate, at the highest to interpret life and Nature to the mind
\nby identifying it with deeper things through some derivative
\ntouch of the spirit that has entered into and subdued itself to their shapes, praviśya yah pratirūpo babhūva,<\/i> is the governing
\nprinciple.1<\/sup> <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe Indian artist sets out from the other end of the scale <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> All this is no longer <\/b> true of European art in much of its more prominent recent developments. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-282<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof values of experience which connect life and the spirit.
\nThe whole creative force comes here from a spiritual and
\npsychic vision, the emphasis of the physical is secondary and
\nalways deliberately lightened so as to give an overwhelmingly
\nspiritual and psychic impression and everything is suppressed
\nwhich does not serve this purpose or would distract the mind
\nfrom the purity of this intention. This painting expresses
\nthe soul through life, but life is only a means of the spiritual
\nself-expression; and its outward representation is not the
\nfirst object or the direct motive. There is a real and a very
\nvivid and vital representation, but it is more of an inner’ psychical than of the outward physical life. A critic of high repute speaking of the Indian influence in a famous Japanese
\npainting fixes on the grand strongly outlined figures and the
\nfeeling for life and character recalling the Ajanta frescoes as
\nthe signs of its Indian character : but we have to mark carefully the nature of this feeling for life and the origin and
\nintention of this strong outlining of the figures. The feeling
\nfor life and character here is a very different thing from the
\nsplendid and abundant vitality and the power and force of
\ncharacter which we find in an Italian painting, a fresco from
\nMichael Angelo’s hand or a portrait by Titian or Tintoretto.
\nThe first primitive object of the art of painting is to illustrate
\nlife and Nature and at the lowest this becomes a more or less
\nvigorous and original or conventionally faithful reproduction,
\nbut it rises in great hands to a revelation of the glory and beauty
\nof the sensuous appeal of life or of the dramatic power and
\nmoving interest of character and emotion and action. That
\nis a common form of aesthetic work in Europe : but in Indian art it is never the governing motive. The sensuous appeal is there, but it is refined into only one and not the chief
\nelement of the richness of a soul of psychic grace and beauty
\nwhich is for the Indian artist the true beauty, Iāvanya :<\/i> the
\ndramatic motive is subordinated and made only a purely
\nsecondary element, only so much is given of character and <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-283<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\naction as will help to bring out the deeper spiritual or psychic
\nfeeling, bhāva,<\/i> and all insistence or too prominent force of
\nthese more outwardly dynamic things is shunned, because
\nthat would externalise too much the spiritual emotion and
\ntake away from its intense purity by the interference of the
\ngrosser intensity which emotion puts on in the stress of the
\nactive outward nature. The life depicted is the life of the
\nsoul and not, except as a form and a helping suggestion, the
\nlife of the vital being and the body. For the second more
\nelevated aim of art is the interpretation or intuitive revelation
\nof existence through the forms of life and Nature and it is
\nthis that is the starting-point of the Indian motive. But the
\ninterpretation may proceed on the basis of the forms already
\ngiven us by physical Nature and try to evoke by the form an
\nidea, a truth of the spirit which starts from it as a suggestion
\nand returns upon it for support, and the effort is then to
\ncorrelate the form as it is to the physical eye with the truth
\nwhich it evokes without overpassing the limits imposed by
\nthe appearance. This is the common method of occidental
\nart always zealous for the immediate fidelity to Nature which
\nis its idea of true correspondence, sādrśya,<\/i> but it is rejected
\nby the Indian artist. He begins from within, sees in his soul
\nthe thing he wishes to express or interpret and tries to discover the right line, colour and design of
\nhis intuition which,
\nwhen it appears on the physical ground, is not a just and
\nreminding reproduction of the line, colour and design of
\nphysical nature, but much rather what seems to us a psychical
\n‘transmutation of the natural figure. In reality the shapes he
\npaints are the forms of things as he has seen them in the
\npsychical plane of experience : these are the soul-figures of
\nwhich physical things are a gross representation and their
\npurity and subtlety reveals at once what the physical masks
\nby the thickness of its casings. The lines and colours sought
\nhere are the psychic lines and the psychic hues proper to the
\nvision which the artist has gone into himself to discover. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-284<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThis is the whole governing principle of the art which
\ngives its stamp to every detail of an Indian painting and transforms the artist’s use of the six limbs of the canon. The
\ndistinction of forms is faithfully observed, but not in the sense
\nof an exact naturalistic fidelity to the physical appearance with
\nthe object of a faithful reproduction of the outward shapes
\nof the world in which we live. To recall with fidelity something our eyes have seen or could have seen on the spot, a
\nscene, an interior, a living and breathing person, and give the
\naesthetic sense and emotion of it to the mind is not the motive.
\nThere is here an extraordinary vividness, naturalness, reality,
\nbut it is a more than physical reality, a reality which the soul
\nat once recognises as of its own sphere, a vivid naturalness of
\npsychic truth, the convincing spirit of the form to which the
\nsoul, not the outward naturalness of the form to which the
\nphysical eye bears witness. The truth, the exact likeness is
\nthere, the correspondence, sādrśya,<\/i> but it is the truth of the
\nessence of the form, it is the likeness of the soul to itself, the
\nreproduction of the subtle embodiment which is the basis
\nof the physical embodiment, the purer and finer subtle body
\nof an object which is the very expression of its own essential
\nnature, svabhāva.<\/i> The means by which this effect is produced is characteristic of the inward vision of the Indian mind.
\nIt is done by a bold and firm insistence on the pure and strong
\noutline and a total suppression of everything that would interfere with its boldness, strength and purity or would blur over
\nand dilute the intense significance of the line. In the treatment of the human figure all corporeal filling in of the outline
\nby insistence on the flesh, the muscle, the anatomical detail
\nis minimised or disregarded : the strong subtle lines and pure
\nshapes which make the humanity of the human form are alone
\nbrought into relief; the whole essential human being is there,
\nthe divinity that has taken this garb of the spirit to the eye,
\nbut not the superfluous physicality which he carries with him as
\nhis burden. It is the ideal psychical figure and body of man <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-285<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand woman that is before us in its charm and beauty. The filling in of the line is done in another way; it is effected by a
\ndisposition of pure masses, a design and coloured wave-flow of the body, bhanga,<\/i> a simplicity of content that enables
\nthe artist to flood the whole with the significance of the one
\nspiritual emotion, feeling, suggestion which he intends to
\nconvey, his intuition of the moment of the soul, its living self-experience. All is disposed so as to express that and that alone.
\nThe almost miraculously subtle and meaningful use of the
\nhands to express the psychic suggestion is a common and
\nwell-marked feature of Indian paintings and the way in which
\nthe suggestion of the face and the eyes is subtly repeated or
\nsupplemented by this expression of the hands is always one of
\nthe first things that strikes the regard, but as we continue
\nto look, we see that every turn of the body, the pose of each
\nlimb, the relation and design of all the masses are filled with
\nthe same psychical feeling. The more important accessories
\nhelp it by a kindred suggestion or bring it out by a support or
\nvariation or extension or relief of the motive. The same law of
\nsignificant line and suppression of distracting detail is applied
\nto animal forms, buildings, trees, objects. There is in all the
\nart an inspired harmony of conception, method and expression.
\nColour too is used as a means for the spiritual and psychic
\nintention, and we can see this well enough if we study the suggestive significance of the hues in a Buddhist miniature.
\nThis power of line and subtlety of psychic suggestion in the
\nfilling in of the expressive outlines is the source of that remarkable union of greatness and moving grace which is the stamp
\nof the whole work of Ajanta and continues in Rajput painting,
\nthough there the grandeur of the earlier work is lost in the grace
\nand replaced by a delicately intense but still bold and decisive
\npower of vivid and suggestive line. It is this common spirit
\nand tradition which is the mark of all the truly indigenous
\nwork of India. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThese things have to be carefully understood and held in <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-286<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nmind when we look at an Indian painting and the real spirit of
\nit first grasped before we condemn or praise. To dwell on
\nthat in it which is common to all art is well enough, but it is
\nwhat is peculiar to India that is its real essence. And there again
\nto appreciate the technique and the fervour of religious feeling
\nis not sufficient; the spiritual intention served by the technique, the psychic significance of line and colour, the greater
\nthing of which the religious emotion is the result has to be
\nfelt if we would identify ourself with the whole purpose of the
\nartist. If we look long, for an example, at the adoration group
\nof the mother and child before the Buddha, one of the most
\nprofound, tender and noble of the Ajanta masterpieces, we
\nshall find that the impression of intense religious feeling of
\nadoration there is only the most outward general touch in the
\nensemble of the emotion. That which it deepens to is the turning of the soul of humanity in love to the benignant and calm
\nIneffable which has made itself sensible and human to us in the
\nuniversal compassion of the Buddha, and the motive of the soul-moment the painting interprets is the dedication of the awakening mind of the child, the coming younger humanity, to that
\nin which already the soul of the mother has learned to find
\nand fix its spiritual joy. The eyes, brows, lips, face, poise of the
\nhead of the woman are filled with this spiritual emotion which
\nis a continued memory and possession of the psychical release,
\nthe steady settled calm of the heart’s experience filled with an
\nineffable tenderness, the familiar depths which are yet moved
\nwith the wonder and always farther appeal of something that
\nis infinite, the body and other limbs are grave masses of this
\nemotion and in their poise a basic embodiment of it, while
\nthe hands prolong it in the dedicative putting forward of her
\nchild to meet the Eternal. This contact of the human and
\neternal is repeated in the smaller figure with a subtly and strongly indicated variation, the glad and childlike smile of awakening which promises but not yet possesses the depths that are
\nto come, the hands disposed to receive and keep, the body in <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-287<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nits looser curves and waves harmonising with that significance.
\nThe two have forgotten themselves and seem almost to forget
\nor confound each other in that which they adore and contemplate, and yet the dedicating hands unite mother and
\nchild in the common act and feeling by their simultaneous
\ngesture of maternal possession and spiritual giving. The two
\nfigures have at each point the same rhythm, but with a significant difference. The simplicity in the greatness and power,
\nthe fullness of expression gained by reserve and suppression
\nand concentration which we find here is the perfect method of
\nthe classical art of India. And by this perfection Buddhist art
\nbecame not merely an illustration of the religion and an expression of its thought and its religious feeling, history and
\nlegend, but a revealing interpretation of the spiritual sense of
\nBuddhism and its profounder meaning to the soul of India. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nTo understand that\u2014we must always seek first and foremost this kind of deeper intention\u2014is to understand the reason
\nof the differences between the occidental and the Indian
\ntreatment of the life motives. Thus a portrait by a great
\nEuropean painter will express with sovereign power the soul
\nthrough character, through the active qualities, the ruling
\npowers and passions, the master feeling and temperament,
\nthe active mental and vital man : the Indian artist tones down
\nthe outward-going dynamic indices and gives only so much of
\nthem as will serve to bring out or to modulate something that
\nis more of the grain of the subtle soul, something more static
\nand impersonal of which our personality is at once the mask
\nand the index. A moment of the spirit expressing with purity
\nthe permanence of a very subtle soul quality is the highest
\ntype of the Indian portrait. And more generally the feeling for
\ncharacter which has been noted as a feature of the Ajanta
\nwork is of a similar kind. An Indian painting expressing, let
\nus say, a religious feeling centred on some significant incident
\nwill show the expression in each figure varied in such
\na way as to bring out the universal spiritual essence  <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-288<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof the emotion modified by the essential soul type, different
\nwaves of the one sea, all complexity of dramatic
\ninsistence is avoided, and so much stress only is laid on
\ncharacter in the individual feeling as to give the variation
\nwithout diminishing the unity of the fundamental emotion.
\nThe vividness of life in these paintings must not obscure
\nfor us the more profound purpose for which it is the setting,
\nand this has especially to be kept in mind in our view of the
\nlater art which has not the greatness of the classic work and
\nruns to a less grave and highly sustained kind, to lyric emotion,
\nminute vividness of life movement, the more naive feelings of
\nthe people. One sometimes finds inspiration, decisive power
\nof thought and feeling, originality of creative imagination denied to this later art, but its real difference from that of Ajanta
\nis only that the intermediate psychic transmission between
\nthe life movement and the inmost motive has been given with
\nless power and distinctness : the psychic thought and feeling
\nare there more thrown outward in movement, less contained
\nin the soul, but still the soul-motive is not only present but
\nmakes the true atmosphere and if we miss it, we miss the real
\nsense of the picture. This is more evident where the inspiration is religious, but it is not absent from the secular subject.
\nHere too spiritual intention or psychic suggestion are the
\nthings of the first importance. In Ajanta work they are all-important and to ignore them at all is to open the way to
\nserious errors of interpretation. Thus a highly competent
\nand very sympathetic critic speaking of the painting of the
\nGreat Renunciation says truly that this great work excels in
\nits expression of sorrow and feeling of profound pity, but then,
\nlooking for what a western imagination would naturally put
\ninto such a subject, he goes on to speak of the weight of a tragic
\ndecision, the bitterness of renouncing a life of bliss blended
\nwith a yearning sense of hope in the happiness of the future,
\nand that is singularly to misunderstand the spirit in which the Indian mind
\nturns from the transient to the eternal, to mistake  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-289<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe Indian art motive and to put a vital into the place of
\na spiritual emotion. It is not at all his own personal sorrow
\nbut the sorrow of all others, not an emotional self-pity but a
\npoignant pity for the world, not the regret for a life of domestic
\nbliss but the afflicting sense of the unreality of human happiness
\nthat is concentrated in the eyes and lips of the Buddha, and the
\nyearning there is not, certainly, for earthly happiness in the
\nfuture but for the spiritual way out, the anguished seeking which
\nfound its release, already foreseen by the spirit behind and hence
\nthe immense calm and restraint that support the sorrow, in
\nthe true bliss of Nirvana. There is illustrated the whole difference between two kinds of imagination, the mental, vital
\nand physical stress of the art of Europe and the subtle, less
\nforcefully tangible spiritual stress of the art of India. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIt is the indigenous art of which this is the constant spirit
\nand tradition, and it has been doubted whether the Moghul
\npaintings deserve that name, have anything to do with that
\ntradition and are not rather an exotic importation from Persia. Almost all oriental art is akin in this respect that the
\npsychic enters into and for the most part lays its subtler law
\non the physical vision and the psychic line and significance
\ngive the characteristic turn, are the secret of the decorative
\nskill, direct the higher art in its principal motive. But there is a
\ndifference between the Persian psychicality which is redolent
\nof the magic of the middle worlds and the Indian which is only
\na means of transmission of the spiritual vision. And obviously
\nthe Indo-Persian style is of the former kind and not indigenous to India. But the Moghul school is not an exotic; there
\nis rather a blending of two mentalities : on the one side there
\nis a leaning to some kind of externalism which is not the same
\nthing as western naturalism, a secular spirit and certain prominent elements that are more strongly illustrative than
\ninterpretative, but the central thing is still the domination
\nof a transforming touch which shows that there as in the
\narchitecture the Indian mind has taken hold of  another <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-290<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ninvading mentality and made it a help to a more outward-going
\nself-expression that comes in as a new side-strain in the spiritual continuity of achievement which began in prehistoric
\ntimes and ended only with the general decline of Indian culture. Painting, the last of the arts in that decline to touch the
\nbottom, has also been the first to rise again and lift the dawn
\nfires of an era of new creation. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIt is not necessary to dilate on the decorative arts and crafts
\nof India, for their excellence has always been beyond dispute.
\nThe generalised sense of beauty which they imply is one of the
\ngreatest proofs that there can be of the value and soundness
\nof a national culture. Indian culture in this respect need not
\nfear any comparison : if it is less predominantly artistic than
\nthat of Japan, it is because it has put first the spiritual need
\nand made all other things subservient to and a means for the
\nspiritual growth of the people. Its civilisation, standing in the
\nfirst rank in the three great arts as in all things of the mind,
\nhas proved that the spiritual urge is not, as has been vainly
\nsupposed, sterilising to the other activities, but a most powerful force for the many-sided development of the human whole. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-291<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER VI   INDIAN ART   A GOOD deal of hostile or unsympathetic western criticism of Indian civilisation has been directed in the past against…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-foundations-of-indian-culture","wpcat-66-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}