Ananda Coomaraswamy: A Confluence of

ANANDA COOMARASWAMY

A Confluence of East and West

Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy, best remembered as the author of The Dance of Shiva, was one of the most versatile minds of his century. Indeed Coomaraswamy was one of the last poly-­histors of our time, and his work straddling aesthetics and literature, reflects the deepest intuitions of the perennial tradition derived from Indian and European sources. For the spectrum of his thought can be viewed at different wavelengths. And Coomaraswamy, who had an unusual ground, was a man of varied talents and interests–a scientist, an Indian nationalist in his youth and an universal being in his maturity, an interpreter of Indian art in its wider perspectives, a literary figure and an exponent of the perennial philosophy.

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was born on August 22, 1877, in Colombo, Ceylon. His father, Sir Mutu Coomaraswamy, noted for his forensic brilliance and classical scholarship, was the first Asian to be knighted during the reign of Queen Victoria. Sir Mutu enjoyed the esteem of such men as Lord Palmerston, Tennyson and Lord Beaconsfield; indeed, Lord Beaconsfield had portrayed him as Kusinara in his last unfinished novel.* In 1876, Sir Mutu married an English lady of Kent named Elizabeth Clay Beeby, and when their only child Ananda was born, he received the middle name “Kentish”.

Ananda, after a brilliant career at Wycliffe and London University, was appointed director of the mineralogical survey of Ceylon at the age of twenty-six. Though he received a D. Sc. from London University for his research, his valuable discovery of thorianite in 1904 is not generally known. It was characteri­stic of Coomaraswamy’s self-effacement that he called the new mineral “thorianite”, instead of linking it with his own name. In the course of his scientific work, he became interested in the artistic heritage of Ceylon and did a study of the surviving guilds of the mediaeval Sinhalese craftsmen and their artifacts. The results of the study are recorded in his classic monograph Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908). Soon he abandoned geology altogether and devoted himself wholly to the study of the arts and cultures of India and Ceylon. It was at this time that he published another excellent monograph The Aims of Indian Art (1908). In this study and in others, Coomaraswamy tried to reconstruct and interpret the philosophy of national art rather than to convey merely the beauties of different art-works. He was not a romantic aesthetician but the foremost academic historian of Indian and Indonesian art. And he succeeded not only in synthesizing the ideals and traditions of Indian art scattered through the ages in different parts of Asia, but also in creating a new consciousness of Indian cultural unity.

“The Asiatic Cult”, writes Prof. Hans Kohn in his A History of Nationalism in the East, “has assumed new forms corres­ponding to Europe’s expressionist tendencies, her reaching out towards the mythical and primitive; the roots of nationalism struck deeper, men meditated upon its spiritual value, as is seen in the writings of Coomaraswamy and his contemporaries. And all this reached its climax in Gandhi’s agitation.” Professor Kohn’s attempt to demonstrate the similarity between European expressionism (which started as a movement in German literature and painting in the first quarter of the present century) and the Asiatic cult (which is a political phenomenon) will probably astonish readers. Yet his attempt is justified, for the revolt of the Indians against the alienation caused by the Western impact on India is comparable to the revolt of the adherents of expressionism against current art and civilization.

In a slightly different context, it was noted by Dr. Basil Gray of the British Museum that Coomaraswamy had died just when his life-work was coming to fruition. By the time of his death in 1947, the last vestiges of the “smoke clouds which all too long obscured the splendid achievements of Indian sculpture” (Rothenstein) were about to disappear. Indeed, it has been fashionable to regard Coomaraswamy as the prophet of Indian cultural nationalism. To any student of Coomaraswamy’s thought, however, it is clear that, despite the national perspective of his earlier days, Coomaraswamy slowly came to perceive all that was best in other cultures and traditions, as is evident from the universal quality of his mature writings.

Undoubtedly, the aesthetic philosophy of Indian nationalism found its most articulate exponent in Coomaraswamy during the first decade of the twentieth century. In Essays in National Idealism he wrote: “We want our India for ourselves because we believe each nation has its own part to play in the long tale of human progress and nations which are not free to develop their individuality and character are also unable to make the contribution to the sum of human culture which the world has a right to expect of them.” In other words, he argued that every nation ought to make its own contribution to what Mazzini acclaimed as “the concert of mankind, the orchestra of human genius.” To him the word “nationalism” denoted the cultural expression of a nation. When India had attained independence, his message was “Be Yourself”. It placed the accent on aesthetic authenticity and not on the political context of freedom. “Nations” observed Coomaraswamy, “are created by poets and artists, not by merchants and politicians. In art lie the deepest life principles”.

In his famous oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837, Emerson had castigated American writers for their subservience to the artists of Europe and called on them to create an indigenous literature. His oration has been justly hailed as “America’s declaration of intellectual independence”. Similarly, to Coomaraswamy, Indian nationalism was a quest for self-realization, a declaration of spiritual independence. We cannot perceive the full significance of Coomaraswamy’s philosophy of Indian nationalism without perceiving the aesthetic impact of the theory of “dhvani” on his philosophy of Indian art. The word “dhvani” literally means “suggestion in an aesthetic sense” and was developed into an elaborate theory by Anandavardhana, the celebrated critic of the ninth century A. D. While the “Dhvanyaloka” of Anandavardhana, the locus classicus in Indian literary criticism, deals with the aesthetic Significance of words and their subtle undertones, Coomaraswamy reflected on the significance of art motifs and their symbolic meanings. Thus Coomaraswamy’s approach to nationalism combined the patriotic spirit of Mazzini, the intellectual freedom of Emerson, and the aesthetic insight of Anandavardhana.

Coomaraswamy’s was an aesthetic view of life. In fact he gave an aesthetic orientation to the concept of Indian freedom. “Have you ever realized”, he asked of the Indian nationalist, “that India, politically and economically free, but subdued by Europe in the innermost soul is scarcely an ideal to be dreamt of or to live and die for.” Indeed he was first and foremost an artist. Dorothy Norman recorded Coomaraswamy’s observa­tion on Gandhi just before his death: “Gandhi can be looked upon as a moral saint. But not as an aesthetic saint. He said for example that a woman should not wear a necklace. Had he been an aesthetic saint, he would have said that if a necklace is worn, then it should be a good necklace.” Here it would be relevant to quote a similar observation from his Art and Swadeshi: “Has it ever occurred to you that it is as much your duty to make your lives and your environment beautiful as to make them normal - in fact that without beauty there can be no true morality, just as without morality there can be no true beauty?” Again with his characteristic sarcasm Coomaraswamy speaks of the superficially Westernized Indian of his time who “disfigures the walls of his home with cheap oleographs, pretends to enjoy shrill records of European music, and then tries to save his soul by purchasing a share or two in a Swadeshi soap company.” And in a nostalgic vein he cried: “Where are the filmy muslins or the flower-woven silks with which we used to worship the beauty of Indian women, the brazen vessels from which we ate and drunk, the concepts on which we trod with bare feet, or the pictures that revealed to us the love of Radha and the soul of the eternal snows?” It is this nostalgia which led to Coomara­swamy’s recovery of the passport of the Indian nation in the cultural sense of the term.

Though Coomaraswamy wrote much, he always wrote well. A master of the aphoristic style, in his discourse he blended thought and feeling, poetical fervour and lucid exposition. To cite a few examples one could begin with his description of Borobudur: “The rich and gracious forms of these reliefs, which if placed end to end would extend for over five kilometers, bespeak an infinitely luxurious rather than a profoundly spiritual or energised experience. There is here no nervous tension, no concentration of force to be compared with that which so impresses the observer at Angkor Wat. Borobudur is like a ripe fruit matured in breathless air; the fullness of its forms is an expression of static wealth, rather than the volume that denotes the outward radiation of power. The Sumatran empire was now in the very height of its glory, and in intimate contact with the whole of the then civilized world; in the last analysis Borobudur is a monument of Sailendra culture, rather than that of Buddhist devotion.”...The evocative description of Borobudur reminds one of his portrayal of Krishna. In the Museum of Fine Arts Collection 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.”

To cite another example, he writes about the Dance of Shiva: “If we could reconcile Time with Eternity, we can scarcely do so otherwise than by the conception of alternations of phase extending over vast regions of space and great and great tracts of time. Especially significant, then, is the phase alternation implied by the drum, and the fire which ‘changes’ not destroys. These are but visual symbols of the theory of the day and night of Brahma. In the night of Brahma, Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Shiva wills it. He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! matter also dances appearing as a glory round about Him. Dancing He sustains its manifold phenomena. In the fullness of time, still dancing, he destroys all forms and names by fire and gives now rest. This is poetry; but none the less science.”

This description of the dancing Shiva suggests T. S. Eliot’s memorable lines:

...... Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.

And it also suggests the vision of Yeats in which all opposites are transcended and united in the cosmic dance:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Equally sensitive is his assessment of Tagore’s paintings. “The poet gives no descriptive titles to his picture – how could he? They are not pictures about things, but pictures about himself. In this sense they are probably much nearer to his music than to his poetry. In the poetry, so far at least as the context is concerned, he is primarily the sensitive exponent of a racial or rational tradition, not an inventor, and therefore his words are more profoundly sanctioned and more significant than those of any private genius could be, all India speaks and understands the same language. The poetry reveals nothing of the poet’s personality, though it establishes his status. But the painting is an intimacy comparable to the publication of private correspondence. What a varied and colourful person is revealed! One picture, that might be taken for a representation of a cross between Shylock and Ivan, the terrible, hat qualities strangely suggestive of a stained glass window; others in the poet’s own words depict the temperate exaggeration of a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence’, or some ‘bird that can only soar in our dreams and find its nest in some hospitable lines that may offer it in our canvas’; in others, human seriousness is made ridiculous by animal caricature; others express the thrill of swift unhindered movement; one, represent­ing a crowd attentive to a flute player may embody some allusion both to Krishna, and to the call of the infinite in the poet’s own songs, another is a dancing Ganesha, far removed from the canons of Hindu iconography; there are portraits, including one of a young Bengali girl, the direct antithesis of ‘Ivan, the Terrible’; groupings of coloured flowers; pages of actual manuscript; and soft ethereal landscapes. The manner is as varied as the theme, and this despite the fact that all pictures are done with a pen, usually the of a fountain pen, and coloured inks or tints; any method is employed that may be available or that may suggest itself at the moment. The artist, like a child, invests his own technique as he goes along; adequate to the end in view; this end is not ‘Art’ with a capital A, on the one hand - nor on the other, a merely pathological self-­expression; nor art intended to improve our minds, nor to provide for the artist himself an ‘escape’; but without ulterior motives, truly innocent, like the creation of an universe.

Between 1895, when as a young man of eighteen, he published his first article “The Geology of Doverow Hill”, and 1947, his seventieth year, he became the author of more than five hundred publications. Their scope is astonishing. He had written several articles on Indian, Indonesian and Sinhalese Art in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and also in The National Encyclopaedia of America, in addition to editing English words of Indian origin in Webster’s New International Dictionary. The rest of his publica­tions ranges from his collection of essays entitled The Dance of Shiva to such works as The History of Indian and Indonesian Art, Hinduism and Buddhism, Rajput Painting and A New Approach to the Vedas The History of Indian and Indonesian Art, which was published in 1927, is his chief contribution to the study of Indian art in its historical, sociological and philosophical contexts. Beginning with the Indo-Sumerian finds, it gives a clear and connected historical account of the entire history of Indian and Indonesian art, with special emphasis on problems relating to the Indian origin of the Buddha image. His profound grasp of various inter-related disciplines helped him to realize the twin ideals of harmony and truth in all Indian art. Thus, in discussing the evolution of Indian art and cultures as a joint creation of the Aryan and Dravidian genius, he is able to reveal that the Gupta Buddhas, Elephanta Mahesvara, Pallava Lingams, and the later Natarajas are products of the crossing of two spiritual natures. In the words of Coomaraswamy, this situation resulted in a cultural process, which “in a very real sense” was “a marriage of East and West”, or of the North and South, consummated, as the donors of the image would say, “for the good of all sentient beings; a result, not of a superficial blending of Hellenistic and Indian technique, but of the crossing of spiritual tendencies, racial ‘Samskaras’ (preoccupations) that may well have been determined before the use of metals was known.”

Looking , we cannot doubt that Coomaraswamy’s migration to Boston was a gain; It led to a deeper appreciation of Indian art in the West and particularly in America. Also, his stay at Needham widened his intellectual horizons and deepened his ideas on mysticism. During this period of time he concerned himself especially with the general problems of art, religion and philosophy. By harmonizing his manifold interests, both Eastern and Western, he attained a unity of outlook which invests his writings with a lasting significance. Coomaraswamy has argued in his Hindu View of Art that the fusion of religious ecstasy and artistic experience is not an exclusively Hindu view; it has been expounded by many others – such as the neo­platonists, Hsieh Ho, Goethe, Blake, Schopenhauer or Schiller – and also restated by Croce. In one of his flashes of self-revela­tion, Coomaraswamy called himself “an orientalist who was in fact almost as much a platonist as a mediaevalist.” And he was continually striving to understand the creative unity of symbolical expressions - the ‘Brahma’ of Indian philosophers, the ‘Logos’ of the Platonic philosophers, on the ‘Unio Mystica’ of Jan Van Ruysbroock, the father of mysticism in the Nether­lands, and the ‘Urquelle’ of the German Meister Eckhart – and, in this way, to synthesize the fundamental insights of the Eastern and Western traditions of mysticism.

His culturally most significant notion is that of the chosen people of the future – a notion which elevates Coomaraswamy to the select company of those choice spirits who have effectively contributed to the continuous dialogue between East and West. According to him, “the chosen people of the future cannot be any nation or race but an aristocracy of the earth uniting the virility of European youth to the serenity of Asiatic age.” Else­where he wrote: “Who that has breathed the clear mountain air of the Upanishads, of Gautama, Sankara and Kahir, of Rumi, Laotse and Jesus can be alien to those who have sat at the feet of Plato and Kant, Tauler, Behmen and Ruysbroock. Whitman, Nietzsche and Blake”? Coomaraswamy hoped for a more fruitful era in “East-West Cultural Relations” and wrote that “men like the English De Morgan and George Boole, the American Emerson and the contemporary Frenchmen Rene Guenon and Jaques De Marquette, were able to make a real and vital contact with Indian metaphysics which became for them a transforming experience.” He also stressed the desirabi­lity of “using one tradition to illuminate the other so as to demonstrate even more clearly that the variety of the traditional cultures, in all of which there subsisted until now a polar balance of spiritual and material values, is simply that of the dialects of what is always one and the same language of the spirit, of that perennial philosophy to which no one people or age can lay an exclusive claim.”

In his admirably clear study of Coomaraswamy’s theory of poetic creation entitled The Traditional Theory of Literature, Prof. Ray Livingston has stressed the importance of a great critic like Coomaraswamy who makes our mind receptive to the depths of meaning and profound life-giving qualities of perennial works such as the Vedas, Brahmanas, Upanishads as well as the writings of Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Rumi, Dante, Eckhart and Blake. Prof. Livingston has also observed that in the process of winning his birth as an oriental, Coomaraswamy responded as few men ever have to the Faustian challenge:

“What from your fathers’ heritage is lent,
Earn it anew to really possess it.”

However, Coomaraswamy’s response to the Faustian challenge was fundamentally aesthetic. Indeed Coomaraswamy could focus his image, whether of the Divine Comedy, or a bronze figure of a dancing Shiva in a lightning-flash of gnosis, revealing a new wavelength of aesthetic perception. For his horizon encompassed not merely the sublime figure of the Nataraja but also the majesty of the great Gothic cathedrals, the great poetry of Dante, the manifold meanings of the Vedic incantations, Paradise Lost and the transcendent thought of Eckhart which reflected the “spiritual being of Europe at its highest tension.”

It is remarkable that Coomaraswamy who began his career as a geologist, should have ended it with publication of Time and Eternity, a perceptive essay in metaphysical speculation. He achieved distinction in four different fields of intellectual and creative endeavour: geology, political philosophy, Indian art history, and the general philosophy of art, literature and religion. In his own person, he symbolized a racial confluence of East and West, as well as an aesthetic symbiosis of the two cultures, scientific and literary. Child of Ceylon and England, he became an Indian in the same deep sense in which Henry James trans­formed himself into an European and T. S. Eliot into an English­man. While reflecting on the life of Coomaraswamy, one is irresistibly reminded of Walt Whitman’s “marriage of continents, climates and oceans”. Coomaraswamy’s early scientific career can be compared to a spring originating from some subterranean mineral source, delighting everyone by its natural freshness and sweetness. And the later development of his mind can be likened to the course of the stream of Indian artistic conscious­ness, which starting from the Vedic source and flowing through India catches the nationalistic current at the turn of the century, then mingles with the streams of traditional European art and finally joins the ocean that washes the shores of Philosophia Perennis.

* This unfinished novel is printed as an appendix in G. E. Buckle’s The Life of Benjamin Disraeli.