In the first part, we saw Sri Aurobindo mount one of the strongest defences of Indian culture in response to the ignorant criticisms of an English writer, Mr. Archer. We have seen previously how Sri Aurobindo articulates a clear understanding of Hindu religion and spirituality. In the second part, Sri Aurobindo looks at Indian art and Indian literature. He shows how Indian art differs in its perspective from European art. Approaching the former with the European understandings leads to misunderstanding and a deep misrepresentation of Indian art. Similarly, no civilisation and language in the world comes even close to the enormous output of India in terms of its literature.
INDIAN ART
Western criticism depreciates India’s fine arts due to a lack of understanding. The Indian ideal figure, as held by poets and authorities on art, of the masculine body with a characteristic width at the shoulders and slenderness in their middle has the simile of a lion. Mr. Archer believes this is proof that the Indian people were just out of the semi-savage state. The whole basis of Indian artistic creation is directly spiritual and intuitive, based on the superiority of the method of direct perception over intellect. Archer completely fails to grasp this elementary notion.
The western mind, long bound up in the Greek and Renaissance traditions, has only romantic and realistic motives. The imitation of Nature was the first law. There is a want of understanding when Archer and other better-informed critics approach ancient Hindu, Buddhistic, or Vedantic art with blank incomprehension. Mr. Archer, for instance, sees the Dhyani Buddha with its supreme spiritual calm with only a “passionless” face. European art does not invoke or consider the direct and unveiled presence of the Infinite and its godhead necessary for the highest expression.
The highest business of Indian art is to disclose something of the Self, the infinite, and the divine through its outer forms. Thus, beyond the ordinary aesthetic instinct, there is a spiritual insight or culture needed if we are to enter into the whole meaning of Indian artistic creation. The same is true for Indian philosophy, religion, yoga, and culture.
Architecture, sculpture, and painting are the great arts that appeal to the spirit and where the sensible and the invisible meet. The form attracts the Western mind, but the Indian mind perceives form as a creation of the spirit. The Indian mind goes to the inner spirit of reality. When one is capable of long and deep meditation, one can see a great oriental work of art in solitude. Indian architecture also demands this kind of inner study. A rational and secular aesthetic mind ignoring the spiritual suggestion and the meaning of the symbols fails miserably in appreciating Indian art. An Indian temple to whatever godhead is in its inmost reality an altar raised to the divine Self, a house of the Cosmic Spirit, an appeal and aspiration to the Infinite. To gain a true understanding, we must view everything through that perspective.
Architecture and Temples
Archer talks about the massive, yet “monstrous,” construction of South Temples but misses their unity, clarity, and nobility. He views the northern buildings with less disfavour, while he exempts the Mahomedan architecture (Indo-Saracenic) from condemnation. In reality, such criticisms miss the principle of unity. Indian sacred architecture constantly represents the infinite in the immensity and its crowding abundance of significant detail.
Western criticisms of Indian art and architecture should not trouble Indian minds. The two apparently different-looking temples at Kalahasti and Sinhachalam show how the immense multiplicity of the base, ascending and ending at a single sign, represents the profound spiritual significance of Indian architecture and sculpture. These great builders saw a tremendous unity. It is impossible to appreciate Indian architecture without understanding its entirety. The architectural language of the North is of a different kind; there is another basic style, but here too, the same spiritual, meditative, intuitive method has to be used to get the same results.
To condemn and object that the crowding detail “allows no calm” has no validity for the Indian experience. The “monstrous effect of terror and gloom” in these mighty buildings is astonishing to an Indian mind because terror and gloom are conspicuously absent from the feelings aroused in it by its religion, art, and literature. People often mistake Shiva’s dance for the dance of Death or the “terrible” form of Kali. In reality, it shows the rapture of the cosmic dance with the depths of unmoved infinite bliss or the destruction of evil forces. Regarding monstrous forms, the Indian aesthetic mind deals not only with the earth but with psychic planes in which these things exist.
Regarding Indo-Moslem architecture, the Indian mind might have taken from Arab-Persian imagination, but still, on the whole, it is a typically Indian creation. Archer is impressed by its rational beauty, refinement, and grace, refreshing after the monstrous riot of Hindu yogic hallucination. However, even the Taj is not a sensuous reminiscence of a fairy enchantment but the eternal dream of a love that survives death. The all-pervading spiritual obsession is not there, but other elements of life typical of Indian culture stay intact.
Sculpture
Sri Aurobindo writes:
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… 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….
The appreciation of our own artistic past has to be free from a foreign outlook. Two millennia of accomplished sculptural creation is a significant fact in Indian culture. The ancient sculptural art of India embodied the thought of the Upanishads and the life of the Mahabharata. It created and expressed not the ideal physical and emotional beauty but the utmost spiritual beauty the human form is capable of. The statue of a king or a saint is not meant merely to portray some dramatic action of a character but to embody rather a soul-state.
The profound intelligence, skill, and beauty of its masterpieces—the great Buddhas, south Indian bronzes, the Kalasamhara image, and the Natarajas—are impossible to deny. The figure of the Buddha achieves the expression of the infinite in a finite image. The Kalasamhara Shiva is supreme not only by the majesty and power but by the meaning poured through the whole unity of this creation. Similarly, the cosmic movement, the rapturous intensity, and the delight of the dance of Shiva attest to the art that, understood in its own spirit, is incomparable. Still, to Archer, the whole thing appears barbaric, meaningless, strange, and the work of a distorted imagination. Each manner of art has its own ideals, traditions, and agreed conventions. In its own way, Indian sculpture is a singularly powerful interpretation in stone and bronze of the inner soul of the people.
Painting
The art of painting in ancient and later India, due to its scantiness, does not create quite so great an impression as her architecture and sculpture. But a closer view reveals a persistent tradition linking even the latest Rajput art to the earliest surviving work in Ajanta. The one important thing that emerges is the continuity of all Indian art in its essential spirit and tradition. 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 art, the sadanga, are common to all works in line and colour: the distinction of forms, rupabheda; proportion, pramana; aesthetic feeling, bhava; beauty for the satisfaction of the spirit, lavanya; truth of the form, sadrsya; and the harmony of colours, varnika-bhanga. It is the turn given to each of the constituents that makes all the difference. The first primitive object of painting is to illustrate life and nature; the second is the intuitive revelation of existence. The latter is the starting point of the Indian motive. We faithfully observe the distinction of forms in depicting humans, animals, buildings, trees, and objects, but not with a strict naturalistic fidelity. The colours and forms used are a means for spiritual and psychic intuition.
The classical art of India is characterised by its simplicity, reserve, and concentration. Such art is a revealing interpretation of the spiritual sense and its profounder meaning. Ignoring the spiritual intention is serious misinterpretation. The excellence of the decorative arts and crafts of India has been indisputable.
Sri Aurobindo writes:
Indian culture in this respect need not fear any comparison. Its civilisation, standing in the first rank in the three great arts as in all things of the mind, has proved that the spiritual urge is not, as has been vainly supposed, sterilising to the other activities, but a most powerful force for the many-sided development of the human whole.
INDIAN LITERATURE
The Veda and the Upanishads
Indian literature in Sanskrit, Pali, Sanskrit-derived, and Dravidian languages makes for the rich, many-sided expression of Indian culture. The civilisation becomes the world’s most creative and developed. The classical creations in Sanskrit—a magnificent literary instrument—stand first among the world’s literature.
The early mind of India is represented by four of the supreme and unparalleled productions of her genius: the Veda, the Upanishads, and the two vast epics (Mahabharata and Ramayana). The Veda represents an early intuitive and symbolical mentality that the later human mind has become completely unfamiliar with. The later scholastic idea made it nothing better than a book of mythology and sacrificial ceremonies. European scholars, yet worse, stripped it of its spiritual interest, poetic greatness, and beauty in an exclusive external reading. To the Rishis, the Veda was the word for discovering the truth—not the word of logical reasoning or aesthetic intelligence, but the intuitive and inspired rhythmic utterance, the mantra. The Rishis were not medicine men and makers of incantations to a robust and barbaric tribe but were seers and thinkers.
The life of man was to these seers a thing of mixed truth and falsehood, a movement from mortality to immortality, from mixed light and darkness to the splendour of a divine Truth whose home is in the Infinite. Life was both a journey and a sacrifice, and they spoke in a fixed system of images taken from nature and surrounding life. The cult of fire and the powers of living nature held a central place. The greatest seers achieve extraordinary heights, and the ancient Indian mind accurately traced all its philosophy, religion, and essential elements of culture back to these seer-poets of the Vedas.
The Upanishads, literary and poetical masterpieces, are the supreme work of the Indian mind, after the Veda. They are a source of unfailing inspiration and a direct spiritual revelation. Foreign translators engage with the intellectual sense of the Upanishads, often overlooking the philosophy or the ecstasy of spiritual experience. There is hardly a main philosophical idea, west or east, that cannot find an authority, a seed, or an indication in the Upanishads. Even the larger generalisations of modern science have their echoes in the Indian sages’ utterances of the deeper truth of the spirit.
The Upanishads, or Vedanta, were no mere philosophy without any vitality applicable to life. Even when the Vedic cult receded to the background, the creative Upanishads generated the numerous devotional religions and the persistent Indian idea of dharma. The Upanishads are full of revealing power and suggestive thought that discover a whole infinite through a finite image. The Upanishads, with their luminous brevity and immeasurable completeness, are a unique form of poetry.
The intuitive thoughts of the Upanishads start with the concrete imagery and symbols of the Vedic Rishis. It opens to sublime prose and poetry, revealing the spiritual truth in all its splendour. At the end emerges knowledge to which modern thought is returning through its own different method. At once poetry and spirituality, the Veda-Upanishads show how the soul of India was born and how it strives to soar from its earth into the supreme empire of the spirit.
Along with the creation of great philosophical systems, the Veda-Upanishidic movement also brought about the creation of moral, social, and political ideals that people and groups could use to guide their lives. The latter were the authoritative social treatises (Shastras), of which the greatest and most authoritative are the famous Laws of Manu. The philosophies gave intellectual reasoning to the truths already discovered by intuition, revelation, and spiritual experience and embodied in the Veda and the Upanishads.
The Itihasas
The Mahabharata and Ramayana are Itihasas with a massive purpose. The poets told an ancient tale in a beautiful manner with a sense of their function as architects of the national thought, religion, ethics, and culture. These poems weave philosophical ideas, embodying the entire ancient culture of India. The Mahabharata has been spoken of as a fifth Veda; it has been said of both these poems that they are not only significant poems but also Dharmashastras, the body of a large religious, ethical, social, and political teaching.
The significant personalities of the epics became abiding national memories and represented all that was best in the social, ethical, political, and religious culture of India. Valmiki, in the characters of Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Bharata, and Lakshmana, fashioned much of what is best and sweetest in the national character. They have become divine characters worthy of worship.
The characteristic diction of the Mahabharata is almost austerely masculine, trusting to the force of sense and inspired accuracy of turn; it is almost ascetic in its simplicity and directness. The Ramayana’s diction takes on a more attractive shape, a marvel of sweetness and strength, lucidity, warmth, and grace. Both poems embody a high poetic soul and inspired intelligence. The directly intuitive mind of the Veda and Upanishads retreats behind the veil of intellectual and outwardly psychical imagination.
The vastness of the plan and the leisurely minuteness of detail are baffling to a western mind accustomed to smaller limits with a more easily fatigued eye and a hastier pace of life. However, the Indian mind has grown accustomed to this expansiveness of vision. Another difference lies in the great powers and forces, Daivic, Asuric, and Rakshasic, that surround and influence terrestrial life and human action. The greater human figures are a kind of incarnation of these more cosmic personalities and powers.
The characters are intensely real, human, and alive to the Indian mind. Only the main emphasis here, as in Indian art, is not on the outward character but on the inner soul quality. The idealism of characters like Rama and Sita is no pale and vapid unreality; they are vivid with the truth of the ideal life, of the greatness that man may become when he gives his soul a chance.
These epics are therefore not a mere mass of untransmuted legend and folklore, as is ignorantly objected, but a highly artistic representation of intimate significances of life, the living presentment of strong and noble thinking, a developed ethical and aesthetic mind, and a high social and political ideal—the ensouled image of a great culture. More profound and rich than Greek or Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems serve a greater national and cultural function. Their reception by both the high and the low and their continued presence in national life for twenty centuries is the strongest evidence of this ancient Indian culture’s greatness and beauty.
The Classical Age
The classical age covers a period of some ten centuries or more. Finally, Sanskrit becomes the language of the Pandits and no longer a first-hand expression of the people. This change reflects the replacement of the spontaneous unity of the intuitive mind with the artificial unity of analysing and synthetic intelligence. In the representative poet of the age, Kalidasa, poetic speech reaches an extraordinary perfection. Kalidasa’s seven extant poems, each a masterpiece, are brilliant depictions of the life, mind, and the whole culture of the rich, beautiful, ordered life of India of his age. The rest of the poetry of the times is of the same type, though not of the same perfection. The literary epics of Bharavi and Magha reveal the beginning of decline. Gradually, the deeper soul disappears, and an overdeveloped intellectualism sets the stage for decadence.
The predominantly intellectual turn appears in abundance in the subhāṣita of Bhartrihari, a work of genius. His three centuries, or satakas, express, respectively, his high ethical thought, erotic passion, and ascetic weariness, which reveal the three leading motives of the age.
The drama, mostly romantic plays representing the images and settled paces of the cultured life, however, is the most attractive, though not the greatest, product of the age. There is a myth that India was lost in religious and philosophical dreams, but the Jatakas, the Kathasaritsagara, the Panchatantra, the Hitopadesa, animal fables, and literature of worldly wisdom, policy, and statecraft show that India was not so.
The Puranas and Tantras
The dominant note in the Indian mind has been spiritual, intuitive, and psychic, but not excluding a strong intellectual, practical, and vital activity. The philosophic writings and the religious poetry of the Puranas and Tantras completed the diffusion of ideas. There is no essential change from the Vedic ethos, but only a change of forms. Instead of being a degradation of the Vedic religion, they may be looked upon as an extension and advance.
The Tantras embody an immense and complex body of psycho-spiritual experience, supported by visual images, and systematised in yogic practices. The Tantras extend the Vedic method, which, like its geography and symbolism, is prone to misinterpretation. Its danger and disadvantage are inherent but should not blind us to the enormous effect produced in training the mass mind to respond to a psycho-religious and psycho-spiritual appeal that prepared it for a higher capacity. The remarkable religious poetry in all the eighteen Puranas has had profound effects on Indian culture. The Bhagavata holds the highest value in the future emotional and ecstatic religion of Bhakti. The perfect outcome is associated with Chaitanya.
Sanskrit literature still continues, but the regional languages in different provinces create a more popular literature, beginning with the inspired poetry of the saints and devotees. Vidyapati, Ramprasad, and Chandidas in Bengal; Mirabai in Rajasthan; Andal in the South; Tukaram and Ramdas in the Maratha regions; and Kabir exemplify this devotion to either Krishna or other forms of Vishnu. The Shaiva poets of the south, Surdas, Nanak, and the Sikh Gurus in the north were equally important and extensive. The epics were also adapted in vernacular renditions in many languages. These and other popular writings, entering deeply into the life of the people, are clear evidence of a remarkable culture.
…Continued in the Part 3
Feature Image Credit: istockphoto.com
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author. Indic Today is neither responsible nor liable for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in the article.
