INTER-RELATIONSHIP
OF LITERATURE
AND
FINE ARTS *
DR.
PRABHAKAR MACHWE
As
a student of art-history and literary criticism, I should start with the
problem of interchangeability of critical terms. When we use terms freely like
a ‘baroque’ novel or the ‘timbre’ of a poem, or the ‘architectonics’ of a play,
and the Rasa in music, or the Dhwani in dance, what are we trying
to suggest? As all fine arts employ different media–very different from
words–are we only trying to catch what is ephemeral, or push the frontiers of
language, or attempt to give a sound-sight picture to a deaf and blind? All
senses and sensibility are constantly seeking some balance in imbalance. What
was called the quest for beauty and the discovery of bliss in classical poetics
in the East and the West is no more mere ‘imitation of nature’ or ‘the best
words in the best order’. The Brahman created world as play (Leela) and
was a spectator and an outsider (Sakshin). A stroke of brush or a
plucking of strings or a careful chiselling may achieve a world of its own
which is beyond words. Art is the universal language, in this particular sense.
Kant’s
categories might have been no barrier for pure aesthetic experience. But in
India, as the tradition goes, Kreeda te Lokarachana, that is, ‘the play
is not a thing in itself’, but is recreating a world, ‘shaping and reshaping a
world of its own’ as Goethe would have called it. This alchemy of Abhisambhava
meets with the first barrier of universality. Anthropology may have some explanation
for why Picasso went to Negro art and Jamini Roy derived his inspiration from
Bengali folk-art scrolls; on the one hand, art claims that it has no nation or
regional bounds, on the other, every artist is deeply rooted in his Samskaras
or traditional archetypes.
If
the material delimits the artist’s way of expression, for example, some suggest
that the musical instruments in different regions are based on the general
capacity to absorb the pitched sound in a particular group of people, is it
right to follow Bharata and say that some people from a particular region are
best suited for certain roles? Are all those old geographical or natural gifts
or handicaps to be recognised even today? With plaster and cement, with
linoleum and plastic material, the visual arts are fast moving in a more or
less universal world–but in music we have yet to go a long way to enter the age
of electronic music. Abstract sculpture and action painting is possible in
India, but we have not undertaken similar bold experiments in modern dance and
other media. In poetry, free verse and many technical virtuosities are
practised, but we don’t see that in the field of art, other than visual, there
is such large-scale experimentation. One Kumara Gandharva may invent a new Raga,
or some ballet may be based on modern themes by Udai
Shankar, but one can safely generalise that music and dance are still
conservative. There was some attempt to borrow from the folk-forms, but it was
rapidly commercialised or vulgarised.
As
the sociologists call it, in India, there is the conflict between
Sanskritisation and Westernisation. Raja Ravi Varma resolved that conflict by
dressing a Botticelli’s Venus with a red sari and calling it Lakshmi; but
neither Abanindranath Tagore’s attempt to combine Ajanta and Japanese styles
nor Amrita Shergil’s painting the Punjabi villagers in a Gauguin idiom solved
the problem. The more modern painters in India have definitely two periods; the
Indian and the western or modernist-abstract: Biren Dey before visiting U. S.
A. and after; or Kishen Khanna before visiting Japan and after. After all, it
is the artist’s own choice: whether a poet writes a Rubai or a Hiaku,
or a musician prefers to sing a Dhrupad or Thumri, no one is
going to dictate to him. Tagore tried to combine Indian musical melody with
western harmony and in this attempt the later expressionist Tagore the painter
broke his own crucible of the earlier pantheistic-romantic Tagore the poet.
Some
people talk of time and timelessness. I am not sure when we talk of the Indian
concept of Time, what we exactly mean by it–The Vedic Sun-God, or the Saivite
Mahakala, or the Jain or Buddhist or Tantric phenomenology? One thing is
certain: Nobody wrote the biography of Kalidasa, nor did the artists in Ajanta
or Ellora, Halebied or Mahabalipuram inscribe their names in stones or on
walls. We here, in India, prized the end-product art more than the individual
artist who created it. Like Brahman, the creator remained behind the show and
yet was the supreme puppeteer. He was the creator and the creation combined,
Shiva and Sakti together. Hence the artist’s vision of Death in India and in
the west is so different. I have seen the scenes of the Crusades painted in
some medieval churches in Europe; yesterday, I saw the Rama-Ravana war in the
Dutch Palace in Cochin and the stylised seven Sal trees cut by one arrow
in Bali-vadha, and it seems that the Indian tradition is well-defined in the proverbial
three monkeys: don’t see evil, don’t hear evil, don’t speak evil. It is the
West, post-Hellenic West beginning with Aristotle, which brought this dichotomy
between ‘A’ and ‘Non-A’ and subsequent tragedy, How much of western music, even
Negro spirituals, is primarily concerned with Karuna Rasa! In Indian
music, excepting a few Ragas, none is specially earmarked for pathos. The
movement in time is another problem in a speed-mad modern world, where people
are forgetting Rodin’s wise adage ‘Slowness is Beauty’.
I
think in this East-West juxtaposition or dialogue in the field of Arts in
modern India, the traditional concepts of freedom and self-expression are fast
changing. In the ancient times ‘every temple was a body and every body was a
temple’–even temples had erotic zones and areas like the human body. When art
was just a handmaid of religion, freedom for the artist meant salvation: a
Dharmapada’s masterpiece was to jump from the spiral of Konark, or a devadasi
would offer herself to an Amman or Kovil altar. In the medieval days, when
the Indian Arts became more secular, under the influence of Islam and
Christianity, the Artist’s destiny was bound with the royal patron. The Mughal
portrait-painter, or the Rajastani or Dogri illustrator of a puranic theme
would take special care not to paint the king as he was, with all his warts.
With
the British Victorian import of artistic technique and taste in visual arts,
the artists’ freedom was delimited by the new market of connoisseurs, and of
course, the sweet will of our colonial masters During the nationalist struggle,
artists sought new pastures and meadows, and I remember Nandalal Bose painting
a walking Gandhi (further sculpted by D. P. Roy Chowdhury), or Bendre painting
a Congress session, and Hebbar and Hussain sketching a Nehru. Artists were free
to choose and paint whatever they liked and in whatever manner: a Souza or a
Padamas or a Swaminathan painting a nude is very different from a similar
painter painting thirty years ago. The artist became more and more
self-conscious. The social taboos and shams became gradually meaningless. But
while the visual arts broke many traditional curbs to freedom, music and dance
stuck to the ‘purity’ of revivalism. All the four classical dances, with their
elaborate rituals, were static, and even Orissi joined the movement. But here
the formalistic aspect was being more emphasised; in the past it was a
spiritual pilgrimage, a penance or Sadhana. So the artist gradually
discovered his own self; his expression also became less free. In literature
the dreamy, wishy-washy sentimental romanticism and the nihilistic
revolutionary realism gave way to a more poised age of reason, a modernist
adventure to combine science with religion, reason with anti-reason.
This
brings one to the problem of the indirect curbs on the freedom of the artists.
Who buys Art? No more the religious endowments, no more the native states or
the aristocracy patronising the musicians, sculptors and artists. The new
Maharajas are the commissions offered by Governmental or semi-Governmental
agencies; the Broadcasting and Television centre; the film-magnates and the new
rich class. Is democracy necessarily mediocracy as Shaw called it? With the
increasing commercialism, the mid-cult and mass-cult are rapidly encroaching
upon our tastes. The violent, anti-rational, Beatnik–Hungry
Generations–Digambara Kavita has started having its volcanic outbursts in
poetry. In painting the angry young man has not reached the stage of piercing
his canvass with a palette-knife but has started searing the surface of wood
with a blow-lamp. The definitions of traditional Beauty and Balance, Sublimity
and Significance have started dwindling. New artists have begun to explore the
unconscious dark recesses of the mental world like Muktibodh or Himmat Shah or
Kanoria. Here, one again sees an atavistic, neo-primitive, conscious movement
of ‘Back to Original Nature.’
Here
I want to stop, because words fail me. The new world of the anti-artist’s
vision is a charred, weird, eerie and undefined world. I know not its
boundaries. It is a protest against nagging parents, sex-frustration, hidebound
tradition, gagging establishment, indirect censorship, blind jingoism,
atom-splitting all-destructiveness. This feeling that there is no exit, there
is no way out, that we are doomed for ever, this post-war western-European
‘Angst’ is now eating into the vitals of our artistic experience too. No amount
of hair-splitting of classical works on poetics or Shilpa-Shastras or Natya-Shastras
is going to help this new artist. He is feeling cheated. He has no
sympathetic critics. The older generation dubs him as ‘derivative;
western-oriented, anti-Indian’, the younger generation has no time to wait and
watch and wonder. In this atmosphere of corroding erosion of values and
stifling overwhelming anarchy of belief-patterns, many of them
self-contradictory, the artist, and the poet, is baffled. He seeks for words
which fail him. He has lost his ‘ladder to his own soul’, while loud-speakers
din into his ears “in the Upanishads it is written: Know Thyself (Aatmaanam
Viddhi )” “May be it was written or uttered by God Himself, but how does it
help me?”–the artist seems to ask.
* Speech delivered at
the fifth All-India Writers’ Conference in Kerala on 28-12-1965.