The Foundations of Indian Culture And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo | POST 18

The Foundations of Indian Culture

And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo

POST 18

Indian Art - IV

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Summary

Owing to the comparative scantiness of its surviving creations, the art of painting in ancient and later India does not create quite so great an impression as her architecture and sculpture. But to a closer view it reveals a persistent tradition which links even the latest Rajput art to the earliest surviving work still preserved in the rock-cut retreats of Ajanta, almost all of whose twenty-nine caves had at one time had their frescoes, many of these are now lost for ever. The one important thing that emerges is the continuity of all Indian art in its essential spirit and tradition: it is a throwing out of a certain profound self-vision, a discovery of the subject in one’s deeper self, the giving of soul-form to that vision and a remoulding of the material and natural shape to express the psychic truth of it with the greatest possible purity and power of outline and the greatest possible concentrated rhythmic unity of significance in all the parts of an individual artistic whole. The only difference from the other arts comes from the turn natural and inevitable to its own kind of aesthetics, from the moved and indulgent dwelling on what one might call the mobilities of the soul rather than its static elements. Painting is naturally the most sensuous of the arts, and the highest greatness open to the painter is to spiritualise the sensuous appeal by making the most vivid outward beauty a revelation of subtle spiritual emotion so that the soul and the sense are at harmony.

The six limbs of his art, the ?a?a?ga, are common to all work in line and colour. The distinction of forms, rūpabheda, proportion, arrangement of line and mass, perspective, pramā?a, the emotion of aesthetic feeling, bhāva, the seeking for beauty and charm for the satisfaction of the spirit lāva?ya, truth of the form and its suggestion, sād??ya, the turn, combination, harmony of colours, var?ikā-bha?ga But it is the turn given to each of the constituents which makes all the difference.

If the first primitive object of the art of painting is to illustrate life and Nature, its second and more elevated aim is the interpretation or intuitive revelation of existence, and it is this second that is the starting-point of the Indian motive. Here the distinction of forms is faithfully observed, but not in the sense of a strict naturalistic fidelity. It is the ideal psychical figure and body of men and women that is before us, and the filling of the line is done in another way that enables the artist to flood the whole with the significance of the one spiritual emotion, feeling, suggestion which he intends to convey, his intuition of the moment of the soul, its living self-experience. The same law of significant line and suppression of distracting detail is applied in animal forms, buildings, trees, objects. Colour too is used as a means for the spiritual and psychic intuition.

These things have to be carefully understood and held in mind when we look at an Indian painting before we condemn or praise. If we look long, for example, at the adoration group of mother and child before the Buddha, one of the most profound, tender and noble of the Ajanta masterpieces, we shall find that which it deepens to is the turning of the soul of humanity in love to the benignant and calm Ineffable embodied in the Master’s universal compassion. The two have forgotten themselves and seem almost to forget or confound each other in that which they adore and contemplate, and yet the dedicating hands unite mother and child in the common act; and feeling by their simultaneous gesture of maternal possession and spiritual giving. The two figures have at each point the same rhythm, but with a significant difference. With its simplicity, reserve and concentration we find here the perfect method of the classical art of India and a revealing interpretation of the spiritual sense of Buddhism and its profounder meaning to the soul of India.

To ignore the spiritual intention or psychic suggestion is to open the way to serious errors of interpretation. Thus a competent and sympathetic critic speaking appreciatively of the painting of the Great Renunciation also goes on to speak of the weight of tragic decision, and that is to misunderstand, to mistake the Indian art motive and to put a vital into the place of a spiritual emotion.

It has been doubted whether the Moghul paintings deserve to be called Indian. But though there is a difference between the Persian psychicality and the Indian, the Moghul school is not an exotic. There is rather a blending of two mentalities: a leaning to some kind of externalism which is yet not the same thing as western naturalism, a secular spirit and certain prominent elements that are more strongly illustrative than interpretative, but the central thing is still the domination of a transforming touch.

As for the decorative arts and crafts of India, their excellence has always been beyond dispute. The generalised sense of beauty which they imply is one of the greatest proofs that there can be of the value and soundness of a national culture, and that the spiritual urge is not sterilising to the other activities, but a most powerful force for the many-sided development of the human whole.

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