Orientalism And The New Claims For Indian Art: The Ideas Of Havell, Coomaraswamy, Okakura And Nivedita
Payal Kapoor
Orientalism And The New Claims For Indian Art: The Ideas Of Havell, Coomaraswamy, Okakura And Nivedita
In this chapter as the author's tapati guha and thakurta convey to us the history of Indian art during the 1900's. They do it by choosing few personalities whose works including reforms and writings were linked to changing practices related to art in Bengal. During this period people were trying to bring out through their works the attributes that have the quality of being essentially Indian.
We had surge of Orientalism with nationalism acting as a stage for the reinventing the history of Indian art. Also providing base for redefining aesthetics and search for a tradition. Orientalist produced and structured much of a notion of Indian art tradition. During this period there was a shift in European approach towards the Indian art. From a western classical bias it showed shift towards an Indian point of view. The western bias, which formed, dominated European view of Indian art had counteractions in form of "Indian defence" pioneered by people like Havell and Coomaraswamy in front of them.
It was the mid 19th century when the British government started showing interest in Indian art but behind this the imperial motive was hidden. They wanted to understand us better so that they can maintain their future positions. So the earlier Orientalist work involved the preservation of Indian handicrafts, which were a part of paternalistic commitments and a search for new cultural roots in the empire after 1857.
With the Orientalist movement, Indian art was reconstructed and revived for implementation in new schools of art and design, for academic studies. E.B Havell and A.K Coomaraswamy were a part of this expanding Orientalism and they established new Orientalism, which was against the dominant colonial art trends and showed a kind of departure from official mainstream. They tried to secure anti colonial, pro – Indian image.
During this period of Orientalism they tries to create equations between ideas of 'art', ' tradition', and 'Indian-ness'. The authors try to show the new assertive strength of Orientalism by elaborating claims made by people like havell, Coomaraswamy, sister Nivedita and Okakura.
Both havell and Coomaraswamy equated art as a living tradition of design and skilled craftsmanship. For both of them art should be a part of people's religious and daily life where it just not remains an imported item to be studied in galleries and museums. They were influenced by the art and crafts movements by William Morris and considered handicraft as the living art of India. According to havell Indian art was related to the higher qualities of imagination and spirituality. Western world wasn't able to understand because of its misconception about taking Indian art as purely decorative and they failed to see the spiritual understanding, which lied beneath it. Western scholars failed to appreciate the iconography and canons of Hindu art, and distorted picture by evaluating it through renaissance and academic standards.
Through his reforms like reorganising the curricula of the school of art with the basic objective of 'making Indian art as the basis of all instruction', theoretically removing the line between fine and applied arts, havell tried to revive the living art of the past which according to him had a spontaneous and natural growth. But Havell's schemes had an implicit categorisation of fine arts as European domain as he accounted it as an area of special talent and aptitude whereas decorative art became as the Indian domain where it became the main sphere of official concern. According to Coomaraswamy in his book The Indian Craftsmen, he presented craftsman as a organic element in the traditional national life of India. According to him the religion and culture of Ceylon was but a fragment and an inextricable part of India.
Throughout his projects, Havell's aesthetic evaluation of oriental design was constantly grounded in practical revival of design in surviving art industries . He was usually sensitive to the dichotomy that prevailed between acknowledging the artistic merits of traditional design and ensuring the commercial practicability of their revival.
Through his books, one by the name of A Handbook To Agra And The Taj, Sikandra, Fatehpur Sikri And The Neighbourhood (1904 ) and other Benaras The Sacred City: Sketches Of Hindu Life And Religion, he tried to affirm that being Hindu meant being genuinely Indian.
He regarded Benaras as Hinduism, which synthesized all the different creeds of worship and different shrines into the Hindu philosophy of 'one in many' and which also corresponded to the new Orientalist ideal of an unchanging Hindu civilisation in India, with a deep spiritual core. Benaras provided a case where the destruction of mohammadan times could be seen with the progress of British times and the greatest boon which the British saw was in the restoration of Benaras as the sacred cities of Hindus and in setting up of institutions like Annie Besant's Hindu Central college.
The aim was to give India an ideal past of a Hindu golden age and ensure progress within the bounds of ancient Hindu civilization. Interest in Hindu metaphysics and Hindu past became dominant trait in Havell's whole approach to Indian art. Because of the books written by him Indian sculpture and painting in 1908 and the ideals of Indian art in 1911 which became a significant text for new Orientalist discourse, India came to be associated with a range of specially Indian attributes – an ancient classical past, a deep reserve of religiosity and spiritualism: and a new spirit of nationalism.
Now Coomaraswamy, who grew up and studied in west, returned to his native land Ceylon in mid – twenties. He wrote a book- Medieval Sinhalese Art which coincided with the publication of Indian sculpture and painting, with a urge for national reform because in his research he could see that colonial rule had a destructive impact on Ceylon which could be seen in the disappearance of her traditional art, architecture and handicrafts. Basic intent behind his book was also evocations of the ideal of the past with the past of Ceylon fitting into the larger, more glorious past of India and according too him devoted to the possibility of a true regeneration… of the national life of the Sinhalese people.
We can see influence of western ideologies on Coomaraswamy work. He made a systematic historic classification of Rajput paintings according to period and style and made an in depth survey of religious and literary iconography of the paintings of rajasthan and Punjab hills. This kind of classification havell termed as archaeological approach.. This way of writing in linear notion of time is a western concept. The central point of his study was to differentiate between the religious and Hindu genre of Rajput painting from secular genre of Mughal court painting and to link the former with an unbroken line of tradition that could be stretched back to frescoes of Ajanta. According to him Rajput painting was a Hindu and predominantly religious art, it was therefore more purely and genuinely Indian than the secular painting of Mughal court.
WITH THE CONTINUING OF PAST TRADITION AND FORMING AN IMAGINARY LINE OF CONTINUITY, THEY HIGHLIGHTED CERTAIN PERIODS AND STYLES, WHICH FITTED INTO THE SAID FRAMEWORK ACCORDING TO THESE PEOPLE AND LED TO MARGINALIZATION OF MOST OF THE DEVELOPMENTS WHICH REMAINED OUTSIDE THE SCOPE OF ART HISTORY.
Like in this case styles and periods given more importance, which could be called according to their standards as genuinely Indian being synonymous with being genuinely Hindu and also fit idea of a 'great art' tradition.
Where as havell continued with his battle against European misconceptions, with giving Indian art spiritual and transcendental character. Coomaraswamy started hard-core documentative research with his rigorous definition of commitment to Indian art.
As the author states about havell, " given the mystical and complex nature of Hindu iconography and the western misunderstanding of it. He believed the greatest justice he could do to this subject was to evoke ' a feel for Indian spiritualism', rather than provide mere technical interpretations."
People like him were there not just to merely add to the existing information about Indian art, but these new advocates of Indian art had a great battle to fight, which would determine their overstatements and counter-postures of their ' Indian bias'.
With the swadeshi movement in Bengal, Coomaraswamy in a pamphlet entitled 'The deeper meaning of the struggle' , defined the real goal of nationalist movements to be the propagation of the ' the great ideals of Indian culture' and gave the swadeshi movement a false terminology which tried to make India economically self sufficient by replacing European manufactures by a multiplication of Indian products but it was based on false commercial values and purely material pre-occupations of industrial competitions .for him a true swadeshi was which fought against industrialism, which subordinated men to a production of things and gave up art to a degraded material culture .
For Coomaraswamy his discourse on nationalism stated Indian art as the main means of expression for 'higher wisdom' . And regarded culture of Indian superior with greatest embodiment of 'Idealism', ' Imagination and Genius'.
Both havell and Coomaraswamy gave more importance to 'idea behind sensuous appearance', of the ideal than behind the illusory trappings of the real'.
Having a transcendental view of art in Indian philosophy, both havell and Coomaraswamy natural choice was Vedanta school of Indian philosophy which considered the material world to be an illusion or Maya which had to be removed in order to perceive the ideal.
WHAT CONSTITUTED INDIAN ART BECAME THE MAIN ISSUE AT STAKE?
Some people like Cecil burns, principal of Bombay school of art and sir George birdwood, denied existence of fine arts in India. For them any great art in India had Greek influence. But the new Orientalist gave Indian art the status of great art where the 'great art' was located in a central religious and divine inspiration. The new Orientalist were reasserting the glorious past of Indian art but also giving it a present day national identity.
There was an increasingly impact of oriental art in west, with the writing of these people.
Kakuzo Okakura was an interesting parallel to that of Coomaraswamy in terms of fundamental associations with European Orientalism. Following strong differences with European academic structure of art he opened with 39 other Japanese artist Nippon bijutsuin (or the hall of fine arts) that became the centre for new movement of 'renationalising ' of Japanese art.
"The Ideal Of The East became important in the discourse of new Orientalism. it was about Orientalism which was not merely in search of antiquity and a lost civilisation of the east , but in a living wave of spirituality and a superior wisdom that could resist the colonisation of the west ."
This book by Okakura showed a common range of ideals where whole of Asia stood together and far above from the material culture of Europe. Vedic India was looked on as the great 'motherland' of all Asiatic thought and religion.
Sister Nivedita writings on kali ma evoked a new emotive concept of motherland.
Like havell and Coomaraswamy Okakura described Asia's true wealth as, 'whole that of industrial and decorative art which is the heirloom of ages.' As the author states 'while craftsmanship came to symbolise a preservation of identity and independence, the interests in crafts merged with the paramount notion of a 'great art' heritage, where art was equated with the highest realm of religion and philosophy and the loftiest aspects of national culture.'
Sister Nivedita who was a disciple of swami vivekananda identified in okakaura's book a promise for the reunification of Asia under the guidance of Hindu religion and philosophy. According to her art played an important role in shaping the nationality.
Western art as analysed by Nivedita provide the notions of realism and idea of individualism. She said the collective identity of a race, culture and inherited tradition in any 'great art' is important but this in any way does not exclude individualism or freedom of imagination. in the new Indian she looked forward towards a new guild of painters who were not from a single caste but from the ' nation as a whole'
FROM THE IDEAS OF HAVELL, COOMARASWAMY, OKAKURA AND SISTER NIVEDITA WE SEE THAT A GREAT ART INVOVLES QUALITIES OF SPIRITUALISM, RELIGIOUSITY, WITH CRAFTS ACTING AS A LIVING TRADITION AND NATION ACTING AS A WHOLE.
If Nivedita derived from Okakura books a pan Asian vision of oriental culture, she was equally convinced about the central place of Indian art and religion in it. Even her review of Coomaraswamy 's medieval Sinhalese art discovered the same idea of India, as the mother of whole circle of art synthesis on which all the arts and craft tradition of the east depended for inspiration and sustenance. What she considered important about the Havell's view of Indian art was as one continuous living tradition, where India's past, present and future stood as one , where the continuity with the past contained 'the rich promise of future .'
THESE PEOPLE WERE HAD COMPLETED THEIR EDUCATION IN THE WEST AND WE CAN THE HEGELIAN CONCEPT OF MANKIND HISTORY BEING ONE in their thoughts. They were establishing the imaginary concept of continuity and hence within their defined framework of great art they were giving more importance to certain people, styles, periods…etc
VEDIC INDIA WAS MARKED AS THE REAL AND THE ORIGINAL INDIA .IN VEDIC RELIGION AND PHILOSPHY WAS LOCATED THE PURE INDIAN ESSENCE OF ALL INDIAN ART. ORIENTALIST INVOKED THe IDEA OF THE OF 'THE GREAT INDIAN SYNTHESIS' AND TRIED TO COLLAPSE AND ENCAPSULATE ALL PHASES OF INDIAN HOSTORY WITHIN A PRISTINE CORE OF VEDIC HINDU CIVILISATIONS.VEDIC WAS ASSOCIATED MORE WITH HINDU RELIGION AND CULTURE.
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{payal kapoor}