Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s Universalism

Son of a Hindu father, Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy of Ceylon and an English mother, Lady Elizabeth Clay Beeby of Kent, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. In partial modification of William Shakespeeare’s words, it can be said of Ananda Coomaraswamy that he was born great and achieved greatness, but greatness was not thrust upon him. A scholar and writer of the eminence of Coomaraswamy is a rarity and a person like him seldom appears. He was a ready reckoner for scholars in the West on oriental religion, philosophy and arts. He was adored as a sage even during his lifetime. He lived up to what the Kural says:

“The recompense a son can pay his father
Is for the world to say,
What penance his father might have done
To beget a son one like him.” (The Tirukkural, 70)

Ananda’s father, Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy was a popular figure in the court circles of Queen Victoria, who conferred on him the honour of Knighthood on the 6th August, 1874. Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, in his last novel, portrays a Buddhist missionary, Kusinara, bearing in mind Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy. Sir P. Arunachalam, a nephew of Sir Muthu, wrote to the London Times in 1905 and again in 1920 that “Sir Kumara Swami of Ceylon was well-known to Lord Beaconsfield (Disraeli) and was a Buddhist scholar of repute in his day and a devotee of Buddha’s philosophy”.¹ Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy passed away on Sunday, the 4th May, 1879, the day he was expected to sail for England from Ceylon to join his wife and infant son. Ananda Coomaraswamy was brought up by his mother in England, where he graduated at London University and later was awarded a Doctorate in Science in Geology. His aristocratic affluence apart, “he had his ordinary share of ‘teasing’ by his schoolmates based in part on his being of different nationality and colour, and to arouse his ire which could only be done in safety when out of reach of his arms and legs”, ² according to his class-mate, Crofton E. Gane. In the absence of an authentic biography, which Ananda Coomaraswamy considered as asvargya, except for some broad outlines it is well-nigh impossible to spell out the inspiring incidents in his life, which will always remain a concealed book.

An outstanding scholar not of one but several centuries with an output in quality and quantity amazingly inspiring, Ananda Coomaraswamy started his life as the Director of Mineralogical Survey in Ceylon, where he could not continue for long as a mute witness to its art treasures being written off. His Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908) came as morale booster to a people sagging in their enthusiasm for their own art and culture and imitating the west. He is known the world over as the author of the essay, Dance of Siva. It became a world classic and was the guidelight for hundreds of scholars to take to the study of the Lord of Dance and works big and small on the subject began to appear. The world of research must be grateful to Coomaraswamy for paving a highway for them, but it must be said that none else could reach the Himalayan peak at which Coomaraswamy’s essay stands. Study of the philosophy of Saiva Siddhanta got a fillip thanks to the Dance of Siva, which opened the eyes of many and enabled them to understand the symbolism enshrined in the form of Nataraja. During his stay in Ceylon, Coomaraswamy came into close contact with his distinguished cousins, Sir P. Ramanathan and Sir P. Arunachalam and later in India with poet Rabindranath Tagore and Dr Bhagavan Das. From the realm of geology to the domain of art he journeyed and drifted slowly but steadily to the kingdom of philosophy, whence he did not look . Though his works in the earlier period of his life had a preponderant dose of art, they were not divorced from nor devoid of philosophy. In his essay, ‘What has India contributed to Human Welfare?’, Coomaraswamy observes: “All that India can offer to the world proceeds from her philosophy. This philosophy is not, indeed, unknown to others–it is equally the gospel of Jesus and of Blake, Lao Tze and Rumi–but nowhere has it been made the essential basis of sociology and education. In India, philosophy is not regarded primarily as a mental gymnastic, but rather, and with deep religious conviction, as our salvation (moksha)from the ignorance (avidya) which for ever hides from our eyes the vision of reality. Philosophy is the key to the map of life, by which are set forth the meaning of life and the means of attaining its goal. … … What is needed for the common civilization of the world is the recognition of common problems, and to co-operate in their solution. If it be asked what inner riches India brings to aid in the realization of a civilization of the world, then from the Indian standpoint, the answer must be found in her religions and her philosophy, and her constant application of abstract theory to practical life”. ³ In his essay ‘On the pertinence of philosophy’, Coomaraswamy defines: “It will not be contested that ‘philosophy,’ implies rather the love of wisdom than the love of knowledge, nor secondarily that from the ‘love of wisdom’, philosophy has come by a natural transition to mean the doctrine of those who love the wisdom and are called philosophers. … … Philosophy is a wisdom about knowledge, a correction du savoir-penser.”In the same essay, in another place he writes: “Religions may and must be many, each being an ‘arrangement of God’, and stylistically differentiated, inasmuch as the thing known can only be in the knower according to the mode of the knower, and hence as we say in India, ‘He takes forms that are imagined by his worshippers,’ or as Eckart expresses it, ‘I am the cause that God is God.’ In the footnote against this he writes: “The physical analogy is represented in the assertion of the anthropologist that ‘God is man-made’; a proposition perfectly valid within the conditions of its own level reference “.⁴

Ananda Coomaraswamy’s intellectual pursuit was born out of an awakening in him to discover and not to create. His familiarity with Greek and Latin endowed him with the advantage of making a comparative study of oriental and occidental literatures. As early as 1915, Duggirala Gopalakrishnaya in collaboration with whom he translated the Abhinaya Darpana of Nandikeswara under the title ‘The Mirror of Gesture’ found that in Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy the idealism of the East and the practicalism of the West are harmoniously blended”. ⁵ In this, he was in great company with Swami Vivekananda, poet Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. Partly because of up bringing in the West and partly because of his parentage–British on his mother’s side and Ceylonese Tamil on his father’s side–Ananda Coomaraswamy had perhaps a natural advantage in interpreting the East to the West and vice versa. The essay, ‘The Common Wisdom of the World’ bears eloquent testimony to his erudition and sense of universalism. The essay begins thus:

“When God is our teacher, men are all agreed.” “It is wise to listen, not to me, but to the word that ever Isand to agree that all things are One. The WORD is common to all”. So said Xenophon and Heracleitus, most truly.

“I have often argued that the WORD that has been handed down in the Western tradition from the pre-Socratic to the present day, and the WORD to the hearing of which we in India refer by the name of Sruti, “audition”, corresponding to what in the West is called “Scripture”, are one and the same. During many years I have collected from Eastern and Western sources parallel passages in which identical doctrines have been enunciated as nearly as possible in the same term and often, indeed, in the same idioms and making use of etymologically equivalent words; not at all with a view to the demonstration of any literary “influences”, but only in order to show that the doctrines themselves are cognate in the same sense that the etymons, e. g., of Greek and Sanskrit, are cognate, that is to say, of common origin.”

Ananda Coomaraswamy thereafter cites a few representative examples of these collations, one of which is reproduced below:

Motion-at-will

The deceased becomes an ‘Osiris justified’ ... this Osiris “can go wherever he pleases...(having power over) all the mysteries of the divine forms...he might wish to assume” (A. Moret, The Nile and Egyptian Civilization. 1927. p. 405). “Shall pass in and out, and find pasture” (John 10.9). “Now let thy liking be thy leader” (Dante, Purgatnrio27.131). “We shall be made so subtle in body and soul together, that we shall be then swiftly where us list bodily, as we be now in our thoughts ghostly” (Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 59). “Where there is motion-at-will” (Rgveda9.13.9.). “Those who decease, having already found here the Self and those true-desires, they become movers-at-will in every world” (Chandogya Up. 8-1.6); “up and down these worlds; eating what he will, and assuming what form he will” (Taittiriya Up. 3.10.5).

Ananda Coomaraswamy concluded: “Any extended list of such dharma paryaayaas would fill a book”. ⁶

Before joining the Boston Museum of the United States of America and after relinquishing the directorship of the Mineralogical Survey of Ceylon, Ananda Coomaraswamy spent his time in studying objects of art first hand collecting specimens in India. He enjoyed the friendship of poet Rabindranath Tagore with whom he was in correspondence since 1913. Some of the great contemporaries of his time he had known personally were Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Heinrich Zimmer, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Okakura. “The personal relation between the two (Tagore and Coomaraswamy) continued unabated for many years. Coomaraswamy enjoyed the friendship of the poet and Acharya Abanindranath in the ancestral home of the Tagores at Jorasanko in Calcutta. He was also the guest of the poet at Santiniketan. Cordial correspondence between the two continued over a long period of time. Coomaraswamy always cherished a high respect for the poet because the latter’s literature was replete with India’s eternal message to the world. He was one of the very first to realise that Tagore’s writings should reach the Western mind. He with the late Ajit Kumar Chakravarti first rendered Tagore’s poems into English. Rabindranath, in his turn, always respected Coomaraswamy as one of the greatest Indians who took upon their shoulders the task of re-discovering India,” writes Amiya Kumar Sen of Viswabharati. The Tiruvalankadu bronze of Nataraja in the Madras Museum was projected into world arena, thanks to Coomaraswamy introducing the same to the world famous sculptor, Auguste Rodin, whose pen-portrait of the bronze is a classic. Heinrich Zimmer, who went to America as a refugee from Germany during Hitler’s days, enjoyed the friendship of Coomaraswamy. He rendered assistance to Joseph Campbell in editing the manuscripts for publication. Right from the days of directorship of the Mineralogical Survey of Ceylon till his seventieth year when he suddenly passed away, Coomaraswamy was ceaselessly working, having produced standard works on art criticism and history and blossomed into a philosopher, although he was averse to building a philosophy of his own. The full impact of Coomaraswamy’s personality would not be fully revealed to the world, unless his works are systematically studied and interpreted.

Every minute of his time, Coomaraswamy was re-discovering ancient India and interpreting the same to people of his generation and posterity. When his fourteen essays under the title, ‘The Dance of Siva’ appeared in 1917, some of the eyebrows in the West were raised as if there was an element of exaggeration. Coomaraswamy was an objective writer and it did not take long for him to stand his ground. His weighty writings focused the Orient, in particular India, against a universal setting as the common heritage of Man. Any theme at the hand of Coomaraswamy acquires a magic mould and is metamorphosed into solid unalloyed gold-maarrariyaata celum pacum pon, to borrow a phrase from the Tamil hymnist and saint Manikkavacakar. In his essay, “Understanding and Reunion–An Oriental Perspective,” Coomaraswamy writes in his inimitable style: “As the late Dr Heinrich Zimmer remarked in his admirable introduction to La Meri’s ‘The Gesture Language of the Indian Dance’, ‘the Indian dance reflects the dance of the universe, whose transient gestures we all of us are...Its function is to be an encyclopaedic initiation into the manifold mystery of life.’ The history of Indian dancing can be traced through three millennium and that of treatises on the subject through two. In the oldest books we find a God (Indra) described as ‘dancing his heroic deeds’ and as ‘performing a metrical composition’ and that it is a dance of the gods that sets in motion the cosmic process. We find that the ritual of the sacrifice, which is an ‘initiation’ of what was done by the gods in the beginning, includes the dance in various forms; and that there are many gestures which are common to the iconography of the deities... These gestures are related to those that are familiar in everyday life. It is indeed impossible to detach a traditional art from its environment and to consider it simply as an art form. Art is a part of life and life itself an art”. ⁸

Dance is Siva-lila–play of Siva. Dancing, He creates, protects, destroys, gives respite to souls and bestows grace on them. The dancing Lord the hymnists sang of, the artists moulded into bronzes. The Cholas, though not remembered for transplanting Indian culture in East Asia, will certainly be remembered for their Nataraja bronzes being worshipped in temples today and adorning the museums all over the globe. The Lord’s dance Coomaraswamy depicted in a short essay got him fame sky-high. Not only in the essay in question, but elsewhere too Coomaraswamy thinks aloud of the Lord who dances not only in ether, but also in the heart of the devotee. In the essay alluded to in the preceding paragraph, Coomaraswamy writes: “One of the most familiar forms of Indian art in our museums is that of Siva as Natataja, Lord of the Dance, whose creative and destructive, fettering and liberating operation is conceived in terms of thesis and anti-thesis of a dance, of which the incessance is the manifestation of his sustaining power. From this cosmic dance all other activities operations and dances are so to speak, experts to the extent of its perfection, every performance ‘participates’ in the divine operation, the principles of dancing are not of human invention, but have been revealed, and have been transmitted from generation to generation in pupillary succession. The standard of excellence is not one of pleasure that may be felt by a given audience, but one of correctness, just as for Plato, the irregularity of human motions is to be corrected by an assimilation to cosmic rhythm. An educated audience is pre-supposed, one that will be pleased by whatever is correct in the performance, and displeased conversely. It is in the same way that the mathematician judges of the beauty of an equation”.⁹

Whatever be one’s station in life or avocation, the great make their mark. The Dance of Siva, Rajput Paintings, Origin of the Buddha Image, Symbolism in Indian Sculptures–these readily flash across one’s mind, with the very mention of Ananda Coomaraswamy’s name. But he is something more. He made the faint echo of the dim but glorious past of ancient India reverberate in our hearts in his powerful voice and carried the West with him to meet the East in all its grandeur. From the scriptures of the East and the West, he gave identical sayings and led Man to tread nobler path in life.

References

¹ S. Durai Raja Singam: The Life and Writings of Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy.
² Homage to Ananda Coomaraswamy (A memorial volume edited by S. Durai Raja Singam, Kuanton, Malaya. 1947)
³ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: The Dance of Siva (1917)
⁴ Contemporary Indian Philosophy. Edited by S. Radhakrishnan & J. H. Muirhead. 1936.
cf. (i) Kaaraikkaal Ammaiyaar sings: (Eleventh Tirumurai Arputa-t-tiruvantaati–IV-33)
“Whosoever they be, professing whatever they do,
Howsoever they put on a garb and project an image,
The Lord manifests Himself in the same shape and form to them.”
and (ii) Tirumurukaarru-p-padai(lines 247-248):
“The while votaries worship
That their hearts’ desires may be fulfilled,
Here also doth He dwell.”
⁵ G. V. Subba Rao: Sree Gopalakrishnayya. 1935.
⁶ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: The Common Wisdom of the World.
⁷ Homage to Ananda Coomaraswamy, Vol. II (A Memorial Volume edited by S. Durai Raja Singam) Kuanton, Malaya. 1947.
⁸ Ananda Coomaraswamy: Understanding and Reunion –An Oriental
⁹ Ibid.