Art of India. Vincent Arthur Smith
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Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Bodhisattva of compassion), late 6th century C. E., late Gupta period. Detail of a fresco. Ajanta caves (cave I), near Aurangabad, Maharashtra.
Vessantara Jataka: Pavilion scene in the Palace of Prince Vessantara and his wife Princess Madri, 5th-6th century C. E., late Gupta period. Detail of a fresco. Ajanta caves (cave XVII), near Aurangabad, Maharashtra.
A Representation of the Miracle of Sravasti: to silence the sceptics who did not believe in him, the Buddha miraculously manifests himself into a thousand different forms, 6th century C. E., late Gupta period. Detail of a fresco. Ajanta caves (Cave II), near Aurangabad, Maharashtra.
This declaration was directly caused by a paper read before the Royal Society of Arts by Sir George Birdwood, the chronicler of Indian industrial arts. As a matter of fact, all that was then said had already appeared in print thirty years before, but the moment was not then ripe for the acceptance of the challenge. Birdwood can in no way be accused of lack of sympathy with Indian life or things Indian. A stylistic analysis of the crafts of modern India is illuminating with regard to one’s attitude to the country itself, for one is forced to acknowledge the predominance of the Islamic and especially of the Persian culture of the Mughal court. Except in their everyday household form, pottery and metalwork are purely Islamic. Textiles, especially prints and brocades, are very largely Persian in design, although the Indian strength of imagination and purity of colour are evident. Certain forms of textiles are, however, purely Indian, the darn-stitch Phulkaris of the northwest and certain tied-and-dyed and warp-dyed forms. Only in jewellery has the Indian tradition been wholly preserved, in the beadwork of the villages as well as in the enamels of Jaipur. Birdwood’s love of all this delicate and colourful craftsmanship, and of the complex, changeful life of which it is a part, is expressed in many passages from his pen of very great beauty. The arts of Ancient and Medieval India were outside his field, and his criticism of them is not deeply considered and purely personal.
In his paper before the Royal Society of Arts he stated with regard to a certain Javanese seated Buddha that this ‘senseless similitude, by its immemorial fixed pose, is nothing more than an uninspired brazen image, vacuously squinting down its nose to its thumbs, knees, and toes. A boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of passionate purity and serenity of soul.’ This attack, however, may be considered as being equally directed against the loose verbiage of those critics of Indian art to whom the ideal content of an object is of greater importance than its form, than against Indian art itself.
Gautama Buddha sitting under a pipal tree in the Dharmachakra Parvartana Mudra and the crowned Maitreya seated under the asoka tree, 5th-6th century C. E., late Gupta period. Detail of a fresco above the doorway. Ajanta caves (Cave XVII), near Aurangabad, Maharashtra.
An earlier statement in the official handbook to the India Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum offers a more definite criticism. “The monstrous shapes of the Puranic deities are unsuitable for the higher forms of artistic representation: and this is possibly why sculpture and painting are unknown, as fine arts, in India… How completely their figure-sculpture fails in true art is seen at once when they attempt to produce it on a natural and heroic scale, and it is only because their ivory and stone figures of men and animals are on so minute a scale that they excite admiration.” Here it must be noticed the subject under discussion is modern Indian ivory-carving. In his Handbook of Sculpture, Professor Westmacott dismissed Indian art in one paragraph, forming his judgement, apparently, from the steel engravings and lithographs of the two or three books that were all that was then accessible.
There is no temptation to dwell at length on the sculpture of Hindustan. It affords no assistance in tracing the history of art, and its debased quality deprives it of all interest as a phase of fine art, the point of view from which it would have to be considered. It must be admitted, however, that the works existing have sufficient character to stamp their nationality, and although they possess no properties that can make them useful for the student, they offer very curious subjects of inquiry to the scholar and archaeologist. The sculptures found in various parts of India, at Ellora, Elephanta, and other places, are of a strictly symbolical or mythological character. They usually consist of combinations of human and brute forms, repulsive from their ugliness and outrageous defiance of rule and even possibility.
In the opinion of Dr. Anderson, author of the catalogue of sculpture at the Indian Museum, Calcutta, Indian sculptors ‘have never risen… beyond the most feeble mediocrity’, although he acclaims the Orissa temple sculptures as ‘extremely pleasing pieces of art’. A more guarded opinion is that of Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, who while giving Indian art a good place among the arts of the world, would not place it in the first rank, except for its ‘eminent suitability to its country and people.’
Such were the opinions current among scholars at the end of the nineteenth century, concerning an art already accepted by artists and acclaimed by its influence upon the work of such men as Rodin, Degas, and Maillol.
The popularization of Indian art has been mainly the work of Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy and E. B. Havell. To a certain extent their methods of exposition agree, the vein being interpretational, with a stressing of the literary. For Dr. Coomaraswamy ‘all that India can offer to the world proceeds from her philosophy’, a state of ‘mental concentration’ (yoga) on the part of the artist and the enactment of a certain amount of ritual being postulated as the source of the ‘spirituality’ of Indian art. The weakness of this attitude lies in its interweaving of distinct lines of criticism, form being dressed out in the purely literary with the consequent confusion of aesthetic appreciation with religious and other impulses. It is also historically ill-founded, for the sentiment and philosophy out of which the web is spun are the products of medieval India, as an examination of the texts quoted will show; many of the southern authorities quoted can only be classed as modern. The increasingly hieratic art of medieval and modern India, especially in the south, is doubtless closely knit with this literary tradition. But the literary tradition is not the source of the art, for iconography presupposes icons. The technical formulae of the sastras resulted in a standardization of production in spite of which genius, which knows no bonds, asserted itself. The bronze Nataraja loaned by Lord Ampthill to South Kensington is supreme among a hundred examples of mere hack-work. The bones of the literary formulae too often remain bones; here they are clothed with life, and beauty of form is achieved.
The miracle is a perennial one and world-wide; we marvel at the hand and eye that shaped this wonder. However, it is evident that many such images are not aesthetically worth the metal they are cast in. Their function as objects of worship is an entirely different matter. To insist on the necessity of burdening the mind with a host of symbolical and psychological adjuncts prior to appreciation is to obstruct the vision. Research literary or historical may aid vision, but cannot be substituted for it. Aesthetic vision is, of course, distinct from the practical vision of everyday life. Those who indulge in it are entirely absorbed in apprehending the relation of forms and colour to one another, as they cohere within the object. Intensity and detachment from the merely superficial and additional are essential to it. This rigid detachment may at any moment be broken by interest in all sorts of ‘quasi-biological feelings’ and irrelevant queries: but then the vision ceases to be critical and becomes merely curious.
Lingaraj Temple with one hundred and fifty smaller shrines, 11th century C. E., Keshari dynasty/Somavamsi dynasty. Red sandstone. Bhubaneswar, Orissa.
A further element is apparent in the recent discussion of Indian art. Aesthetically we are not at all concerned with the sub-continent that is known as India or its peoples, but our curiosity must be strong as to its past and future. The pageantry of Indian history is as glorious as that of any country in the world. Artistically it falls into two main periods, the first of which, ending with the Muslim conquest, is an epic in itself. This period discloses the development of a great art. From the vividly pictorial, strictly popular sculpture of the Early Period, based on a living tradition, increased skill and wider vision lead to the classic art of the Gupta century. Henceforward it is