Inter-Relationship of Literature and Fine Arts

INTER-RELATIONSHIP OF LITERATURE
AND FINE ARTS *

DR. PRABHAKAR MACHWE

As a student of art-history and literary criticism, I should start with the problem of interchangeability of critical terms. When we use terms freely like a ‘baroque’ novel or the ‘timbre’ of a poem, or the ‘architectonics’ of a play, and the Rasa in music, or the Dhwani in dance, what are we trying to suggest? As all fine arts employ different media–very different from words–are we only trying to catch what is ephemeral, or push the frontiers of language, or attempt to give a sound-sight picture to a deaf and blind? All senses and sensibility are constantly seeking some balance in imbalance. What was called the quest for beauty and the discovery of bliss in classical poetics in the East and the West is no more mere ‘imitation of nature’ or ‘the best words in the best order’. The Brahman created world as play (Leela) and was a spectator and an outsider (Sakshin). A stroke of brush or a plucking of strings or a careful chiselling may achieve a world of its own which is beyond words. Art is the universal language, in this particular sense.

Movement in Space

Kant’s categories might have been no barrier for pure aesthetic experience. But in India, as the tradition goes, Kreeda te Lokarachana, that is, ‘the play is not a thing in itself’, but is recreating a world, ‘shaping and reshaping a world of its own’ as Goethe would have called it. This alchemy of Abhisambhava meets with the first barrier of universality. Anthropology may have some explanation for why Picasso went to Negro art and Jamini Roy derived his inspiration from Bengali folk-art scrolls; on the one hand, art claims that it has no nation or regional bounds, on the other, every artist is deeply rooted in his Samskaras or traditional archetypes.

Is it true that because a Ravi Shankar or Balasaraswati may have been appreciated in New York, and Shakespeare’s plays have had the same appeal to Moscow audiences as in London, so the appeal of all arts, which are beyond words, is the same throughout the world? It will be naive to suggest that all human beings have the same training and aptitude to appreciate classical Karnataka music or a sophisticated Ragamala miniature painting. Is the temple architecture in India the same in all the regions? Does our iconography use the same symbology? Even the Buddha’s image in one cave in Ajanta is not similar to another, for one to speak of Gandharan art. So, the material used does affect the shape and size of the theatre, the temple or mosque, the statue or the fresco, the mural or the illustration of a medieval Jain manuscript.

If the material delimits the artist’s way of expression, for example, some suggest that the musical instruments in different regions are based on the general capacity to absorb the pitched sound in a particular group of people, is it right to follow Bharata and say that some people from a particular region are best suited for certain roles? Are all those old geographical or natural gifts or handicaps to be recognised even today? With plaster and cement, with linoleum and plastic material, the visual arts are fast moving in a more or less universal world–but in music we have yet to go a long way to enter the age of electronic music. Abstract sculpture and action painting is possible in India, but we have not undertaken similar bold experiments in modern dance and other media. In poetry, free verse and many technical virtuosities are practised, but we don’t see that in the field of art, other than visual, there is such large-scale experimentation. One Kumara Gandharva may invent a new Raga, or some ballet may be based on modern themes by Udai Shankar, but one can safely generalise that music and dance are still conservative. There was some attempt to borrow from the folk-forms, but it was rapidly commercialised or vulgarised.

Movement in Time

As the sociologists call it, in India, there is the conflict between Sanskritisation and Westernisation. Raja Ravi Varma resolved that conflict by dressing a Botticelli’s Venus with a red sari and calling it Lakshmi; but neither Abanindranath Tagore’s attempt to combine Ajanta and Japanese styles nor Amrita Shergil’s painting the Punjabi villagers in a Gauguin idiom solved the problem. The more modern painters in India have definitely two periods; the Indian and the western or modernist-abstract: Biren Dey before visiting U. S. A. and after; or Kishen Khanna before visiting Japan and after. After all, it is the artist’s own choice: whether a poet writes a Rubai or a Hiaku, or a musician prefers to sing a Dhrupad or Thumri, no one is going to dictate to him. Tagore tried to combine Indian musical melody with western harmony and in this attempt the later expressionist Tagore the painter broke his own crucible of the earlier pantheistic-romantic Tagore the poet.

Some people talk of time and timelessness. I am not sure when we talk of the Indian concept of Time, what we exactly mean by it–The Vedic Sun-God, or the Saivite Mahakala, or the Jain or Buddhist or Tantric phenomenology? One thing is certain: Nobody wrote the biography of Kalidasa, nor did the artists in Ajanta or Ellora, Halebied or Mahabalipuram inscribe their names in stones or on walls. We here, in India, prized the end-product art more than the individual artist who created it. Like Brahman, the creator remained behind the show and yet was the supreme puppeteer. He was the creator and the creation combined, Shiva and Sakti together. Hence the artist’s vision of Death in India and in the west is so different. I have seen the scenes of the Crusades painted in some medieval churches in Europe; yesterday, I saw the Rama-Ravana war in the Dutch Palace in Cochin and the stylised seven Sal trees cut by one arrow in Bali-vadha, and it seems that the Indian tradition is well-defined in the proverbial three monkeys: don’t see evil, don’t hear evil, don’t speak evil. It is the West, post-Hellenic West beginning with Aristotle, which brought this dichotomy between ‘A’ and ‘Non-A’ and subsequent tragedy, How much of western music, even Negro spirituals, is primarily concerned with Karuna Rasa! In Indian music, excepting a few Ragas, none is specially earmarked for pathos. The movement in time is another problem in a speed-mad modern world, where people are forgetting Rodin’s wise adage ‘Slowness is Beauty’.

Freedom and Self-Expression

I think in this East-West juxtaposition or dialogue in the field of Arts in modern India, the traditional concepts of freedom and self-expression are fast changing. In the ancient times ‘every temple was a body and every body was a temple’–even temples had erotic zones and areas like the human body. When art was just a handmaid of religion, freedom for the artist meant salvation: a Dharmapada’s masterpiece was to jump from the spiral of Konark, or a devadasi would offer herself to an Amman or Kovil altar. In the medieval days, when the Indian Arts became more secular, under the influence of Islam and Christianity, the Artist’s destiny was bound with the royal patron. The Mughal portrait-painter, or the Rajastani or Dogri illustrator of a puranic theme would take special care not to paint the king as he was, with all his warts.

With the British Victorian import of artistic technique and taste in visual arts, the artists’ freedom was delimited by the new market of connoisseurs, and of course, the sweet will of our colonial masters During the nationalist struggle, artists sought new pastures and meadows, and I remember Nandalal Bose painting a walking Gandhi (further sculpted by D. P. Roy Chowdhury), or Bendre painting a Congress session, and Hebbar and Hussain sketching a Nehru. Artists were free to choose and paint whatever they liked and in whatever manner: a Souza or a Padamas or a Swaminathan painting a nude is very different from a similar painter painting thirty years ago. The artist became more and more self-conscious. The social taboos and shams became gradually meaningless. But while the visual arts broke many traditional curbs to freedom, music and dance stuck to the ‘purity’ of revivalism. All the four classical dances, with their elaborate rituals, were static, and even Orissi joined the movement. But here the formalistic aspect was being more emphasised; in the past it was a spiritual pilgrimage, a penance or Sadhana. So the artist gradually discovered his own self; his expression also became less free. In literature the dreamy, wishy-washy sentimental romanticism and the nihilistic revolutionary realism gave way to a more poised age of reason, a modernist adventure to combine science with religion, reason with anti-reason.

Exploring the Unconscious

This brings one to the problem of the indirect curbs on the freedom of the artists. Who buys Art? No more the religious endowments, no more the native states or the aristocracy patronising the musicians, sculptors and artists. The new Maharajas are the commissions offered by Governmental or semi-Governmental agencies; the Broadcasting and Television centre; the film-magnates and the new rich class. Is democracy necessarily mediocracy as Shaw called it? With the increasing commercialism, the mid-cult and mass-cult are rapidly encroaching upon our tastes. The violent, anti-rational, Beatnik–Hungry Generations–Digambara Kavita has started having its volcanic outbursts in poetry. In painting the angry young man has not reached the stage of piercing his canvass with a palette-knife but has started searing the surface of wood with a blow-lamp. The definitions of traditional Beauty and Balance, Sublimity and Significance have started dwindling. New artists have begun to explore the unconscious dark recesses of the mental world like Muktibodh or Himmat Shah or Kanoria. Here, one again sees an atavistic, neo-primitive, conscious movement of ‘to Original Nature.’

The Horror of the Ugly

Here I want to stop, because words fail me. The new world of the anti-artist’s vision is a charred, weird, eerie and undefined world. I know not its boundaries. It is a protest against nagging parents, sex-frustration, hidebound tradition, gagging establishment, indirect censorship, blind jingoism, atom-splitting all-destructiveness. This feeling that there is no exit, there is no way out, that we are doomed for ever, this post-war western-European ‘Angst’ is now eating into the vitals of our artistic experience too. No amount of hair-splitting of classical works on poetics or Shilpa-Shastras or Natya-Shastras is going to help this new artist. He is feeling cheated. He has no sympathetic critics. The older generation dubs him as ‘derivative; western-oriented, anti-Indian’, the younger generation has no time to wait and watch and wonder. In this atmosphere of corroding erosion of values and stifling overwhelming anarchy of belief-patterns, many of them self-contradictory, the artist, and the poet, is baffled. He seeks for words which fail him. He has lost his ‘ladder to his own soul’, while loud-speakers din into his ears “in the Upanishads it is written: Know Thyself (Aatmaanam Viddhi )” “May be it was written or uttered by God Himself, but how does it help me?”–the artist seems to ask.

* Speech delivered at the fifth All-India Writers’ Conference in Kerala on 28-12-1965.