Ten arms? And three heads?

Based on the Foundations Of India, where Sri Aurobindo has explained the significance of our civilisation, the book under review is a reiteration of the experience that underlies the creations of Indian art. More importantly, it is a rejoinder to Western criticism, says ZERIN ANKLESARIA.

LOOKING back upon the life and writings of Sri Aurobindo, one is most impressed by his brilliant eclecticism. Educated in England, fluent in three Indian languages and six European ones, including the classics, a teacher of English Literature and a freedom fighter who anticipated Gandhiji by a decade, few men of his generation could match him in intellectual stature and breadth of outlook.

The essays on Indian art and culture were a rejoinder to the English drama critic William Archer who, with no qualifications for the undertaking or empathy with the subject, wrote a book on India and the Future in 1917. Judging from a purely occidental standpoint, he saw any culture as worthless which did not conform to the Greek norms of Reason, Rationality, and Restraint. The doctrine of The Golden Mean must be the yardstick, which meant that any form of excess was condemnable, and the artist must never go beyond Nature. According to these restrictive criteria, Indian art was seen, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, as, "immature, monstrous, an arrested growth from humanity's primitive savagery and incompetent childhood".

Sadly these views, though scarcely believable now, were not uncommon in Archer's time. He is distinguished only by the acerbity of his tone and the brashness of his conclusions, by his penchant for rushing in where angels fear to tread. The Indian ideal of the male physique, full in the shoulders but narrow- waisted, was unreal according to him. When told that it mimicked the torso of the lion to create a visual metaphor for bravery, majesty and so on, he adduced it as proof that Indians were culturally at the tribal level since they worshipped wild animals. Presumably, his own countrymen are similarly placed since one of their kings is admiringly called Richard Lion-Heart.

To a mind so breathtakingly literal, a supra-rational and supra- sensual art was totally incomprehensible. Even sympathetic critics applied Western standards of realism to Indian sculpture and found it wanting because it was not anatomically correct in every detail. To the Eastern mind, however, musculature and bone structure are irrelevant since the aim of art is not to imitate Nature but to reach beyond the show of things to the greater cosmic truths. Western art is not entirely devoid of this visionary quality, but it is brought down to earth, expressed in accepted forms, whereas in Indian art the vision breaks through the form to project deeper meanings.

Having explained this fundamental difference of approach, Sri Aurobindo returns to William Archer and refutes his contentions point by point. Minor criticisms such as his dislike of the Indian arch and dome are attributed to prejudice, the very human preference for one's own art forms over alien ones. The more serious charge is that Indian temples, particularly in the Dravidian mode, are gloomy, ponderous and over-ornamented. These have, says Archer, a titanic impressiveness but no trace of unity, clarity and nobility. They are overwrought, senseless, and swarming with contorted, semi-human figures, barbarous in their excess. Islamic buildings, according to him, are a refreshing contrast. They are rational and have a radiant lightness, a fairylike quality but (since nothing Indian can be entirely praiseworthy) they are alas, superficial and decadent.

Sri Aurobindo's riposte runs into several pages, but can be briefly summed up. Islamic art is not superficial since the mosques, in particular, do convey deeper meanings. Further, no art or structure can be both rational and fairylike; and whatever has a "titanic impressiveness" cannot be totally devoid of nobility. As for the exterior of a temple being so over-decorated as to militate against its unity, each temple is a microcosm that celebrates the myriad forms of life in the universe. Here, each tiny detail contributes to the overall harmony, just as the temple itself is an element in the landscape for which it was built. As for the charge of barbarous excess, what is excessive in one culture is admired in others. Sri Aurobindo reminds us that this is one of the defining contrasts between the Classical and the Romantic modes, and that, to the French mind, Shakespeare himself was "a drunken barbarian of genius".

One wishes sometimes that the Aurobindo style with its multiple clauses and extended periods was more pointed, less circumlocutory, but it does not obscure the sharpness of his perception or his catholicity of outlook. Here is a mind not formally trained in art criticism which ranges from Classical Greece, to Michelangelo and Tintoretto, to Chinese and Japanese landscape painting which he considers supreme in its treatment of nature. There is also humility, a willingness to see opposing view-points. For instance, he admits that perhaps he cannot appreciate Western art fully because his sensibilities are not attuned to it, not because it is intrinsically inferior.

However, when all this is said, one wonders why essays published 80 years ago should be republished now. Sri Aurobindo's views, ably seconded by scholars of the stature of Ananda Coomaraswamy, are too well known and widely accepted to need reiteration. No Western critic today is so simple minded as to judge the merit of a statue by the number of its arms; neither would he draw fatuous comparisons between an image and a living person, as when Archer condemns the Dhyani Buddha for its drooping eyelids, stiff pose and insipid expression in contract with the spirituality in the visage of Rabindranath Tagore. Such colonialist biases like colonialism itself, have passed into history and deserve oblivion, not resurrection.

Photographer Elisabeth Beck, who has compiled the book evidently meant it as a tribute to her guru. If, as she claims, her friends urged her to make his words visible in pictures, it could have been done in a less random manner. There are some splendid studies in black and white, but they do not always match the text. One looks in vain for a picture of the Dhyani Buddha and, in a particularly glaring instance, photographs of the temples at Mamallapuram and Bhubaneshwar are used to illustrate the author's description of two very different temples at Kalahasti and Simhachalam. There is little in common between the Southern and North-eastern styles, and surely so devout a follower should have gone out of her way to depict the actual buildings chosen by the master.

The many Nataraja studies almost compensate for these shortcomings. There are about a dozen, ranging from the superb Sixth Century Shiva at Ellora, dancing as if he were floating on air, to the dramatic 12th Century Chola statue with down-turned head, twisted torso and arms upraised in triumph in the Tanjore Museum. The famous alidha Shiva dancing on his knees from Kanchipuram is included. So is the Kalasanhara Natraja singled out by Aurobindo for its majesty and power and "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 ...". In the harmony of its lines and its perfect balance, in the mystic sense of transcendence it conveys, the Nataraja, as a religious icon, is surely one of the supreme achievements of world art.

Sri Aurobindo On Indian Art: Selections From His Writings, with photographs by Elisabeth Beck, Mapin Publishing, price not mentioned.

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