CONTENTS:
1. The Issue: Is India Cicilised?
2. A Ratinonalistic Critic on Indian Culture
3. A Defence of Indian Culture
4. Indian Culture and External Influence
A good deal of hostile or unsympathetic western criticism of Indian civilisation has been directed in the past against its aesthetic side and taken the form of a disdainful or violent depreciation of its fine arts, architecture, sculpture and painting. Mr. Archer would not find much support in his wholesale and undiscriminating depreciation of a great literature, but here too there has been, if not positive attack, much failure of understanding; but in the attack on Indian art, his is the last and shrillest of many hostile voices. This aesthetic side of a people's culture is of the highest importance and demands almost as much scrutiny and carefulness of appreciation as the philosophy, religion and central formative ideas which have been the foundation of Indian life and of which much of the art and literature is a conscious expression in significant aesthetic forms. Fortunately, a considerable amount of work has been already done in the clearing away of misconceptions about Indian sculpture and painting and, if that were all, I might be content to refer to the works of Mr. Havell and Dr. Coomaraswamy or to the sufficiently understanding though less deeply informed and penetrating criticisms of others who cannot be charged with a prepossession in favour of oriental work. But a more general and searching consideration of first principles is called for in any complete view of the essential motives of Indian culture. I am appealing mainly to that new mind of India which long misled by an alien education, view and influence is returning to a sound and true idea of its past and future; but in this field the return is far from being as pervading, complete or luminous as it should be. I shall confine myself therefore first to a consideration of the sources of misunderstanding and pass from that to the true cultural significance of Indian aesthetic creation.
Mr. Archer pursuing his policy of Thorough devotes a whole chapter to the subject. This chapter is one long torrent of sweeping denunciation. But it would be a waste of time to take his attack as serious criticism and answer all in detail. His reply to defenders and eulogists is amazing in its shallowness and triviality, made up mostly of small, feeble and sometimes irrelevant points, big glaring epithets and forcibly senseless phrases, based for the rest on a misunderstanding or a sheer inability to conceive the meaning of spiritual experiences and metaphysical ideas, which betrays an entire absence of the religious sense and the philosophic mind. Mr. Archer is of course a rationalist and contemner of philosophy and entitled to his deficiencies; but why then try to judge things into the sense of which one is unable to enter and exhibit the spectacle of a blind man discoursing on colours? I will cite one or two instances which will show the quality of his criticism and amply justify a refusal to attach any positive value to the actual points he labours to make, except for the light they throw on the psychology of the objectors.
I will give first an instance amazing in its ineptitude. The Indian ideal figure of the masculine body insists on two features among many, a characteristic width at the shoulders and slenderness in the middle. Well, an objection to broadness of girth and largeness of belly allowed only where they are appropriate as in sculptures of Ganesha or the Yakshas is not peculiar to the Indian aesthetic sense; an emphasis, even a pronounced emphasis on their opposites is surely intelligible enough as an aesthetic tradition, however some may prefer a more realistic and prosperous presentation of the human figure. But Indian poets and authorities on art have given in this connection the simile of the lion, and lo and behold Mr. Archer solemnly discoursing on this image as a plain proof that the Indian people were just only out of the semi-savage state! It is only too clear that they drew the ideal of heroic manhood from their native jungle, from theriolatry, that is to say, from a worship of wild beasts! I presume, on the same principle and with the same stupefying ingenuity he would find in Kamban's image of the sea for the colour and depth of Sita's eyes clear evidence of a still more primitive savagery and barbaric worship of inanimate nature, or in Valmiki's description of his heroine's "eyes like wine", madireksana, evidence of a chronic inebriety and semi-drunken inspiration of the Indian poetic mind. This is one example of Mr. Archer's most telling points. It is by no means an isolated though it is an extreme specimen, and the absurdity of that particular argument only brings out the triviality of this manner of criticism. It is on a par with the common objection to the slim hands and feet loved of the Bengal painters which one hears sometimes advanced as a solid condemnation of their work. And that can be pardoned in the average man who under the high dispensation of modern culture is not expected to have any intelligent conception about art, the instinctive appreciation has been already safely killed and buried. But what are we to say of a professed critic who ignores the deeper motives and fastens on details in order to give them this kind of significance?
But there are more grave and important objections in this criticism;
for Mr. Archer turns also to deal with philosophy in art. The whole basis
of Indian artistic creation, perfectly conscious and recognised in the canons,
is directly spiritual and intuitive. Mr. Havell rightly lays stress on this
essential distinction and speaks in passing of the infinite superiority
of the method of direct perception over intellect, an assertion naturally
offensive to the rationalistic mind, though it is now increasingiy affirmed
by leading western thinkers. Mr. Archer at once starts out to hack at it
with a very blunt tomahawk. How does he deal with this crucial matter? In
a way which misses the whole real point and has nothing whatever to do with
the philosophy of art. He fastens on Mr. Havell's coupling of the master
intuition of Buddha with the great intuition of Newton and objects to the
parallel because the two discoveries deal with two different orders of knowledge,
one scientific and physical, the other mental or psychic, spiritual or philosophic
in nature. He trots out from its stable the old objection that Newton's
intuition was only the last step in a long intellectual process, while according
to this positive psychologist and philosophic critic the intuitions of Buddha
and other Indian sages had no basis in any intellectual process of any kind
or any verifiable experience. It is on the contrary the simple fact, well-known
to all who know anything of the subject, that the conclusions of Buddha
and other Indian philosophers (I am not now speaking of the inspired thought
of the Upanishads which was pure spiritual experience enlightened by intuition
and gnosis,) were preceded by a very acute scrutiny of relevant psychological
phenomena and a process of reasoning which, though certainly not rationalistic,
was as rational as any other method of thinking. He clinches his refutation
by the sage remark that these intuitions which he chooses to call fantasies
contradict one another and therefore, it seems, have no sort of value except
their vain metaphysical subtlety. Are we to conclude that the patient study
of phenomena, the scrupulous and rigidly verifiable intellectual reasonings
and conclusions of western scientists have led to no conflicting or contradictory
results? One could never imagine at this rate that the science of heredity
is torn by conflicting "fantasies" or that Newton's "fantasies"
about space and gravitational effect on space are at this day in danger
of being upset by Einstein's "fantasies" in the same field. It
is a minor matter that Mr. Archer happens to be wrong in his idea of Buddha's
intuition when he says that he would have rejected a certain Vedantic intuition,
since Buddha neither accepted nor rejected, but simply refused at all to
speculate on the supreme cause. His intuition was confined to the cause
of sorrow and the impermanence of things and the release by extinction of
ego, desire and samskara, and so far as he chose to go, his intuition
of this extinction, Nirvana, and the Vedantic intuition of the supreme unity
were the seeing of one truth of spiritual experience, seen no doubt from
different angles of vision and couched in different intellectual forms,
but with a common intuitive substance. The rest was foreign to Buddha's
rigidly practical purpose. All this leads us far afield from our subject,
but our critic has a remarkably confused mind and to follow him is to be
condemned to divagate.
(....)
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