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The sculpture and painting of ancient India have recently been rehabilitated
with a surprising suddenness in the eyes of a more cultivated European
criticism in the course of that rapid opening of the Western mind
to the value of oriental thought and creation which is one of the
most significant signs of a change that is yet only in its beginning.
There have even been here and there minds of a fine perception and
profound originality who have seen in 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
of art as an inspired interpretation of the deeper soul values of
existence lifted beyond servitude to the outsides of Nature, the
right way to the regeneration and liberation of the aesthetic and
creative mind of Europe. And actually, although much of Western
art runs still along the old grooves, much too of its most 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 wait for time to deepen
this new vision and vindicate more fully the truth and greatness
of the art of India.
But we are concerned not only with the critical estimation of our
art by Europe, but much more nearly with the evil effect of the
earlier depreciation on the Indian mind which has been for a long
time side-tracked off its true road by a foreign, an anglicised
education and, as a result, vulgarised and falsified by the loss
of its own true centre, because this hampers and retards a sound
and living revival of artistic taste and culture and stands in the
way of a new age of creation. It was only a few years ago that the
mind of educated India—“educated” without an atom of real culture—accepted
contentedly the vulgar English estimate of our sculpture and painting
as undeveloped inferior art or even a mass of monstrous and abortive
miscreation, and though that has passed and there is a great change,
there is still very common a heavy weight of secondhand occidental
notions, a bluntness or absolute lacking of aesthetic taste,*
a failure to appreciate, and one still comes sometimes across a
strain of blatantly anglicised criticism which depreciates all that
is in the Indian manner and praises only what is consistent with
Western canons. And the old style of European criticism continues
to have some weight with us, because the lack of aesthetic or indeed
of any real cultural training in our present system of education
makes us ignorant and undiscriminating receptacles, so that we are
ready to take the considered opinions of competent critics like
Okakura or Mr. Laurence Binyon and the rash scribblings of journalists
of the type of Mr. Archer, who write without authority because in
these things they have neither taste nor knowledge, as of equal
importance and the latter even attract a greater attention. It is
still necessary therefore to reiterate things which, however obvious
to a trained or sensitive aesthetic intelligence, are not yet familiar
to the average mind still untutored or habituated to a system of
false weights and values. The work of recovering a true and inward
understanding of ourselves—our past and our present self and from
that our future—is only in its commencement for the majority of
our people.
To appreciate our own artistic past at its right value we have to
free ourselves from all subjection to a foreign outlook and see
our sculpture and painting, as I have already suggested about our
architecture, in the light of its own profound intention and greatness
of spirit. When we so look at it, we shall be able to see that the
sculpture of ancient and mediaeval India claims its place on the
very highest levels of artistic achievement. I do not know where
we shall find a sculptural art of a more profound intention, a greater
spirit, a more consistent skill of achievement. Inferior work there
is, work that fails or succeeds only partially, but take it in its
whole, in the long persistence of its excellence, in the number
of its masterpieces, in the power with which it renders the soul
and the mind of a people, and we shall be tempted to go further
and claim for it a first place. The art of sculpture has indeed
flourished supremely only in ancient countries where it was conceived
against its natural background and support, a great architecture.
Egypt, Greece, India take the premier rank in this kind of creation.
Mediaeval and modern Europe produced nothing of the same mastery,
abundance and amplitude, while on the contrary in painting later
Europe has done much and richly and with a prolonged and constantly
renewed inspiration. The difference arises from the different kind
of mentality required by the two arts. The material in which we
work makes its own peculiar demand on the creative spirit, lays
down its own natural conditions, as Ruskin has pointed out in a
different connection, and the art of making in stone or bronze calls
for a cast of mind which the ancients had and the moderns have not
or have had only in rare individuals, an artistic mind not too rapidly
mobile and self-indulgent, not too much mastered by its own personality
and emotion and the touches that excite and pass, but founded rather
on some great basis of assured thought and vision, stable in temperament,
fixed in its imagination on things that are firm and enduring. One
cannot trifle with ease in these sterner materials, one cannot even
for long or with safety indulge in them in mere grace and external
beauty or the more superficial, mobile and lightly attractive motives.
The aesthetic self-indulgence which the soul of colour permits and
even invites, the attraction of the mobile play of life to which
line of brush, pen or pencil gives latitude, are here forbidden
or, if to some extent achieved, only within a line of restraint
to cross which is perilous and soon fatal. Here grand or profound
motives are called for, a more or less penetrating spiritual vision
or some sense of things eternal to base the creation. The sculptural
art is static, self-contained, necessarily firm, noble or severe
and demands an aesthetic spirit capable of these qualities. A certain
mobility of life and mastering grace of line can come in upon this
basis, but if it entirely replaces the original dharma of the material,
that means that the spirit of the statuette has come into the statue
and we may be sure of an approaching decadence. Hellenic sculpture
following this line passed from the greatness of Phidias through
the soft self-indulgence of Praxiteles to its decline. A later Europe
has failed for the most part in sculpture, in spite of some great
work by individuals, an Angelo or a Rodin, because it played externally
with stone and bronze, took them as a medium for the representation
of life and could not find a sufficient basis of profound vision
or spiritual motive. In Egypt and in India, on the contrary, sculpture
preserved its power of successful creation through several great
ages. The earliest recently discovered work in India dates back
to the fifth century B.C.and is already fully evolved with an evident
history of consummate previous creation behind it, and the latest
work of some high value comes down to within a few centuries from
our own time. An assured history of two millenniums of accomplished
sculptural creation is a rare and significant fact in the life of
a people.
This greatness and continuity of Indian sculpture is due to the
close connection between the religious and philosophical and the
aesthetic mind of the people. Its survival into times not far from
us was possible because of the survival of the cast of the antique
mind in that philosophy and religion, a mind familiar with eternal
things, capable of cosmic vision, having its roots of thought and
seeing in the profundities of the soul, in the most intimate, pregnant
and abiding experiences of the human spirit. The spirit of this
greatness is indeed at the opposite pole to the perfection within
limits, the lucid nobility or the vital fineness and physical grace
of Hellenic creation in stone. And since the favourite trick of
Mr. Archer and his kind is to throw the Hellenic ideal constantly
in our face, as if sculpture must be either governed by the Greek
standard or worthless, it is as well to take note of the meaning
of the difference. The earlier and more archaic Greek style had
indeed something in it which looks like a reminiscent touch of a
first creative origin from Egypt and the Orient, but there is already
there the governing conception which determined the Greek aesthesis
and has dominated the later mind of Europe, the will to combine
some kind of expression of an inner truth with an idealising imitation
of external Nature. The brilliance, beauty and nobility of the work
which was accomplished, was a very great and perfect thing, but
it is idle to maintain that that is the sole possible method or
the one permanent and natural law of artistic creation. Its highest
greatness subsisted only so long—and it was not for very long—as
a certain satisfying balance was struck and constantly maintained
between a fine, but not very subtle, opulent or profound spiritual
suggestion and an outward physical harmony of nobility and grace.
A later work achieved a brief miracle of vital suggestion and sensuous
physical grace with a certain power of expressing the spirit of
beauty in the mould of the senses; but this once done, there was
no more to see or create. For the curious turn which impels at the
present day the modern mind to return to spiritual vision through
a fiction of exaggerated realism which is really a pressure upon
the form of things to yield the secret of the spirit in life and
matter, was not open to the classic temperament and intelligence.
And it is surely time for us to see, as is now by many admitted,
that an acknowledgment of the greatness of Greek art in its own
province ought not to prevent the plain perception of the rather
strait and narrow bounds of that province. What Greek sculpture
expressed was fine, gracious and noble, but what it did not express
and could not by the limitations of its canon hope to attempt, was
considerable, was immense in possibility, was that spiritual depth
and extension which the human mind needs for its larger and deeper
self-experience. And just this is the greatness of Indian sculpture
that it expresses in stone and bronze what the Greek aesthetic mind
could not conceive or express and embodies it with a profound understanding
of its right conditions and a native perfection.
The more ancient sculptural art of India embodies in visible form
what the Upanishads threw out into inspired thought and the Mahabharata
and Ramayana portrayed by the word in life. This sculpture like
the architecture springs from spiritual realisation, and what it
creates and expresses at its greatest is the spirit in form, the
soul in body, this or that living soul power in the divine or the
human, the universal and cosmic individualised in suggestion but
not lost in individuality, the impersonal supporting a not too insistent
play of personality, the abiding moments of the eternal, the presence,
the idea, the power, the calm or potent delight of the spirit in
its actions and creations. And over all the art something of this
intention broods and persists and is suggested even where it does
not dominate the mind of the sculptor. And therefore as in the architecture
so in the sculpture, we have to bring a different mind to this work,
a different capacity of vision and response, we have to go deeper
into ourselves to see than in the more outwardly imaginative art
of Europe. The Olympian gods of Phidias are magnified and uplifted
human beings saved from a too human limitation by a certain divine
calm of impersonality or universalised quality, divine type, guna;
in other work we see heroes, athletes, feminine incarnations of
beauty, calm and restrained embodiments of idea, action or emotion
in the idealised beauty of the human figure. The gods of Indian
sculpture are cosmic beings, embodiments of some great spiritual
power, spiritual idea and action, inmost psychic significance, the
human form a vehicle of this soul meaning, its outward means of
self-expression; everything in the figure, every opportunity it
gives, the face, the hands, the posture of the limbs, the poise
and turn of the body, every accessory, has to be made instinct with
the inner meaning, help it to emerge, carry out the rhythm of the
total suggestion, and on the other hand everything is suppressed
which would defeat this end, especially all that would mean an insistence
on the merely vital or physical, outward or obvious suggestions
of the human figure. Not the ideal physical or emotional beauty,
but the utmost spiritual beauty or significance of which the human
form is capable, is the aim of this kind of creation. The divine
self in us is its theme, the body made a form of the soul is its
idea and its secret. And therefore in front of this art it is not
enough to look at it and respond with the aesthetic eye and the
imagination, but we must look also into the form for what it carries
and even through and behind it to pursue the profound suggestion
it gives into its own infinite. The religious or hieratic side of
Indian sculpture is intimately connected with the spiritual experiences
of Indian meditation and adoration,—those deep things of our self-discovery
which our critic calls contemptuously Yogic hallucinations,—soul
realisation is its method of creation and soul realisation must
be the way of our response and understanding. And even with the
figures of human beings or groups it is still a like inner aim and
vision which governs the labour of the sculptor. The statue of a
king or a saint is not meant merely to give the idea of a king or
saint or to portray some dramatic action or to be a character portrait
in stone, but to embody rather a soul state or experience or deeper
soul quality, as for instance, not the outward emotion, but the
inner soul-side of rapt ecstasy of adoration and God-vision in the
saint or the devotee before the presence of the worshipped deity.
This is the character of the task the Indian sculptor set before
his effort and it is according to his success in that and not by
the absence of something else, some quality or some intention foreign
to his mind and contrary to his design, that we have to judge of
his achievement and his labour.
Once we admit this standard, it is impossible to speak too highly
of the profound intelligence of its conditions which was developed
in Indian sculpture, of the skill with which its task was treated
or of the consummate grandeur and beauty of its masterpieces. Take
the great Buddhas—not the Gandharan, but the divine figures or groups
in cave cathedral or temple, the best of the later southern bronzes
of which there is a remarkable collection of plates in Mr. Gangoly's
book on that subject, the Kalasanhara image, the Natarajas. No greater
or finer work, whether in conception or execution, has been done
by the human hand and its greatness is increased by obeying a spiritualised
aesthetic vision. The figure of the Buddha achieves the expression
of the infinite in a finite image, and that is surely no mean or
barbaric achievement, to embody the illimitable calm of Nirvana
in a human form and visage. The Kalasanhara Shiva is supreme not
only by the majesty, power, calmly forceful control, dignity and
kingship of existence which the whole spirit and pose of the figure
visibly incarnates,—that is only half or less than half its achievement,—but
much more by the concentrated divine passion of the spiritual overcoming
of time and existence which the artist has succeeded in putting
into eye and 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 of his meaning which
he has poured through the whole unity of this creation. Or what
of the marvellous genius and skill in the treatment of the cosmic
movement and delight of the dance of Shiva, the success with which
the posture of every limb is made to bring out the rhythm of the
significance, the rapturous intensity and abandon of the movement
itself and yet the just restraint in the intensity of motion, the
subtle variation of each element of the single theme in the seizing
idea of these master sculptors? Image after image in the great temples
or saved from the wreck of time shows the same grand traditional
art and the genius which worked in that tradition and its many styles,
the profound and firmly grasped spiritual idea, the consistent expression
of it in every curve, line and mass, in hand and limb, in suggestive
pose, in expressive rhythm,—it is an art which, understood in its
own spirit, need fear no comparison with any other, ancient or modern,
Hellenic or Egyptian, of the near or the far East or of the West
in any of its creative ages. This sculpture passed through many
changes, a more ancient art of extraordinary grandeur and epic power
uplifted by the same spirit as reigned in the Vedic and Vedantic
seers and in the epic poets, a later Puranic turn towards grace
and beauty and rapture and an outburst of lyric ecstasy and movement,
and last a rapid and vacant decadence; but throughout all the second
period 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 complete debasement, emptiness
or insignificance.
Let us see then what is the value of the objections made to the
spirit and style of Indian sculpture. This is the burden of the
objurgations of the devil's advocate that his self-bound European
mind finds the whole thing barbaric, meaningless, uncouth, strange,
bizarre, the work of a distorted imagination labouring mid a nightmare
of unlovely unrealities. Now there is in the total of what survives
to us work that is less inspired or even work that is bad, exaggerated,
forced or clumsy, the production of mechanic artificers mingled
with the creation of great nameless artists, and an eye that does
not understand the sense, the first conditions of the work, the
mind of the race or its type of aesthesis, may well fail to distinguish
between good and inferior execution, decadent work and the work
of the great hands and the great eras. But applied as a general
description the criticism is itself grotesque and distorted and
it means only that here are conceptions and a figuring imagination
strange to the Western intelligence. The line and run and turn demanded
by the Indian aesthetic sense are not the same as those demanded
by the European. It would take too long to examine the detail of
the difference which we find not only in sculpture, but in the other
plastic arts and in music and even to a certain extent in literature,
but on the whole we may say that the Indian mind moves on the spur
of a spiritual sensitiveness and psychic curiosity, while the aesthetic
curiosity of the European temperament is intellectual, vital, emotional
and imaginative in that sense, and almost the whole strangeness
of the Indian use of line and mass, ornament and proportion and
rhythm arises from this difference. The two minds live almost in
different worlds, are either not looking at the same things or,
even where they meet in the object, see it from a different level
or surrounded by a different atmosphere, and we know what power
the point of view or the medium of vision has to transform the object.
And undoubtedly there is very ample ground for Mr. Archer's complaint
of the want of naturalism in most Indian sculpture. The inspiration,
the way of seeing is frankly not naturalistic, not, that is to say,
the vivid, convincing and accurate, the graceful, 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 impressions, not with recording or glorifying what
is received by the physical senses. He may start with suggestions
from earthly and physical things, but he produces his work only
after he has closed his eyes to the Page 293 insistence of the physical
circumstances, seen them in the psychic memory and transformed them
within himself so as to bring out something other than their physical
reality or their vital and intellectual significance. His eye sees
the psychic line and turn of things and he replaces by them the
material contours. It is not surprising that such a method should
produce results which are strange to the average Western mind and
eye when these are not liberated by a broad and sympathetic culture.
And what is strange to us, is naturally repugnant to our habitual
mind and uncouth to our habitual sense, bizarre to our imaginative
tradition and aesthetic training. We want what is familiar to the
eye and obvious to the imagination and will not readily admit that
there may be here another and perhaps greater beauty than that in
the circle of which we are accustomed to live and take pleasure.
It seems to be especially the application of this psychic vision
to the human form which offends these critics of Indian sculpture.
There is the familiar objection to such features as the multiplication
of the arms in the figures of gods and goddesses, the four, six,
eight or ten arms of Shiva, the eighteen arms of Durga, because
they are a monstrosity, a thing not in nature. Now certainly a play
of imagination of this kind would be out of place in the representation
of a man or woman, because it would have no artistic or other meaning,
but I cannot see why this freedom should be denied in the representation
of cosmic beings like the Indian godheads. The whole question is,
first, whether it is an appropriate means of conveying a significance
not otherwise to be represented with an equal power and force and,
secondly, whether it is capable of artistic representation, a rhythm
of artistic truth and unity which need not be that of physical nature.
If not, then it is an ugliness and violence, but if these conditions
are satisfied, the means are justified and I do not see that we
have any right, faced with the perfection of the work, to raise
a discordant clamour. Mr. Archer himself is struck with the perfection
of skill and mastery with which these to him superfluous limbs are
disposed in the figures of the dancing Shiva, and indeed it would
need an eye of impossible blindness not to see that much, but what
is still more important is the artistic significance which this
skill is used to serve, and, if that is understood, we can at once
see that the spiritual emotion and suggestions of the cosmic dance
are brought out by this device in a way which would not be as possible
with a two-armed figure. The same truth holds as to the Durga with
her eighteen arms slaying the Asuras or the Shivas of the great
Pallava creations where the lyrical beauty of the Natarajas is absent,
but there is instead a great epical rhythm and grandeur. Art justifies
its own means and here it does it with a supreme perfection. And
as for the “contorted” postures of some figures, the same law holds.
There is often a departure in this respect from the anatomical norm
of the physical body or else—and that is a rather different thing—an
emphasis more or less pronounced on an unusual pose of limbs or
body, and the question then is whether it is done without sense
or purpose, a mere clumsiness or an ugly exaggeration, or whether
it rather serves some significance and establishes in the place
of the normal physical metric of Nature another purposeful and successful
artistic rhythm. Art after all is not forbidden to deal with the
unusual or to alter and overpass Nature, and it might almost be
said that it has been doing little else since it began to serve
the human imagination from its first grand epic exaggerations to
the violences of modern romanticism and realism, from the high ages
of Valmiki and Homer to the day of Hugo and Ibsen. The means matter,
but less than the significance and the thing done and the power
and beauty with which it expresses the dreams and truths of the
human spirit.
The whole question of the Indian artistic treatment of the human
figure has to be understood in the light of its aesthetic purpose.
It works with a certain intention and ideal, a general norm and
standard which permits of a good many variations and from which
too there are appropriate departures. The epithets with which Mr.
Archer tries to damn its features are absurd, captious, exaggerated,
the forced phrases of a journalist trying to depreciate a perfectly
sensible, beautiful and aesthetic norm with which he does not sympathise.
There are other things here than a repetition of hawk faces, wasp
waists, thin legs and the rest of the ill-tempered caricature. He
doubts Mr. Havell's suggestion that these old Indian artists knew
the anatomy of the body well enough, as Indian science knew it,
but chose to depart from it for their own purpose. It does not seem
to me to matter much, since art is not anatomy, nor an artistic
masterpiece necessarily a reproduction of physical fact or a lesson
in natural science. I see no reason to regret the absence of telling
studies in muscles, torsos, etc., for I cannot regard these things
as having in themselves any essential artistic value. The one important
point is that the Indian artist had a perfect idea of proportion
and rhythm and used them in certain styles with nobility and power,
in others like the Javan, the Gauda or the southern bronzes with
that or with a perfect grace added and often an intense and a lyrical
sweetness. The dignity and beauty of the human figure in the best
Indian statues cannot be excelled, but what was sought and what
was achieved was not an outward naturalistic, but a spiritual and
a psychic beauty, and to achieve it the sculptor suppressed, and
was entirely right in suppressing, the obtrusive material detail
and aimed instead at purity of outline and fineness of feature.
And into that outline, into that purity and fineness he 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 his meaning. A divine and
subtle body was his ideal; and to a taste and imagination too blunt
or realistic to conceive the truth and beauty of his idea, the ideal
itself may well be a stumbling-block, a thing of offence. But the
triumphs of art are not to be limited by the narrow prejudices of
the natural realistic man; that triumphs and endures which appeals
to the best, sadhu-sammatam, that is deepest and greatest which
satisfies the profoundest souls and the most sensitive psychic imaginations.
Each manner of art has its own ideals, traditions, agreed conventions;
for the ideas and forms of the creative spirit are many, though
there is one ultimate basis. The perspective, the psychic vision
of the Chinese and Japanese painters are not the same as those of
European artists; but who can ignore the beauty and the wonder of
their work? I dare say Mr. Archer would set a Constable or a Turner
above the whole mass of Far Eastern work, as I myself, if I had
to make a choice, would take a Chinese or Japanese landscape or
other magic transmutation of Nature in preference to all others;
but these are matters of individual, national or continental temperament
and preference. The essence of the question lies in the rendering
of the truth and beauty seized by the spirit. Indian sculpture,
Indian art in general follows its own ideal and traditions and these
are unique in their character and quality. It is the expression
great as a whole through many centuries and ages of creation, supreme
at its best, whether in rare early pre-Asokan, in Asokan or later
work of the first heroic age or in the magnificent statues of the
cave-cathedrals and Pallava and other southern temples or the noble,
accomplished or gracious imaginations of Bengal, Nepal and Java
through the after centuries or in the singular skill and delicacy
of the bronze work of the southern religions, a self-expression
of the spirit and ideals of a great nation and a great culture which
stands apart in the cast of its mind and qualities among the earth's
peoples, famed for its spiritual achievement, its deep philosophies
and its religious spirit, its artistic taste, the richness of its
poetic imagination, and not inferior once in its dealings with life
and its social endeavour and political institutions. This sculpture
is a singularly powerful, a seizing and profound interpretation
in stone and bronze of the inner soul of that people. The nation,
the culture failed for a time in life after a long greatness, as
others failed before it and others will yet fail that now flourish;
the creations of its mind have been arrested, this art like others
has ceased or fallen into decay, but the thing from which it rose,
the spiritual fire within still burns and in the renascence that
is coming it may be that this great art too will revive, not saddled
with the grave limitations of modern Western work in the kind, but
vivified by the nobility of a new impulse and power of the ancient
spiritual motive. Let it recover, not limited by old forms, but
undeterred by the cavillings of an alien mind, the sense of the
grandeur and beauty and the inner significance of its past achievement;
for in the continuity of its spiritual endeavour lies its best hope
for the future.
Footnote:
For example, one still reads with a sense of despairing stupefaction
“criticism” that speaks of Ravi Varma and Abanindranath Tagore as
artistic creators of different styles, but an equal power and genius!
All
extracts and quotations from the written works of Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother and the Photographs of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo
are copyright Sri Aurobindo Trust, Pondicherry -605002 India
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