The Foundations of Indian Culture And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo | POST 15

The Foundations of Indian Culture

And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo

POST 15

Indian Art - I

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Summary

A good deal of hostile or unsympathetic western criticism has taken the form of a depreciation of its fine arts. But Mr Archer’s torrent of sweeping denunciation, external and uninformed, need not be taken as serious or answered in detail. I will give an instance—by no means isolated—of his amazing ineptitude. The Indian ideal figure of the masculine body insists on two features among many, a characteristic width at the shoulders and slenderness in their middle. Indian poets and authorities on art have given in this connection the simile of the lion, and behold Mr. Archer solemnly discoursing on this as a plain proof that the Indian people were just only out of the semi-savage state!

But Mr. Archer turns also to deal with the philosophy in art. The whole basis of Indian artistic creation, perfectly conscious and recognised in the canons, is directly spiritual and intuitive, and based on the superiority of the method of direct perception over intellect. It is not surprising that one who ignores it and allied elementary notions should misunderstand the strong and subtle art creations of India.

The weakness of Mr Archer’s attack must not blind us to the importance of the mental outlook from which his dislike or misunderstanding of Indian art proceeds. The western mind was long bound up in the Greek and Renascence tradition, with only two later side rooms of escape, the romantic and the realistic motives. The conventional superstition of the imitation of Nature as the first law or limiting rule of an governed even the freest of work, and western canons were held to be the sole valid criteria. A remarkable change has, it is true, begun to set in, though it has not gone far enough for a thorough appreciation of the deepest and most characteristic spirit and aspiration of Indian work. There is therefore still a utility in fathoming the depths and causes of the divergence. A comparative criticism has its use, but the essential understanding must precede it, a thing comparatively difficult in arts other than literature. The difficulty is mutual and in viewing much of European work, say, Tintoretto, I am myself aware of a failure of spiritual sympathy. When I try to analyse my failure I can see that I come to this art with a previous demand for a kind of vision, imagination, emotion, significance which it cannot give me.

I lay stress on this psychological misunderstanding or want of understanding, because it explains the attitude of the natural European mind to the great works of Indian art and puts on it its right value. For instance, the amazing preference of better informed critics than Mr. Archer for the bastard Gandharan sculpture to great and sincere work original and true in its unity.

Ordinarily, place this mind before anything ancient, Hindu, Buddhistic or Vedantic in art and it looks at it with blank or an angry incomprehension. Mr. Archer, for instance, sees the Dhyani Buddha with its supreme, its unfathomable, its infinite spiritual calm which every cultured oriental mind can at once feel and respond to in the depths of his being, and he denies that there is anything—only drooping eyelids, an immobile pose and an insipid, by which, I suppose, he means a calm passionless face. There we have the blind window, the blocked door in the mind.

All great artistic work proceeds from an act of intuition, not really an intellectual idea or a splendid imagination-these are only mental translations—but a direct intuition of some truth of life or being, some significant form of that truth. So far there is no difference between great European and great Indian work. Where then begins the immense divergence? It is there in everything else, in the object and field of the intuitive vision, in the method of working out the sight or suggestion, in the part taken in the rendering to the human mind, even in the centre of our being to which the work appeals. The appeal is not direct to the eye of the deepest self and spirit within, but to the outward soul by a strong awakening of the sensuous, the vital, the emotional, the intellectual and imaginative being, and of the spiritual we get as much or as little as can suit itself to and express itself through the outward man. The something more looks out, if at all, from behind many veils. The direct and unveiled presence of the Infinite and its godhead is not evoked or thought necessary to the greater greatness and the highest expression.

The theory of ancient Indian art at its greatest is of another kind, if not its opposite. Its highest business is to disclose something of the Self, the Infinite, the Divine to the regard of the soul, the Self through its expressions, the Infinite through its living, finite symbols, the Divine through his powers. Life is seen in the self or in some suggestion of the Infinite or of something beyond or there is at least a touch or influence of those which helps to shape the presentation.

A seeing in the self accordingly becomes the characteristic method of the Indian artist and it is directly enjoined on him by the canon. One may, therefore, well say that beyond the ordinary cultivation of the aesthetic instinct necessary to all artistic appreciation there is a spiritual insight or culture needed if we are to enter into the whole meaning of Indian artistic creation which are not only intimately one in inspiration with the central things in Indian philosophy, religion, yoga, culture, but a specially intense expression of their significance.

- by Unknown

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