Son
of a Hindu father, Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy
of
“The
recompense a son can pay his father
Is
for the world to say,
What
penance his father might have done
To beget a son one like him.”
(The Tirukkural, 70)
Ananda’s father, Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy was a popular
figure in the court circles of Queen Victoria, who conferred on him the honour of Knighthood on the 6th August, 1874. Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, in his last novel,
portrays a Buddhist missionary, Kusinara, bearing in
mind Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy.
Sir P. Arunachalam, a nephew of Sir Muthu, wrote to the London Times in 1905 and again
in 1920 that “Sir Kumara Swami of Ceylon was well-known to Lord Beaconsfield (Disraeli) and was a Buddhist scholar of repute in his day
and a devotee of Buddha’s philosophy”.1 Sir Muthu
Coomaraswamy passed away on Sunday, the 4th May,
1879, the day he was expected to sail for England from Ceylon to join his wife
and infant son. Ananda Coomaraswamy
was brought up by his mother in
An
outstanding scholar not of one but several centuries with an output in quality
and quantity amazingly inspiring, Ananda Coomaraswamy started his life as the Director of
Mineralogical Survey in Ceylon, where he could not continue for long as a mute witness
to its art treasures being written off. His Medieval Sinhalese
Art (1908) came as morale booster to a people sagging in their enthusiasm
for their own art and culture and imitating the west. He is known the world
over as the author of the essay, Dance of Siva. It became a world
classic and was the guidelight for hundreds of
scholars to take to the study of the Lord of Dance and works big and small on
the subject began to appear. The world of research must be grateful to Coomaraswamy for paving a highway for them, but it must be
said that none else could reach the Himalayan peak at which Coomaraswamy’s
essay stands. Study of the philosophy of Saiva Siddhanta got a fillip thanks to the Dance of Siva, which
opened the eyes of many and enabled them to understand the symbolism enshrined
in the form of Nataraja. During his stay in
Ananda Coomaraswamy’s
intellectual pursuit was born out of an awakening in him to discover and not to
create. His familiarity with Greek and Latin endowed him with the advantage of
making a comparative study of oriental and occidental literatures. As early as
1915, Duggirala Gopalakrishnaya
in collaboration with whom he translated the Abhinaya
Darpana of Nandikeswara
under the title ‘The Mirror of Gesture’ found that in Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy the idealism
of the East and the practicalism of the West are harmoniously blended”. 5 In this, he was in
great company with Swami Vivekananda, poet Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. Partly because of
up bringing in the West and partly because of his parentage–British on his
mother’s side and Ceylonese Tamil on his father’s side–Ananda
Coomaraswamy had perhaps a natural advantage in
interpreting the East to the West and vice versa. The essay, ‘The
Common Wisdom of the World’ bears eloquent testimony to his erudition and sense
of universalism. The essay begins thus:
“When
God is our teacher, men are all agreed.” “It is wise to listen, not to me, but
to the word that ever Is and to
agree that all things are One. The WORD is common to all”. So
said Xenophon and Heracleitus,
most truly.
“I
have often argued that the WORD that has been handed down in the Western
tradition from the pre-Socratic to the present day, and the WORD to the hearing
of which we in India refer by the name of Sruti,
“audition”, corresponding to what in the West is called “Scripture”, are one
and the same. During many years I have collected from Eastern and Western
sources parallel passages in which identical doctrines have been enunciated as
nearly as possible in the same term and often, indeed, in the same idioms and
making use of etymologically equivalent words; not at all with a view to the
demonstration of any literary “influences”, but only in order to show that the
doctrines themselves are cognate in the same sense that the etymons, e. g., of
Greek and Sanskrit, are cognate, that is to say, of common origin.”
Ananda Coomaraswamy
thereafter cites a few representative examples of these collations, one of
which is reproduced below:
Motion-at-will
The
deceased becomes an ‘Osiris justified’ ... this Osiris “can go wherever he pleases...(having
power over) all the mysteries of the divine forms...he might wish to assume”
(A. Moret, The
Ananda Coomaraswamy
concluded: “Any extended list of such dharma paryaayaas
would fill a book”. 6
Before
joining the
Every
minute of his time, Coomaraswamy was re-discovering
ancient India and interpreting the same to people of his generation and
posterity. When his fourteen essays under the title, ‘The Dance of Siva’
appeared in 1917, some of the eyebrows in the West were raised as if there was
an element of exaggeration. Coomaraswamy was an
objective writer and it did not take long for him to stand his ground. His
weighty writings focused the Orient, in particular India, against a universal
setting as the common heritage of Man. Any theme at the hand of
Coomaraswamy acquires a magic mould and is
metamorphosed into solid unalloyed gold-maarrariyaata
celum pacum pon, to borrow a phrase from the Tamil hymnist and
saint Manikkavacakar. In his essay, “Understanding
and Reunion–An Oriental Perspective,” Coomaraswamy
writes in his inimitable style: “As the late Dr Heinrich Zimmer remarked in his
admirable introduction to La Meri’s ‘The Gesture
Language of the Indian Dance’, ‘the Indian dance reflects the dance of the
universe, whose transient gestures we all of us are...Its function is to be an encyclopaedic initiation into the manifold mystery of
life.’ The history of Indian dancing can be traced through three millennium and
that of treatises on the subject through two. In the oldest books we find a God
(Indra) described as ‘dancing his heroic deeds’ and
as ‘performing a metrical composition’ and that it is a dance of the gods that
sets in motion the cosmic process. We find that the ritual of the sacrifice,
which is an ‘initiation’ of what was done by the gods in the beginning, includes
the dance in various forms; and that there are many gestures which are common
to the iconography of the deities... These gestures are related to those that
are familiar in everyday life. It is indeed impossible to detach a traditional
art from its environment and to consider it simply as an art form. Art is a
part of life and life itself an art”. 8
Dance
is Siva-lila–play of Siva. Dancing, He
creates, protects, destroys, gives respite to souls and bestows grace on them.
The dancing Lord the hymnists sang of, the artists moulded
into bronzes. The Cholas, though not remembered for
transplanting Indian culture in East Asia, will certainly be remembered for
their Nataraja bronzes being worshipped in temples
today and adorning the museums all over the globe. The Lord’s dance Coomaraswamy depicted in a short essay got him fame
sky-high. Not only in the essay in question, but elsewhere too Coomaraswamy thinks aloud of the Lord who dances not only
in ether, but also in the heart of the devotee. In the essay alluded to in the
preceding paragraph, Coomaraswamy writes: “One of the
most familiar forms of Indian art in our museums is that of Siva as Natataja, Lord of the Dance, whose creative and
destructive, fettering and liberating operation is conceived in terms of thesis
and anti-thesis of a dance, of which the incessance
is the manifestation of his sustaining power. From this cosmic dance all other
activities operations and dances are so to speak, experts to the extent of its perfection,
every performance ‘participates’ in the divine operation, the
principles of dancing are not of human invention, but have been revealed, and
have been transmitted from generation to generation in pupillary
succession. The standard of excellence is not one of pleasure that may be felt
by a given audience, but one of correctness, just as for Plato, the
irregularity of human motions is to be corrected by an assimilation to cosmic
rhythm. An educated audience is pre-supposed, one that will be pleased by
whatever is correct in the performance, and displeased conversely. It is in the
same way that the mathematician judges of the beauty of an equation”.9
Whatever
be one’s station in life or avocation, the great make their mark. The Dance of
Siva, Rajput Paintings, Origin of the Buddha Image,
Symbolism in Indian Sculptures–these readily flash across one’s mind, with the
very mention of Ananda Coomaraswamy’s
name. But he is something more. He made the faint echo of the dim but glorious
past of ancient India reverberate in our hearts in his powerful voice and
carried the West with him to meet the East in all its grandeur. From the
scriptures of the East and the West, he gave identical sayings and led Man to
tread nobler path in life.
1 S.
Durai Raja Singam: The Life
and Writings of Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy.
2
Homage to Ananda Coomaraswamy
(A memorial volume edited by S. Durai Raja Singam, Kuanton, Malaya. 1947)
3 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: The Dance of Siva (1917)
4 Contemporary
Indian Philosophy. Edited by S. Radhakrishnan
& J. H. Muirhead. 1936.
cf.
(i) Kaaraikkaal Ammaiyaar sings: (Eleventh Tirumurai
Arputa-t-tiruvantaati–IV-33)
“Whosoever they be,
professing whatever they do,
Howsoever they put on
a garb and project an image,
The Lord manifests
Himself in the same shape and form to them.”
and (ii) Tirumurukaarru-p-padai (lines 247-248):
“The
while votaries worship
That
their hearts’ desires may be fulfilled,
Here
also doth He dwell.”
5 G.
V. Subba Rao: Sree Gopalakrishnayya. 1935.
6
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: The
Common Wisdom of the World.
7 Homage
to Ananda Coomaraswamy,
Vol. II (A Memorial Volume edited by S. Durai Raja Singam) Kuanton, Malaya. 1947.
8
Ananda Coomaraswamy: Understanding
and Reunion –An Oriental
9
Ibid.