Dr
COOMARASWAMY AS AN INTERPRETER
OF RAJPUT PAINTING
A.
RANGANATHAN
Sixty-one
years ago, Dr Ananda K. qoomaraswamy awoke one morning in London to find that
his publication entitled Rajput Painting...an
account of the Hindu paintings of Rajasthan and the Punnjab Himalayas from the
sixteenth to the nineteenth century described in their relation to contemporary
thought was an immediate success. Indeed, it became and has remained, an
authentic classic of Indian art history.
Although
Coomaraswamy was a versatile and prolific writer, his interpretative work on Rajput Painting, is his most significant
contribution to Indian art history. True, long before Commaraswamy published
his original essay on Rajput Painting in
the Burlington Magazine in
1912, certain art critics had already written on some aspects of Rajput art–a
contribution to architecture by J. Ferguson, an occasional piece on painting by
Hendley and essays on the decorative arts by Sir George Birdwood and Percy
Brown. However, these art critics mistook surface qualities and expressions for
fundamentals and universals. Naturally their inability to comprehend the
attitude and level of vision attained by the Rajput artists accounted for
shallow understanding. And in the process of identifying Rajput painting with a
tradition different that of the Mughals, Coomaraswamy discovered the actual
headwaters of the stream of Rajput art.
Coomarswamy’s
Rajput Painting is the work of a
pioneer, which reveals a new world of romance and mysticism, heroism and chivalry.
Not surprisingly, it inspired several informative publications by O. C.
Ganguly, N. C. Mehta, L. Binyon, H. Goetz, W. G. Archer, Eric Dickinson, Karl
Khandalawala, M. S. Randhawa, B. N. Goswamy and several others. for instance,
the importance of Archer’s work is derived from his accent on the styles and
centres of Pahari painting. Equally important is the publication of Eric
Dickinson and Karl Khandalawala which highlights the romantic lyricism of the
Kishengarh school. Similarly Randhawa’s focus is on the brilliancy of colours
which constitutes the peculiar appeal of the Basohli painting.
It
is easy to be unfair to a pioneer like Coomaraswamy. It is easier to stir up
the old controversies about “styles” and “bias.” Yet. interestingly,
Coomaraswamy’s Rajput Painting has
not become outdated amid the flood of “new material” pertaining to the
Rajasthani, Basohli, Kangra and related styles, that appeared over the decades.
The fact that Mughal influences have played an important part in the evolution
of the Rajasthani style is hardly relevant in an assessment of Coomaraswamy’s
contribution to the study of Rajput painting. Indeed Coomaraswamy had other
fish to fry. For he was basically concerned with the study of Rajput painting
as a part of the mediaeval background of the history of ideas.
Coomaraswamy
had that rarest of scholarly gifts, a mind which was at once sensitive and
inter-disciplinary. His contributions to the study of Rajput painting over the
years–the original work on Rajput
Painting, Part V of the Catalogue of
the Indian Collections in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which is devoted
to Rajput painting and the section dealing with Rajput painting in the History of Indian and Indonesian Art–reflect a wide spectrum of moods and
insights. Here is an evocation of Cowdust
which translates Krishna from the merely mortal realm of time and place
into an immutable product of the Vaishnava imagination. “In the Museum of Fine
Arts Collections,” wrote Coomaraswamy, “there is no more lovely painting of the
Kangra school than the well-known Cowdust
where Krishna is seen returning with the herds and herdsmen to Brindavan at
sunset...He is an Orphic power whose music charms and beguiles all nature,
animate and inanimate alike, and the very rivers stay the courses to hear it…In
innumerable paintings we find varied combinations of the theme.” Again
Coomaraswamy’s exposition of the Hindi
Ragamala Texts reveals a new aesthetic insight into the nature of Rajput
aesthetcs. He defines the Ragamala as “profoundly imagined pictures of human
passion.” In these Ragamala paintings, with interweaving of mood and
suggestion, as colours and design in a piece of embroidery, we have an
authentic fragment of fine art. For example, the aim and method of the Bundi
painting Madhu Madhari are expressed
in Coomaraswamy’s translation of a Ragamala text. To cite another example, the
Bundi painting depicting the lovers’ dalliance can be visualized in the Raga
Malkaus.
At
least three aesthetic reasons exist for calling the book a classic. First,
there is a vernal freshness here which forecasts its more sensitive use in
Coomaraswamy’s next book, History of
Indian and Indonesian Art as the following aesthetic response suggests:
“What Chinese art achieved for landscape, is here accomplished for human love.
Here, if never and nowhere else in the world, the Western Gates are opened
wide. The arms of lovers are about each other’s necks, eye meets eye, the
whispering Sakhis speak of nothing else but the course of Krishna’s courtship,
the very animals are spell-bound by the sound of Krishna’s flute and the
elements stand still to hear Ragas and the Raginis. This art is only concerned
with the realities of life, above all, with passionate love-service, conceived
as the means and symbol of all Union. If Rajput art at first sight appears to
lack the material charm of Persian pastorals, or the significance of Mughal
portraiture, it more than compensates in tenderness and depth of feeling, in
gravity and reverence.
Second,
Coomaraswamy traces, with a revealing sensitivity as of a painter, the
shimmeringly exquisite colour scheme in sky and valley, shrub and dewdrop and
to his seeing eye the aesthetic inspiration of the Rajput paintings has its
radiating point in Vaishnava mysticism. Here it is well to recall that
Wordsworth wrote of that “inward eye which is the bliss of solitude” while
reflecting upon the Ullswater daffodils. To see into the life of things is to
enable the seeing eye to perceive an entire spectrum of beauty. Again just as
Shelley perceived a ray of what he termed as “a light of laughing flowers”, so
is Coomaraswamy’s book on Rajput Painting
full of a passionate conviction that “the sound of Krishna’s flute is the
voice of Eternity heard by the dwellers in Time.” Furthermore, it would be a mistake
to dissociate Coomaraswamy’s interpretation from his historical method general,
for it is the way in which he transcends the limitations of men’s existence in
an attempt to understand the aesthetic significance of Vaishnava mysticism,
that his greatness as an interpreter of Rajput Paintings lies. Above all, Coomaraswamy is aware
of thee haunting presence of Krishna that moves behind the thought and feeling
of the Rajput painters, and communicates this aesthetic awareness in sensitive
prose: “In Rajput art it is not through landscape or through animal painting
that the highest universality is reached. There is no such philosophic
interpretation of Nature, as we recognize in Chinese interpretations of mist
and mountain, dragon and tiger. The universalism of Vaishnava art is attained
in another way; its philosophic language is that of human love; its pair of
opposites–Mist and Mountain, Yin and Yang, Being and Becoming, Rest and Energy,
Spirit and Matter–are typified by Man and Woman...in this convention of its
own, so different from and complementary to that of Chinese art, the Vaishnava
art of Hindusthan is none the less the Indian equivalent of Ch’an or Zen
Buddhistic culture of the Far East. Each in its own way achieves the union of
Nirvana or Samsara, renunciation and pleasure, religion with the world, Man
with Nature.”
This
leads to the last point. It speaks of the universality of Coomaraswamy’s genius
that he, the historian of Rajput Painting should look beyond the
frontiers of Indian culture. His enchanting descriptions of Rajput paintings,
which are expressed in meticulously chosen flicks of words, remind one of
Watteau and possibly Blake. Again his translations bring out the similarities
between the Rajput lyric poets and the troubadours. Similarly the Rajput
mystics have as their comrades St. John of the Cross, Francis Thompson, Rainer
Maria Rilke and others who constitute the Christian hierarchy of immortal song.
Thus, in the pages of Coomaraswamy’s Rajput Painting, one looks beyond India and across Europe, to that
timeless Holy Land of aesthetic experience which is memorably re-created in the
following paragraph: “The typical examples of Rajput painting, like every other
expression of mystical intuition, have for us this lesson, that what we cannot
discover at home and in familiar events, we cannot discover anywhere. The Holy
Land is the land of our own experience. All is in all: and if beauty is not
apparent to us in the well-known, we shall not find it in things that are
strange and far away.”
All
in all, Coomaraswamy’s book on Rajput
Painting must be placed among the major works of Indian art history and
criticism.