SRI
AUROBINDO ON ART
K. CHANDRASEKHARAN,
M.A., B.L.
Formerly Tagore
Professor of Humanities,
Indian
Art with its distinctive quality and style of appeal was in the land of its
origin eclipsed owing to our impact with the West. The British rulers
particularly had no appreciation of ancient Indian arts and crafts with the
result very soon Indians themselves looked aliens in their own homes.
Everything from the West, whether it was sculpture, painting, architecture or
crafts, engaged so much of our peoples’ attraction that whatever was left of
our heritage got either neglected or deliberately allowed to die out.
Some
of the so-called critics of the art from the West such as Archer, Birdwood, Vincent Smith were highly condemning India’s achievements
in the arts of moulding, painting and chiselling as nothing but short of the bizarre and of
immature aesthetic development. Save for the efforts of stray individuals of
discernment like Dr. Havell, our own connoisseurs too
would have completely given up the pursuit of our arts for want of sympathy and
understanding of their true merit.
Dr.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,
among our pioneers in discovering our unsurpassed perfection in architecture,
sculpture, and painting bold enough to resuscitate our interest in the Indian Art.
His was the earliest attempt to collect best samples of Indian Art and present them
to an unsuspecting world of their immense beauty and appeal. His portfolios of
photographs and printed plates, apart from his serious studies of Indian
thought behind the once flourishing arts, revealed an
hitherto uncomprehended wonder-world of significance
and spiritual wealth when properly interpreted by competent persons.
Sri
Aurobindo, whose multifaceted genius could not confine itself to its projection
into philosophy, yoga and poetry, essayed with inborn and natural understanding
into the sacred precincts of art. With his tremendous acquisitic
capacity for knowledge in whatever subject his mind for the moment could dwell
upon, he soon challenged all those Western critics to justify their criticisms
of our art. He said: ‘The religious or heiratic side
of Indian sculpture is intimately connected with the spiritual experiences of
Indian meditation and adoration–those deep things of our self-discovery which our critics call contemptuously
‘yogic hallucinations’–soul realisation is its method of creation and soul realisation must be the way of our response and understanding.’1
Indeed such an immersion into the basic quality of Indian creativity never before received an adequate
explanation. His further elucidation of
the reposeful figures in our sculptural representations needs also
recapturing. For he opined: “The statue of a king or saint is not meant merely to give the idea of a king or saint or to portray some dramatic action or to
be a character portrait in stone, but to embody rather a soul state or experience or deeper soul
quality, as for instance, not the
outward emotion but the inner soul side of rapt ecstacy
of adoration and God-vision in the saint or the devotee before the presence of
the worshipped deity.” 2
Himself
a powerful exponent of our culture and yoga particularly, Sri Aurobino took little or no time to present Indian Art as something
unique of its kind to offer to the world of its
magnificence. The aim and purpose of art
is not merely to copy life but give its own
interpretation of its significance
in its own language which had not been
clearly assessed by our intellectuals, educated in the wake of Western thought.
They even began to feel that
anything unfamiliar bespoke only obscurity of expression or immaturity of conceit. So Sri Aurobindo plunged
into the controversy and set the seal of his disapproval on the present state
of art-appreciation in the country. He then remarked at the usual cheap
undigested criticisms that were found against Indian Art with a resounding
sarcasm, “We want what is familiar to the
eye and obvious to the
imagination and will not readily admit that there may be here another and
perhaps greater beauty than that in the circle of which we are accustomed to
live and take pleasure.” He went on: “Art after all is not forbidden to deal with the unusual or to alter and overpass nature, and it migh almost be said that it has been doing little else
since it began to serve the human imagination from its first grand epic
exaggerations to the violences of modern romanticism
and realism, from the high ages
of Valmiki
and Homer to the day of Hugo and Ibsen.” 3 He
further asserted: “I see no reason to regret the absence of telling studies in muscle, torsos, etc., for I cannot
regard these things as having in themselves any essential artistic value.”4 In
conclusion his words are so
profound that even the hard critic of
Indian Art has to bow before the unassailability
of the argument. For he said: “The
whole creation force comes here from a spiritual and psychic vision,
the emphasis of the physical is
secondary and always deliberately lightened
so as to give an overwhelmingly spiritual and psychic impression, and everything is suppressed which does
not serve this purpose or would
distract the mind from the
purity of this intention.”5 There would be no more scope for
argument to the contrary after this clinching
answer to the same old uninformed criticism
that Indian Art has no perspective in its conception and suffers from a terrible lack of anatomical proportions.
We
now pass on to the art of poetry from the visual arts and see how Sri Aurobindo has planted his banner of excellence on the
mounts of vision and imagination. Though while
quite young he had produced a lot of poetry, especially in the English language which he had
mastered, he sought to unravel his inner
spirit more and more in lines which contain
the full measure of his experience and expression. He was often heard to say
that “In art, poetry and literature there is truth. However it is not discovery
and statement of truth in itself, but of the beauty of truth or
truth as beauty....If the writer
has spirituality in himself, it is bound to express itself in poetry.6”According to him the best poetry
is the result of an inner hearing. Sometimes
a poet hears a line, a passage, a whole poem or
sometimes they come down.
Dwelling
on the poetry of the highest order
Sri Aurobindo was definite
regarding the nature and condition of its source. Speaking of Valmiki he gave utterance to some of the profoundest
observations concerning the making of a poet. He said: “The kavi or Vates, poet or seer
is not the Maneeshi; he is not the logical thinker, scientific analyser or metaphysical reasoner;
his knowledge is one not with his thought, but with his being; he has not arrived at it but has it in himself
by virtue of his power
to become one with all that is around him.” Anyone who has dived deep into Valmiki will readily affirm the
sublime understanding of Sri Aurobindo of a poet who has for ages held Rasikas in thrall not less for his vividness of detail and colour than for his complete mastery of life’s
inexpressible problems and insight into an universe of man, beast, plant and
elements. Apart from poets all over the world who have given us the benefit of
their own experiences of what they had comprehended in human affairs, Indian
poets in particular had, at any rate in the past, striven to gain an expansive
view of all the varied forms and manifestations of the spirit, never omitting
nature, both animate and inanimate, and proved themselves seers and prophets
with an imagination and vision which could envelop the whole of life. Sri
Aurobindo would describe the Indian poet’s
growth as “by some form of spiritual, vital and
emotional oneness, he is what he sees; he is the hero in the forefront of
battle, the mother weeping over her dead, the tree trembling violently in the
storm, the flower warmly penetrated with the sunshine.” Here is poetry written
out of the soul and not out of the intellect. “While others can give us only
fragments of thought or expression of feelings or reveal to us scattered
incidents which had made a deep impression upon them, these ancient seers,
authors of our epics, did not stop with such expressions of their experiences
of their own bit of the vast universal humanity inducing in them a complete
multitudinous, impersonal view of whole life reflected in their very
personality. In short endowed with God’s own power they make us realise in their works some image of His creativity.” 7
Sri
Aurobindo contrasts the two great epics of
Speaking
of Kalidasa too, Sri Aurobindo has his own unsurpassed accuracy of judgment,
when he says: “The speech of Kalidasa is an accomplished art, an intellectual
and aesthetic creation, consummate, deliberate, finely ornate, carved like a
statue, coloured like a painting, not yet artificial
though there is a masterly artifice and device but still a careful work of art laboured by the
intelligence.” Nothing more nor less could satisfy the
requirements of a well-poised judgment of Kalidasa’s
art.
Of
paintings in general he was
clear in his views. To some extent
he was for interpretation of life, man and nature, and not copying
of it in however a perfect sense of colour and
proportion. In modern art he
was not loath to express his disappointment in finding three
things–ugliness, vulgarity and
absurdity. May be he was a bit more harsh than justified; still there is much substance for agreement with him in what he says. He hardly admitted they have any
aesthetic appeal, in spite of
the fact that modernists show a firm mind in suppressing non-essentials.
More
than every other thing, Sri Aurobindo’s view of
creativity has something unique of
its individuality. He felt that
if it should be in its fullest
effulgence, it must be something bringing
out the reality of the inner man. For an example he would cite Tagore’s
Urvasi as a
model of pure creativity. At
the same time it should not be felt
that because in art beauty should not stop with its expression in form
and line but must go beyond and express something within, the training of physical instruments is
of lesser importance. It may be that the force which works in people also sometimes
creates the needed physical instrument.
Hard work under still can under no circumstances be dispensed with, as otherwise the result of expression would
mean an uneven performance. Sri Aurobindo himself with all his vision
and supramental powers never allowed his pen to remain idle. If he was able to devote
thousands of lines over the production of a Savitri, it was not achieved in a day or
two. One learns that the whole body of the great poem was the result of constant meditation of
a seer’s entire being. The Future Poetry which Sri Aurobindo contemplated upon
must be potential of a creativity which should interpret to man his present or
reinterpret for him his past, and should also enable him to witness the
revelation of the face of the Eternal.
He
was fully conscious of the significance of the divinity in man when he said: “No
human manifestation can be illimitable and unlimited but the manifestation in
the limited should reflect the unlimited, the Transcendent Beyond. The
possibility of such a manifestation where the human touches the divine on earth
has been demonstrated more in his own Self which
reflected the unlimited Beyond.
1 “The Significance of Indian Art.” p. 63
2 Ibid p.63
3 Ibid p. 70
4 Ibid p. 72
5 Ibid p. 80
6 “Talks with Sri Aurobindo”
7 “Vyasa and Valmiki”
“By
Yoga is meant union through divine works done without desire, with equality of
soul to all things and all men, as a sacrifice to the Supreme while knowledge
is that on which this desirelessness, this equality,
this power of sacrifice is founded.”
–SRI AUROBINDO