Dr Coomaraswamy as an Interpreter of Rajput Painting

Dr COOMARASWAMY AS AN INTERPRETER
OF RAJPUT PAINTING

Sixty-one years ago, Dr Ananda K. qoomaraswamy awoke one morning in London to find that his publication entitled Rajput Painting...an account of the Hindu paintings of Rajasthan and the Punnjab Himalayas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century described in their relation to contemporary thought was an immediate success. Indeed, it became and has remained, an authentic classic of Indian art history.

Although Coomaraswamy was a versatile and prolific writer, his interpretative work on Rajput Painting, is his most significant contribution to Indian art history. True, long before Commaraswamy published his original essay on Rajput Painting in the Burlington Magazine in 1912, certain art critics had already written on some aspects of Rajput art–a contribution to architecture by J. Ferguson, an occasional piece on painting by Hendley and essays on the decorative arts by Sir George Birdwood and Percy Brown. However, these art critics mistook surface qualities and expressions for fundamentals and universals. Naturally their inability to comprehend the attitude and level of vision attained by the Rajput artists accounted for shallow understanding. And in the process of identifying Rajput painting with a tradition different that of the Mughals, Coomaraswamy discovered the actual headwaters of the stream of Rajput art.

Coomarswamy’s Rajput Painting is the work of a pioneer, which reveals a new world of romance and mysticism, heroism and chivalry. Not surprisingly, it inspired several informative publications by O. C. Ganguly, N. C. Mehta, L. Binyon, H. Goetz, W. G. Archer, Eric Dickinson, Karl Khandalawala, M. S. Randhawa, B. N. Goswamy and several others. for instance, the importance of Archer’s work is derived from his accent on the styles and centres of Pahari painting. Equally important is the publication of Eric Dickinson and Karl Khandalawala which highlights the romantic lyricism of the Kishengarh school. Similarly Randhawa’s focus is on the brilliancy of colours which constitutes the peculiar appeal of the Basohli painting.

It is easy to be unfair to a pioneer like Coomaraswamy. It is easier to stir up the old controversies about “styles” and “bias.” Yet. interestingly, Coomaraswamy’s Rajput Painting has not become outdated amid the flood of “new material” pertaining to the Rajasthani, Basohli, Kangra and related styles, that appeared over the decades. The fact that Mughal influences have played an important part in the evolution of the Rajasthani style is hardly relevant in an assessment of Coomaraswamy’s contribution to the study of Rajput painting. Indeed Coomaraswamy had other fish to fry. For he was basically concerned with the study of Rajput painting as a part of the mediaeval ground of the history of ideas.

Coomaraswamy had that rarest of scholarly gifts, a mind which was at once sensitive and inter-disciplinary. His contributions to the study of Rajput painting over the years–the original work on Rajput Painting, Part V of the Catalogue of the Indian Collections in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which is devoted to Rajput painting and the section dealing with Rajput painting in the History of Indian and Indonesian Art–reflect a wide spectrum of moods and insights. Here is an evocation of Cowdust whichtranslates Krishna from the merely mortal realm of time and place into an immutable product of the Vaishnava imagination. “In the Museum of Fine Arts Collections,” wrote Coomaraswamy, “there is no more lovely painting of the Kangra school than the well-known Cowdust where Krishna is seen returning with the herds and herdsmen to Brindavan at sunset...He is an Orphic power whose music charms and beguiles all nature, animate and inanimate alike, and the very rivers stay the courses to hear it…In innumerable paintings we find varied combinations of the theme.” Again Coomaraswamy’s exposition of the Hindi Ragamala Texts reveals a new aesthetic insight into the nature of Rajput aesthetcs. He defines the Ragamala as “profoundly imagined pictures of human passion.” In these Ragamala paintings, with interweaving of mood and suggestion, as colours and design in a piece of embroidery, we have an authentic fragment of fine art. For example, the aim and method of the Bundi painting Madhu Madhari are expressed in Coomaraswamy’s translation of a Ragamala text. To cite another example, the Bundi painting depicting the lovers’ dalliance can be visualized in the Raga Malkaus.

At least three aesthetic reasons exist for calling the book a classic. First, there is a vernal freshness here which forecasts its more sensitive use in Coomaraswamy’s next book, History of Indian and Indonesian Art as the following aesthetic response suggests: “What Chinese art achieved for landscape, is here accomplished for human love. Here, if never and nowhere else in the world, the Western Gates are opened wide. The arms of lovers are about each other’s necks, eye meets eye, the whispering Sakhis speak of nothing else but the course of Krishna’s courtship, the very animals are spell-bound by the sound of Krishna’s flute and the elements stand still to hear Ragas and the Raginis. This art is only concerned with the realities of life, above all, with passionate love-service, conceived as the means and symbol of all Union. If Rajput art at first sight appears to lack the material charm of Persian pastorals, or the significance of Mughal portraiture, it more than compensates in tenderness and depth of feeling, in gravity and reverence.

Second, Coomaraswamy traces, with a revealing sensitivity as of a painter, the shimmeringly exquisite colour scheme in sky and valley, shrub and dewdrop and to his seeing eye the aesthetic inspiration of the Rajput paintings has its radiating point in Vaishnava mysticism. Here it is well to recall that Wordsworth wrote of that “inward eye which is the bliss of solitude” while reflecting upon the Ullswater daffodils. To see into the life of things is to enable the seeing eye to perceive an entire spectrum of beauty. Again just as Shelley perceived a ray of what he termed as “a light of laughing flowers”, so is Coomaraswamy’s book on Rajput Painting full of a passionate conviction that “the sound of Krishna’s flute is the voice of Eternity heard by the dwellers in Time.” Furthermore, it would be a mistake to dissociate Coomaraswamy’s interpretation from his historical method general, for it is the way in which he transcends the limitations of men’s existence in an attempt to understand the aesthetic significance of Vaishnava mysticism, that his greatness as an interpreter of Rajput Paintingslies. Above all, Coomaraswamy is aware of thee haunting presence of Krishna that moves behind the thought and feeling of the Rajput painters, and communicates this aesthetic awareness in sensitive prose: “In Rajput art it is not through landscape or through animal painting that the highest universality is reached. There is no such philosophic interpretation of Nature, as we recognize in Chinese interpretations of mist and mountain, dragon and tiger. The universalism of Vaishnava art is attained in another way; its philosophic language is that of human love; its pair of opposites–Mist and Mountain, Yin and Yang, Being and Becoming, Rest and Energy, Spirit and Matter–are typified by Man and Woman...in this convention of its own, so different from and complementary to that of Chinese art, the Vaishnava art of Hindusthan is none the less the Indian equivalent of Ch’an or Zen Buddhistic culture of the Far East. Each in its own way achieves the union of Nirvana or Samsara, renunciation and pleasure, religion with the world, Man with Nature.”

This leads to the last point. It speaks of the universality of Coomaraswamy’s genius that he, the historian of Rajput Painting should look beyond the frontiers of Indian culture. His enchanting descriptions of Rajput paintings, which are expressed in meticulously chosen flicks of words, remind one of Watteau and possibly Blake. Again his translations bring out the similarities between the Rajput lyric poets and the troubadours. Similarly the Rajput mystics have as their comrades St. John of the Cross, Francis Thompson, Rainer Maria Rilke and others who constitute the Christian hierarchy of immortal song. Thus, in the pages of Coomaraswamy’s Rajput Painting, one looks beyond India and across Europe, to that timeless Holy Land of aesthetic experience which is memorably re-created in the following paragraph: “The typical examples of Rajput painting, like every other expression of mystical intuition, have for us this lesson, that what we cannot discover at home and in familiar events, we cannot discover anywhere. The Holy Land is the land of our own experience. All is in all: and if beauty is not apparent to us in the well-known, we shall not find it in things that are strange and far away.”

All in all, Coomaraswamy’s book on Rajput Painting must be placed among the major works of Indian art history and criticism.