WORLD PERSPECTIVE OF INDIAN ART
PROF.
DR. HERMANN GOETZ
Most
of what we know of art belongs to the past. And yet, in art, there is an
element which joins the past and the future in a very interesting way.
Art–whether sculpture, painting, architecture, industrial objects-aspires to
form as a conscious or unconscious, means of expression, as perfect as
possible, of human dreams, myths which men feel as their sense of living, of
their circumstances, what achievements they are proud of, what they feel as
their mental support, what they feel as a driving or regulating force, what
they hope for. Some people, therefore, have disposed of art as a mere means of
propaganda of the rich and mighty in the respective societies.
But
so simple an explanation does not work. Life is immensely complicated, many
symbols have a value for everybody, there are symbols for all types of people,
also for the poor, for the opposition, for townspeople, artisans, peasants, for
people of the most differing backgrounds, for the credulous and sceptics, for
Sentimental and hardboiled ones. And these symbols differ from nation to
nation, country to country, from climate to climate, and all the time change
their meaning.
Thus,
the history of art can be interpreted as the optical aspect of the history of
mankind, and in the widest sense, insofar as this optical interpretation can be
extended to Philology and musicology combined with other sources, to all
aspects of human life, to society, economics, the State, history; and often in
a very valuable way, as art expresses much of the unconscious mind, so that the
discovers much which had not been intended to say, even what his objects did
not dare to avow to themselves.
Now
we are again in a time when our lives are utterly upset by the discoveries of
modern science. At the end of the last century railways and steamers were
already familiar to us, motor traffic just came up, but aircraft
had not yet surpassed its first experimental steps. Now, transfer of news, or
even direct talk from and to any part of this earth is no more a problem at
all, aircraft traffic has reduced the connection from continent to continent
from months and weeks to a matter of hours, we have reached the moon, and in
nuclear energy we have developed a helpful force, but also, so far rarely
applied, a deadly weapon beyond all our expectations. This is now so well-known
that it looks almost ridiculous to mention it at all. And yet it is necessary;
for we tend to ignore the consequences when we behave as if nothing at all has
happened, as if we might judge all aspects of life in the accustomed way.
Somehow,
of course, we have no other way out, as it is beyond human capacity. But what
we can do, is at least to reconsider the past in a similar perspective when men
had been confronted with often small discoveries which, however, had immense
consequences. And it is from this angle that I wish here to approach Indian
history, using the history of art as a lever, because archaeology often offers
us evidence where literature as a conscious source, has wiped out the memory,
for reasons which historically are likewise understandable.
This changeover to wider dimensions, in every aspect of this term, concerns India as much as any country, any nation, any continent of this earth. We need, therefore, a perspective in which other parts of this earth fill at least the background of the picture. In this perspective, however tentative it may appear, we can discover at least the essential trends of each time and fill in, at the hand of new, refined methods–maybe hitherto learned and applied in other disciplines–gaps, in the local documentation as far as similar events permit of a similar interpretation. Let us analyse Indian art from such a point of view.
Early
in this century the unit of art analysis was style, which in other words are
technical achievements. In the case off architecture first, the transition from
wood to clay, mortar, stone, concrete, iron; within this sub-division into
bundles and mattresses, beams, planks, posters, ceilings, roofs, doors,
windows, mud plastering, bricks of unbaked clay, burnt bricks and tiles,
construction in boulders, roughly and exactly cut stones, etc., further
distinction between socles, walls and roofs, houses and towers, round,
quadratic, oblong
and transverse buildings, simple to complicated outlays, and finally in each of
these forms an evolution from the simple to the complicated, either by addition
or involvement. For example, a plain socle or a complex system of projections
and niches, plinths, ledges, mouldings, until the socle may become a miniature
edition of the whole facade; or a roof, flat or rounded, vaulted or domed,
horizontal of sloping, simple or a whole system of intermediate storeys, etc.
Or
the approach to reproducing objects in sculpture or painting, say, a figure
conceived as a block on which head, arms, body, legs and feet are indicated
within the available mass; then, with its individual parts well-modelled and
correctly moving; then, freely moving, but still formal and representative,
later easy and elastic, still later perfunctory and playful.
The Class
Tradition
This
formal development is not only a question of technique, but of the whole
mentality of the artist, of the family and class tradition of the maecenas. It
is expressed in the whole structure of the background; political, social,
economic, literary, religious forms of life, corresponding, for example, to tribal
life, monarchy, aristocratic oligarchy, democracy and dissolution of a society.
It is expressed also in other details, for example, costumes and fashions,
single figures or groups, the inclusion of the background and many other aspects.
Normally,
these style curves last only some hundred years. And half a hundred miles away,
there may predominate already a different style, related or quite different,
either in another phase of evolution or with a different background, say different
dresses, different houses and settlements, different goods, etc. If the style
of life is similar. also its formal expression may sometimes cover a rather
vast area. A good example of this type in India may be Sunga art. But just in
the later stages development may be rather complicated. Through conquests or
religious missions certain styles may spread very far, though merely occupying
some political, commercial or intellectual centres, whereas in the surrounding
minor towns and villages archaic forms of the same art, or remnants of former,
utterly different styles may survive.
This
is partly due to the growth of towns and cities in which a new mentality
develops, because the life experience of
the upper classes sets the model. And those latter
generally have travelled far, whether officials sent from the capital or
transferred from province to province (for example, Maurya art), merchants
importing or exporting goods from or to far-off countries (for instance, in
Satavahana art), scholars educated at far-off schools and universities (in
Gandhara art), or missionaries sent from distant centres of their creed. And as
there are always snobs trying to compete with the leading classes, the imported
art of those is imitated, either with the help of cheaper art goods likewise
imported, or that of local goods either imitating it or fabricated by immigrant
surplus-artists and artisans who transfer their skill, learnt in the important
cities, to the local workshops temporarily or permanently.
Where
the local people hate the ruling class for whatever reason, they stick to their
earlier tradition (e.g., in a great part of Rajput art). But also the
opposite is possible; foreign art is accepted enthusiastically, but the local
artists and artisans are not able to do such fine work, imitate as well as
possible, but the product is clumsy and the contents often misunderstood. Or an
immigrated artist, missionary or official feels that for a success he has to
make concessions to the public mentality (viz., Akota bronzes, many
Rajput and Mughal paintings). Then he may assimilate his work to the local
taste.
At
the end there stands the extension of such as style, as rich and involved as
possible, over a rather vast area, but then no more consisting of individual
inspired masterpieces but a conventional form almost falling asunder under the
impact of innumerable details (for example, Vaghela or Hoysala sculpture). The
technique then is developed to the utmost with subdivision of work, so that a
part of the workers must have done nothing else but filling and polishing or
repeating again and again the same ornaments, figure groups etc. The better
artists, however, generally were learned and wore pompous titles–for
example, Gupta Hoysala temples, etc, The whole was designed by a master of high
academic training (sutradhara) who merely prepared the design (when
unfinished still visible).
This
is the normal situation of art in India, nay, as well as in the majority of
countries and civilizations on this earth. All this results in a very
complicated picture, and though the basic factors may be clear and simple,
their variations are innumerable, but very characteristic, enabling us to read
the culture-historically evolution of all Indian States. As anterior to quite
modern developments India had never been a national, but a geographical unit
held together by limits like oceans and mountains, a subcontinent like
South-Western Asia, Europe, South-Eastern Asia, Central or Eastern Asia, the
last stage of local art in most cases was the expression of the last stage of a
State and of its society. For this reason that local style never lasted longer
than a few hundred years. Then a renascence set in, renewing art with merely
slight changes, when the whole of the cultural tradition was still valid, or
with considerable changes when art production was either transferred into
another area, for example, into South-Eastern Asia and Indonesia–or taken over
by maecenas of a very different background for example, Indo-Islamic,
and again modern art.
This
is the normal process of art development, such as it can be observed all over
the earth in any civilization, in any country. But these observations are a
rather modern discovery, and the art theory of ancient
India, as laid down in Sanskrit literature is quite different. Art, like all
aspects of human life, especially religion, is regarded
as revealed by the Gods to the Rishis, first transmitted orally, but at
last written down in the Vastu-Silpa and Natya-Sastras. Some Sastras
are independent, others are parts or the Puranas, mainly later, of Gupta
times, some others even considerably earlier, but practically all of them
pretending to be very old. Abridgements are included in various instructions (Samhitas)
how life should be (rarely how it really is), by Varahamihira and others.
However, all of them, in the first place do not deal with the how (the style)
of art, but with the what, i.e., the contents of
art. What they describe as namely, the Hindu temple and its decoration,
sculptures and paintings, such as we know it from Gupta times to
the Muslim conquest and later wherever Hindu art could again
reassert itself. Much less space is allotted to other themes, places, houses,
gardens, towns, etc.
That
in practice the teachings of those Sastras are not in conflict with but
supplementary to the style problem, can be easily found out. For when surveying
Hindu temples in chronological sequence, we find,
on the average, a systematic growth of types from simple sanctuaries to most involved
plans. Their decoration grows from very simple to most complicated forms, by
subdividing all parts of the building horizontally as well as vertically.
Likewise the sculptures became complicated, first sparsely along the walls,
later innumerable groups of projecting and receding figures including dwarfs, Surasundaris
and other godlings.
Moreover,
this art was merely that of a certain period, not Indian art as such. This has
been proved by archaeology. For official Hinduism has first been fixed as an
orthodoxy under the Gupta emperors before whose time Vedic rituals seem to have
been restricted to court ceremonies, since the time that Buddhist, Jain and
other ascetic sects had begun to dominate public life. In any case, up to the
time of the Mahakshatrapas and Kushanas we know almost exclusively Buddhist
monuments and the Gods and Goddesses of later times represented on Buddhist
monuments, if at all, as additional powers serving the Buddha and his doctrine.
Therefore, for mediaeval times the Gupta Age was the “Golden Age” of India.
This
circumstance offers us a hint how to understand this concept in a wider
perspective. For, in Occidental civilization such a retrospective on a past
golden age, which should be a model for the present and the future, is called
“classicism.” It was and is the basis of every later renascence, in Romanesque
art–which actually means “Roman” art of the Christian Middle Ages, the
Renaissance proper and especially classicism proper in the decade about A. D.
1800. The model of this classicism was not any special, genuinely classic style
of the ancient Mediterranean, but Graeco-Roman art and culture as a whole. In
the last decade, however, we have discovered that classicism as such can be a
phenomenon in any civilization, in any art all over the world, whenever there
was a crisis, even a break between an earlier city civilization and a new form
of culture trying to appear as continuation, but actually something else.
If
Hindu culture survived at all in Northern India, it must have been mainly by
conversion and absorption of the many nomadic invaders. Of course, for the time
being I can put forward this merely as a working theory. It will need further
confirmation from other sides. In the field of ethnology I may mention not only
the scattered references to the many dispersed settlements of Hunas, Gujaras,
Sulikas, but also that there are costumes the predecessors of which can be
traced not in ancient India but at Tunhuang at the Chinese frontier. In
linguistics we have to study the transition from Sanskrit as an upper class
language, to its survival as a language known only to priests and courtly
scholars, and the de facto change of style during those critical
centuries, acknowledged by pandits, but not yet sufficiently studied by
Sanskrit scholars. That those texts behave as if no crisis ever had existed,
has its parallel in early Mediaeval Europe. It was court literature expressing
how things should be interpreted, not how they really were. It was part of the
tactics in absorbing and converting mighty newcomers and just a continuation of
the old politics in converting Scythians and Kushanas.
Here
the Sastras have played the decisive role as a guidance inaugurated by
the “Golden Age” of the Guptas. For the Sastras and Puranas in
India, like the Avesta in Iran, the Christian Scriptures in the Roman
Empire, claimed, as religious authorities, to be very cold, and this seems
partly probable. For much of this literature must have been formulated, as a
merely theoretical matter, already in the preceding centuries, under Buddhist
as well as foreign rulers during the discussions held in the agraharas
conceded to the Brahmins. Under the first Guptas, these tracts seem to have
been propagated as authoritative.
In
the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries we can already observe a renaissance created by
them in the art of Naresar, Gwalior, Osian, Bhinmal, Amber, etc. In all these
places we find a very quick evolution from a deed, slavish imitation of late
Gupta models to a living art, rich of expression, though also a young instead
of an old art, and a revealing admixture of primitive ornaments, in so far as
those did not contravene the teachings of the Sastras. But the fact has
likewise to be stated that this art was in principle not unique. We have starts
towards a similar sculpture with the Sasanians, never completed because of the
conquest of Sasanian Iran by the Moslems. We have a similar art in the
Occident, called “Romanesque” art, pretending to be Roman, likewise intermixed
with primitive tribal ornaments when the Roman Empire had already
disappeared.
Indian Art-An Analysis
I
believe we may now venture on to an analysis of Indian art. The basic
experience: Art is a creative process, in other words a process of eternal
change, because every one of us changes in life as long as he grows and may
reach maturity only in later years, because society around us changes all the
time, and because the wider perspectives of life change likewise, as vague
background and as individual experience. Art, however, is important only as
long as it has a message for real life, its forms and styles being no more than
an instrument of truth for the expression of this message. But for this very
reason, there has never existed, in India or elsewhere, that rigid attitude
which can imagine intellectual, emotional or artistic contacts only in terms of
“no contacts” or imitation. No contacts, this means stupidity, thoughtlessness,
ignorance and indifference, the death of all individual, national and cultural
life. Real contact means neither snobbish imitation, it means information,
goodwill for understanding, criticism and then either rejection or taking over
of certain features, or adaption, however with a strong individual note to
whatever this individual note may refer. Thus, the product always is something
new, of whatever category this may be.
This
Interpretation, however, seems contradicted by the Sastras. However,
this apparent “timelessness” had been merely a practical means of the
conversion of barbarian invaders and is refuted by the evidence of the
monuments. The whole theory of a smooth transition from ancient to mediaeval
Indian art likewise was a fiction–a
most fertile fiction –like in the Occident,
that from Roman to Romanesque art, or in Iran that from Achaemenian to Sasanian
art. And in all the three cases this referred not only to art, but also to
religion, to the whole way of life, to culture in all its aspects. The result
has been grand, often very similar, as already pointed out by A. Coomaraswamy
in his later studies, and is worth a careful study even today. Of course, this
classicism of the Sastras opens the way to further historical,
linguistic and religious studies in a new, very fertile direction.
A Genuine New Creation
But
at least we are now able to study Indian art in the same light and in the same
categories as all the other arts of mankind. And thus also,
modern Indian art in the same perspective as all genuine arts,
as a genuine new creation, neither an imitation of the Indian past, nor of the
foreign present. Learn we can from both, being aware that our space and atomic
age is very different from the past, however, that the Indian tradition is not
the same as that of Europe and America or of Eastern Asia, finally that new art
creations need not be a sign of progress, that they can be as much signs of
disintegrating civilisations. I do not feel entitled to proclaim any programme
for the future. I feel only entitled to suggest the greatest measure of truth
and honesty expressed with the best artistic means. It will not be uniform, but
the expression of as many spiritual types as there are people. And then leave
it to the future to decide what will stand the criticism of time and conviction!
21st December, 1973