The Collective Man of Ancient India

The Collective Man of

Ancient India

(A Theory of the Production of Indian Art)

Across the rivers and seas all over the world huge bridges have been built. A bridge is much more than what it looks above the surface of water. It has its foundations hundreds of feet below the mud of the river bottom. Huge granite stones in countless number or thousands of sand bags are deposited underneath, to satisfy the hunger of the mobile mud. On their rest the artistically laid out pillars and girders. But these stones are once for all buried and forgotten in the chilly blackness of the earth. Even so do the great architects, sculptors and painters of India live in their native land. They work and suffer and glide off the face of the earth, without leaving behind a name. But to them we owe all our visible glory.

Centuries of accumulated wisdom had taught our forefathers that the highest satisfaction of the soul could be attained only through self-effacing suffering and sacrifice for the sake of the common good, which they called the performance of Dharma.

The individuals that comprise a Nation have varying degrees of success, fortune and happiness in life. But the Nation possesses properties which the individual does not retain. The culture, the character, the thought-structure, nay the heart, the mind and the soul of the Nation remain constant entities, unaffected by the chaos of individual idiosyncrasies. The paradox is that although the Nation is built of individuals, the Nation thinks and acts independently ofindividuals. Thus Slocombe's description or Gandhi as ‘incarnating the very soul of India’ is not merely an emotional utterance but a grim scientific truth.

If the Nation has got an individuality, then will not this individuality express itself in thoughts and actions? The Nation which is better called ‘the collective man,’ existed in Ancient India and today exists in Soviet Russia. The German Nation has always shown a marked individuality. The huge rock architecture of India and the Hindu religion itself are striking creations of the collective man of India. Not one man built or conceived our rock temples; not one man founded the Hindu religion. They are the work of the collective giant.

Under the service of the collective man of Ancient India, our artists voluntarily gave up their individuality and catered to his tastes. The collective man was their earthly God, and service of him was the execution of Dharma. Such implicit obedience to the collective man, harnessed to the superb qualities of self-denial, self-sacrifice and self-immolation on the part of the individual, made our collective man a very formidable giant. He built up a religion embracing all the Universe and all natural phenomena. His giant imagination could easily conceive of a Brahman without beginning or end, without joy or sorrow.

Even this highly religious collective giant could not escape the vital principle governing the Universe, viz., the passion for creation. "Creation itself is both an act of homage and a reflection of the Divine origin of the Universe." Creative energy can be given vent to either by procreation or by creative thought. The history of Sankara or Faraday clearly indicates how creative energy can be completely diverted along an intellectual channel. Faraday is said to have exclaimed that he forgot to marry. For our collective man, procreation was out of question, since that business was conducted by the individuals. He, therefore, created things of the imagination that stagger intelligent humanity; but not satisfied with weightless things he tried his hand on the weighty things of the earth. He became an architect, a great temple-builder. But being a giant, he was not satisfied with a few pieces of granite and several cubic feet of lumber for his building, as we are wont to, but from solid hill-sides he carved whole temples. He was not exasperated by our conceptions of Time. For a century or two, he could afford going on building the same thing. Thus arose the great cave-temples of India, the Ellora caves, the Elephanta Caves, the rock-temples at Trichinopoly and a thousand others. None but the collective man could have built them; the individual is incapable of even conceiving them. Even granting that the individual could conceive of such giant dimensions, a realisation, of his own limitations–his short period of life, his crude implements and tools, and the feeling of non-possession and non-enjoyment of the thing he create–would make him drop any idea of its execution. Again it is psychologically impossible for a man to work if he feels that he cannot even see the fruits of his labour. Hence the conclusion that the collective man alone could have built our giant architecture and sculpture. Our historians say that they were built by kings. That will carry no conviction since the limitations mentioned with regard to the individual apply to kings also. The simple unsophisticated people of the localities where these temples stand, tell us that they were created by Gods. That really carries the spirit of the truth.

When the collective man determined to build a giant architecture, he summoned wholesale the artisans of the land. Summoned by duty, they all flocked together to execute the will of the giant. Each artisan sat, gnawed and withered on a chink of the giant excavations. Generations of artisans poured in before the structure could be completed. Such was the will of the collective man. Individuality being an unwanted commodity, any one individual could be succeeded by another or his progeny without bringing detriment to the work. Thus the collective man built his caves.

What must have been the structure of the society that could have so whole-heartedly responded to the will of the collective man? This is the crucial and most important question to be solved. Did that society or nation possess unity? Absolute and harmonious unity must have existed in Ancient India between the various castes, communities, and religious sects. This is substantially proved by our architecture and sculpture. That a higher kind of unity wasprevalent in the India of those days is proved by our sculpture. Look at the stone images of the Buddha found all over India. All these images, it must be noted, have identical shape and convey the same idea. At the same time, the creators of these images lived in different parts of the country—thousands of miles separating them–without any possible means of communication between one another. Even now the Punjabi seldom collides with the Malayalee, and, if the Punjabi and the Malayalee produce the same identical symbolic images, then it means that there is unity of thought, ideas and emotions between the two. The word ‘symbolic’ is important since the stone image of a real cow created by an Indian sculptor will certainly resemble that created by a Peruvian, and yet there may not be any unity of thought or idea between them. The observation with respect to the image of the Buddha applies equally to other images, of Siva for example. Hence, there was a fundamental unity of thought in Ancient India. And everybody will admit that the supremest unity is the unity of thoughts, ideas and emotions. This is the crowning achievement of a Nation, and it may justly be claimed for India that she did achieve this.