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<b><font size="4">The
Standpoint of Indian Art</font></b></p>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">INDIAN art is not in truth unreal and unnatural, though
it may so appear to the eye of the ordinary man or to an eye
habituated to the classical tradition of European art. Indian art,
too, does hold the mirror up to Nature; but it is a different kind of
Nature, not altogether this outward Nature that the mere physical eye
envisages. All art is human creation; it is man's review of Nature;
but the particular type of art depends upon the particular
'view-point that the artist takes for his survey. The classical
artist surveys his field with the physical eye, from a single point
of observation and at a definite angle; it is this which gives him
the </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">sine qua non </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">of his artistic composition, anatomy and
perspective. And the genius of the artist lies very much in the
selection of a vantage ground from which his survey would throw into
relief all the different parts of the objective in the order and
gradation desired; to this vantage ground the entire construction is
organically – one could even say, in this case, geometrically –
correlated.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Indian art, too, possesses a perspective and an anatomy;
it, too, has a focus of observation which governs and guides the
composition, in the ensemble and in detail. Only, it is not the
physical eye, but an inner vision, not the angle given by the retina,
but the angle of a deeper perception or consciousness. To understand
the difference, let us ask ourselves a simple question: when we call
back to memory a landscape, how does the picture form itself in the
mind? Certainly, it is not an exact photograph of the scenery
observed. We cannot, even if we try, re-form in memory the objects in
the shape, colour and relative positions they had when they appeared
to the physical eye. In the picture represented to the mind's eye,
some objects loom large, others are thrown into the back-</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
174</span></FONT></P>
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and others again do not figure at all; the whole scenery is
reshuffled and rearranged in deference to the stress of the mind's
interest. Even the structure and build of each object undergoes a
change; it does not faithfully re-copy Nature, but gives the mind's
version of it, aggrandizing certain parts, suppressing others,
reshaping and recolouring the whole aspect, metamorphosing the very
contour into something that may not be &quot;natural&quot; or
anatomical figure at all. Only we are not introspective enough to
observe this phenomenon of the mind's alchemy; we think we are
representing with perfect exactitude in the imagination whatever is
presented to the senses, whereas in fact we do nothing of the kind;
our idea that we do it is a pure illusion.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">All art is based upon this peculiar virtue of the mind
that naturally and spontaneously transforms or distorts the objective
world presented to its purview. The question, then, is only of the
degree to which the metamorphosis has been carried. At the one end,
there is the art of photography, in which the degree of metamorphosis
is at its minimum; at the other, there seems to be no limit, for the
mind's capacity to dissolve and recreate the world of
sense-perception is infinite – and many modern schools of European
art have gone even beyond the limit that the &quot;unnatural&quot;
Indian art did not consider it necessary to transgress. Now, the
classical artist selects a position as close as he can to the
photographer, tries to give the mind's view of Nature and creation,
as far as possible, in the style and norm of the sense-perceptions.
He takes his stand upon these and from there reaches out towards
whatever imaginative reconstructions are justified within the bounds
laid out by them. The general ground-plan is, almost rigorously, the
form given by the physical eye. The art of the East, and even, to a
large extent, the art of mediaeval Europe, followed a different line.
Here the scheme of the sense-perceptions was rejected, the artist
sought to build on other foundations. His procedure was, first, to
get a focus within the mind, to discover a psychological standpoint,
and from there and in accordance with the subtler laws and
conventions of an inner vision create a world that is unique and
stands by itself. The aim was always to build from within, at the
most, from within outwards, but not from without, not even from
without inwards. This inner 
</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
175</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">world
has its own laws and they differ from the laws of optics which govern
the physical sight; but there is no reason why it should be called
unnatural. It is unnatural only in the sense that it does not copy
physical Nature; it is quite natural in the 1 sense that it is a
faithful reproduction of another, a psychological Nature.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Indian art is pre-eminently and </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">par excellence </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">the
art of this inner re-formation and revaluation. It has thrown down
com&shy;pletely and clearly the rigid scaffolding of the physical
vision. We take here a sudden leap, as it were, into another world,
and sometimes the feeling is that everything is reversed; it is not
exactly that we feel ourselves standing on our heads, but it is, as
if, in the Vedic phrase, the foundations were above and all the rest
branched out from them downwards. The artist sees with an eye, and
constructs upon a plan that conveys the merest excuse of an actual
visible world. There are other schools in the East which have also
moved very far away from the naturalistic view; yet they have kept,
if not the form, at least, the feeling of actuality in their
composition. Thus a Chinese, a Japanese, or a Persian masterpiece
cannot be said to be &quot;natural&quot; in the sense in which a
Tintoretto, or even a Raphael is natural; yet a sense of naturalness
persists, though the appearance is not naturalistic. What Indian art
gives is not the feeling of actuality or this sense of naturalness,
but a feeling of truth, a sense of reality – of the deepest
reality.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Other art shows the world of creative imagination, the
world reconstructed by the mind's own formative delight; the Indian
artist reveals something more than that – the faculty through which
he seeks to create is more properly termed </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">vision, </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">not
imagination; it is the movement of an inner consciousness, a
spiritual perception, and not that of a more or less outer
sensibility. For the Indian artist is a seer or </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">rishi; </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">what he
envisages is the mystery, the truth and beauty of another world – a
real, not merely a mental or imaginative world, as real as this
material creation that we see and touch; it is indeed more real, for
it is the basic world, the world of fundamental truths and realities
behind this universe of apparent phenomena. It is this that he
contemplates, this I upon which his entire consciousness is
concentrated; and all his art consists in</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
176</span></FONT></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">giving
a glimpse of it, bodying it forth or expressing it in significant
forms and symbols.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">European – the Far Western – art gives a front-view
of reality; Japanese – the Far Eastern – art gives a side-view;
Indian art gives a view from above.* Or we may say, in psychological
terms, that European art embodies experiences of the conscious mind
and the external senses, Japanese art gives expression to experiences
that one has through the subtler touches of the nerves and the
sensibility, and Indian art proceeds through a spiritual
consciousness and records experiences of the soul.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The frontal view of reality lays its stress upon the
display of the form of things, their contour, their aspect in mass
and volume and dimension; and the art, inspired and dominated by it,
is more or less a sublimated form of the art of photo&shy;graphy. The
side-view takes us behind the world of forms, into the world of
movement, of rhythm. And behind or above the world of movement,
again, there is a world of typal realities, essential form-movements,
fundamental modes of consciousness in its universal and transcendent
status. It is this that the Indian artist endeavours to envisage and
express.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">A Greek Apollo or Venus or a Madonna of Raphael is a
human form idealized to perfection, – moulded to meet the criterion
of beauty which the physical eye demands. The purely &aelig;sthetic
appeal of such forms consists in the balance and symmetry, the
proportion and adjustment, a certain roundedness and uniformity and
regularity, which the physical eye especially finds beautiful. This
beauty is akin to the beauty of diction in poetry.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Apart from the beauty of the mere form, there is behind
it and informing it what may be called the beauty of character, the
beauty revealed in the expression of psychological movement. It
corresponds to the beauty of rhythm in poetry. Considered
&aelig;sthetically, the beauty of character, in so far as it is found
in what we have called </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">formal </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">art, is a corollary, – an
ornamental and secondary theme whose function is to heighten<BR>
</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">*I am tempted to add a fourth
view-the view from behind or the occult view -something of which may
be found in the art of Egypt in its most ancient and naIve aspects,
in the art of archaic Tibet, in the remnants of some of the old.
world submerged civilizations, now known as &quot;primitive&quot;
(Polynesian, for example).</span></FONT></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
177</span></FONT></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">the effect of the beauty of form, or create the
atmosphere and environment necessary for its display. 
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">A Chinese or a Japanese piece of artistic creation is
more of a study in character than in form; but it is a study in
character in a deeper sense than the meaning which the term usually
bears to an European mind or when it is used in reference to Europe's
art-creations.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Character in the European sense means that part of
nature which is dynamically expressed in conduct, in behaviour, in
external movements. But there is another sense in which the term
would refer to the inner mode of being, and not to any outer
exemplification in activity, any reaction or set of reactions in the
kinetic system, nor even to the mental state, the temperament,
immediately inspiring it, but to a still deeper status of
consciousness. A Raphael Madonna, for example, purposes to pour
wholly into flesh and blood the beauty of motherhood. A Japanese
Madonna (a Kwanon), on the other hand, would not present the
&quot;natural&quot; features and expressions of motherhood; it would
not copy faithfully the model, however idealized, of a woman viewed
as mother. It would endeavour rather to bring out something of the
subtler reactions in the &quot;nervous&quot; world, the world of pure
movements that is behind the world of form; it would record the
rhythms and reverberations attendant upon the conception and
experience of motherhood somewhere on the other side of our wakeful
consciousness. That world is made up not of forms, but of vibrations;
and a picture of it, therefore, instead of being a representation in
three-dimensional space, would be more like a scheme, a presentation
in </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">graph, </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">something like the ideography of the language of the
Japanese themselves, something carrying in it the beauty
characteristic of the calligraphic art.*</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">An Indian Madonna owes its conception to an experience
at the very other end of consciousness. The Indian artist does not at
all think of a human mother; he has not before his mind's<BR>
</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">*It is not my intention to say
that the art of character, even in the deeper sense, is totally
absent in Europe. On the contrary, it is that which has been growing
day by day, – although perhaps often along rather odd lines. It is
a moot question how far this orientation is due to the influence of
the Eastern, especially, the Far Eastern art. In speaking of Europe,
I was referring to the bedrock of the artistic tradition of Europe,
its fundamental classical tone.</span></FONT></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
178</span></FONT></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">eye an idealized mother, nor even a subtilized feeling
of</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">I motherhood. He goes deep into the very origin of
things, and, from there seeks to bring out that which belongs to the
absolute I and the universal. He endeavours to grasp the sense that :
motherhood bears in its ultimate truth and reality. Beyond the form,
beyond even the rhythm, he enters into </span><I><FONT FACE="Times New Roman Baltic, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">bhÄva,
</span></FONT></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">the: spiritual substance of things. An Indian Madonna
</span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">(Ganesh-</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">janani, </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">for example) is not solely or even
primarily a human I mother, but the mother, universal and
transcendent, of sentient</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">and insentient creatures and supersentient beings. She
embodies not the human affection only, but also the parallel
sentiment that finds play in the lower and in the higher creations as
well. She expresses in her limbs not only the gladness of the mother
animal tending its young, but also the exhilaration that a plant
feels in the uprush of its sap while giving out new shoots, and,
above all, the supreme </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">ananda</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;"> which has given birth to the
creation itself. The lines that portray such motherhood must have the
largeness, the sweep, the authenticity of ele&shy;mental forces, the
magic and the mystery of things behind the veil.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">It is this quality which has sometimes made Indian art
seem deficient in its human appeal: the artist chose deliberately to
be non-human, even in the portrayal of human subjects, in order to
bring out the universal and the transcendent element in the truth and
beauty of things. Man is not the measure of creation, nor human
motives the highest or the deepest of nature's movements: at best,
man is but a symbol of truths beyond his humanity.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">It is this characteristic that struck the European mind
in its first contact with the Indian artistic world and called forth
the criticism that Indian culture lacks in humanism. It is true, a
very sublimated humanism finds remarkable expression in Ajanta, –
and perhaps it is here that the Western eye began to learn and
appreciate the Indian style of beauty; even in Ajanta, however, in
the pieces where the art reaches its very height, mere humanism seems
to be at its minimum. And if we go beyond these productions that
reflect the mellowness and humaneness of the Buddhist Compassion, if
we go into the sanctuary of the Brahmanic art, we find that the
experiences embodied there and the method of expression become more</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
179</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">and
more &quot;anonymous&quot;; they have not, that is to say, the </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">local
colour </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">of humanity, which alone makes the European mind feel
entirely at home. Europe's revulsion of feeling against Indian art
came chiefly from her first meeting with the multiple-headed,
multiple-armed, expressionless, strangely poised Hindu gods and
goddesses, so different in every way from ordinary human types.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Indian art had to be non-human, because its aim was to
be supra-human, unnatural, because its very atmosphere was the
supra-natural.</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
180</span></FONT></P>
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