The Foundations of Indian Culture And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo | POST 16

The Foundations of Indian Culture

And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo

POST 16

Indian Art - II

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Summary

Architecture, sculpture and painting, because they are the great arts which appeal to the spirit through the eye, are those too in which the sensible and the invisible meet with the strongest emphasis on themselves and yet the greatest necessity of each other. But the art of the East and of the West deal with the problem of these two interlocking powers in a quite different way. The western mind is arrested and attracted by the form, it might almost be said that for this mind form creates the spirit; while for the Indian mind form does not exist except as a creation of the spirit and draws all its meaning and value from the spirit.

This characteristic attitude of the Indian mind forces us at once to get beyond to the inner spirit of the reality it expresses and see from it and not from outside. The orthodox style of western criticism applied to Indian art leaves it barren or poor of significance. A great oriental work of art has to be seen in loneliness, in the solitude of one’s self, in moments when one is capable of long and deep meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material life, in a treasured secrecy when the soul is at leisure from life.

Indian architecture especially demands this kind of inner study. The secular buildings of ancient India have not outlived the ravage of time, it is the most hieratic side of a hieratic art that remains to us. Ignore the spiritual suggestion, the religious significance, the meaning of the symbols and indications, look only with the rational and secular aesthetic mind, and it is vain to expect that we shall get to any true and discerning appreciation of this art.

An Indian temple, to whatever godhead it may be built, 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. Everything else must be seen in that setting and that light, and then only can there be any real understanding.

The great temples of the South are, Mr. Archer allows, marvels of massive construction, but of unity, clarity, nobility there is no trace, a somewhat contradictory statement. The whole thing he characterises as a monstrosity built by Rakshasas, ogres, demons, a gigantesque barbarism. The northern buildings find a little less disfavour in his eyes. Alone the Mahomedan architecture, called Indo-Sarasenic, is exempted from this otherwise universal condemnation.

In reality these downright assailants have missed the principle of unity because they came with alien conceptions and looked at things from the wrong end. But really it is the more sympathetic and less violent critic who deserves a direct answer, since the Greek or Gothic unity with which alone it is familiar is not to be had there. Indian sacred architecture constantly represents the infinite in the immensity and all its crowding abundance of significant ornament and detail and its return towards oneness are only intelligible as necessary circumstances of this poem, this epic or this lyric of the Infinite. The western mentality may, understandably, find it difficult to appreciate the truth and meaning of such an art, but I would invite those Indian minds who are troubled by these criticisms and partly or temporarily overpowered by the western way of seeing things, to look at our architecture in the light of this conception and see whether all but minor objections do not vanish. I have before me two prints, a temple at Kalahasti, a temple at Sinhachalam, two buildings entirely different in treatment and yet one in the ground and the universal motive. There is in both a constant, subtle yet pronounced lessening from the base towards the top, but at every stage a repetition of the same form, but one maintains its multiple endeavour and indication to the last, the other ends in a single sign. Reinterpret what this representation means in terms of our own spiritual existence and cosmic being, and we have what these great builders saw in themselves and reared in stone. Not absence of unity, but a tremendous unity is revealed. To appreciate the detail of Indian architecture is easy when the whole is thus seen and known; otherwise, it is impossible.

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 and we get at the same result, an aesthetic interpretation or suggestion of the one spiritual experience, one in all its complexity and diversity, which founds the unity of the infinite variations of Indian spirituality and religious feeling and the realised union of the human self with the Divine.

To condemn the abundance as barbarous is to apply a forego standard. The objection that the crowding detail allows no calm, gives no relief falls under the same heading and has no validity for the Indian experience. The precise spiritual effect intended could not be given otherwise.

I need not deal with adverse strictures of a more insignificant kind, which stem from the refusal to admit the beauty of unaccustomed forms. But it is surprising that even a sympathetic mind like Professor Geddes should be impressed by a monstrous effect of terror and gloom in these mighty buildings. Such expressions are astonishing to an Indian mind because terror and gloom are conspicuously absent from the feelings aroused in it by its religion, art and literature. Mark the curious misreading of the dance of Shiva as a dance of Death or Destruction, whereas it expresses on the contrary the rapture of the cosmic dance with the profundities behind of the unmoved eternal and infinite bliss. So too the figure of Kali which is so terrible to European eyes is the Mother of the universe accepting this fierce aspect of destruction in order to slay the Asuras, the powers of evil in man and the world. As for the strangeness and formidable aspect of certain figures, the Indian aesthetic mind deals not only with the earth but with psychic planes in which these things exist and ranges freely among them without being overpowered.

I have dwelt on Hindu and especially on Dravidian architecture. But a word too may be said about Indo-Moslem architecture. Without being concerned about origins, it seems the Indian mind has taken much from Arab and Persian imagination but still on the whole it is a typically Indian creation. But what is it that the European mind so admires about it? Mr. Archer tells us it is its rational beauty, refinement and grace, so refreshing after the monstrous riot of Hindu yogic hallucination and nightmare. Is it only the charm of an outward material luxury and magnificence? But this is not at all true of the characteristic greater work. The Taj is not merely a sensuous reminiscence of an imperial amour or a fairy enchantment, but the eternal dream of a love that survives death. The great mosques embody often a religious aspiration lifted to a noble austerity, while the tombs reach beyond death to the beauty and joy of Paradise. The all-pervading spiritual obsession is not there, but other elements of life not ignored by Indian culture and gaining on it since the classical times are here brought out under a new influence and are still penetrated with some radiant glow of a superior lustre.

by -Unknown

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