World Perspective of Indian Art

PROF. DR. HERMANN GOETZ

Former Director of National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Most of what we know of art belongs to the past. And yet, in art, there is an element which joins the past and the future in a very interesting way. Art–whether sculpture, painting, architecture, industrial objects-aspires to form as a conscious or unconscious, means of expression, as perfect as possible, of human dreams, myths which men feel as their sense of living, of their circumstances, what achievements they are proud of, what they feel as their mental support, what they feel as a driving or regulating force, what they hope for. Some people, therefore, have disposed of art as a mere means of propaganda of the rich and mighty in the respective societies.

But so simple an explanation does not work. Life is immensely complicated, many symbols have a value for everybody, there are symbols for all types of people, also for the poor, for the opposition, for townspeople, artisans, peasants, for people of the most differing grounds, for the credulous and sceptics, for Sentimental and hardboiled ones. And these symbols differ from nation to nation, country to country, from climate to climate, and all the time change their meaning.

Times of Crisis–Past and Present

Thus, the history of art can be interpreted as the optical aspect of the history of mankind, and in the widest sense, insofar as this optical interpretation can be extended to Philology and musicology combined with other sources, to all aspects of human life, to society, economics, the State, history; and often in a very valuable way, as art expresses much of the unconscious mind, so that the discovers much which had not been intended to say, even what his objects did not dare to avow to themselves.

Now we are again in a time when our lives are utterly upset by the discoveries of modern science. At the end of the last century railways and steamers were already familiar to us, motor traffic just came up, but aircraft had not yet surpassed its first experimental steps. Now, transfer of news, or even direct talk from and to any part of this earth is no more a problem at all, aircraft traffic has reduced the connection from continent to continent from months and weeks to a matter of hours, we have reached the moon, and in nuclear energy we have developed a helpful force, but also, so far rarely applied, a deadly weapon beyond all our expectations. This is now so well-known that it looks almost ridiculous to mention it at all. And yet it is necessary; for we tend to ignore the consequences when we behave as if nothing at all has happened, as if we might judge all aspects of life in the accustomed way.

Somehow, of course, we have no other way out, as it is beyond human capacity. But what we can do, is at least to reconsider the past in a similar perspective when men had been confronted with often small discoveries which, however, had immense consequences. And it is from this angle that I wish here to approach Indian history, using the history of art as a lever, because archaeology often offers us evidence where literature as a conscious source, has wiped out the memory, for reasons which historically are likewise understandable.

This changeover to wider dimensions, in every aspect of this term, concerns India as much as any country, any nation, any continent of this earth. We need, therefore, a perspective in which other parts of this earth fill at least the ground of the picture. In this perspective, however tentative it may appear, we can discover at least the essential trends of each time and fill in, at the hand of new, refined methods–maybe hitherto learned and applied in other disciplines–gaps, in the local documentation as far as similar events permit of a similar interpretation. Let us analyse Indian art from such a point of view.

Style as a Normal Expression in Art

Early in this century the unit of art analysis was style, which in other words are technical achievements. In the case off architecture first, the transition from wood to clay, mortar, stone, concrete, iron; within this sub-division into bundles and mattresses, beams, planks, posters, ceilings, roofs, doors, windows, mud plastering, bricks of unbaked clay, burnt bricks and tiles, construction in boulders, roughly and exactly cut stones, etc., further distinction between socles, walls and roofs, houses and towers, round, quadratic, oblong and transverse buildings, simple to complicated outlays, and finally in each of these forms an evolution from the simple to the complicated, either by addition or involvement. For example, a plain socle or a complex system of projections and niches, plinths, ledges, mouldings, until the socle may become a miniature edition of the whole facade; or a roof, flat or rounded, vaulted or domed, horizontal of sloping, simple or a whole system of intermediate storeys, etc.

Or the approach to reproducing objects in sculpture or painting, say, a figure conceived as a block on which head, arms, body, legs and feet are indicated within the available mass; then, with its individual parts well-modelled and correctly moving; then, freely moving, but still formal and representative, later easy and elastic, still later perfunctory and playful.

The Class Tradition

This formal development is not only a question of technique, but of the whole mentality of the artist, of the family and class tradition of the maecenas. It is expressed in the whole structure of the ground; political, social, economic, literary, religious forms of life, corresponding, for example, to tribal life, monarchy, aristocratic oligarchy, democracy and dissolution of a society. It is expressed also in other details, for example, costumes and fashions, single figures or groups, the inclusion of the ground and many other aspects.

Normally, these style curves last only some hundred years. And half a hundred miles away, there may predominate already a different style, related or quite different, either in another phase of evolution or with a different ground, say different dresses, different houses and settlements, different goods, etc. If the style of life is similar. also its formal expression may sometimes cover a rather vast area. A good example of this type in India may be Sunga art. But just in the later stages development may be rather complicated. Through conquests or religious missions certain styles may spread very far, though merely occupying some political, commercial or intellectual centres, whereas in the surrounding minor towns and villages archaic forms of the same art, or remnants of former, utterly different styles may survive.

This is partly due to the growth of towns and cities in which a new mentality develops, because the life experience ofthe upper classes sets the model. And those latter generally have travelled far, whether officials sent from the capital or transferred from province to province (for example, Maurya art), merchants importing or exporting goods from or to far-off countries (for instance, in Satavahana art), scholars educated at far-off schools and universities (in Gandhara art), or missionaries sent from distant centres of their creed. And as there are always snobs trying to compete with the leading classes, the imported art of those is imitated, either with the help of cheaper art goods likewise imported, or that of local goods either imitating it or fabricated by immigrant surplus-artists and artisans who transfer their skill, learnt in the important cities, to the local workshops temporarily or permanently.

Where the local people hate the ruling class for whatever reason, they stick to their earlier tradition (e.g., in a great part of Rajput art). But also the opposite is possible; foreign art is accepted enthusiastically, but the local artists and artisans are not able to do such fine work, imitate as well as possible, but the product is clumsy and the contents often misunderstood. Or an immigrated artist, missionary or official feels that for a success he has to make concessions to the public mentality (viz., Akota bronzes, many Rajput and Mughal paintings). Then he may assimilate his work to the local taste.

At the end there stands the extension of such as style, as rich and involved as possible, over a rather vast area, but then no more consisting of individual inspired masterpieces but a conventional form almost falling asunder under the impact of innumerable details (for example, Vaghela or Hoysala sculpture). The technique then is developed to the utmost with subdivision of work, so that a part of the workers must have done nothing else but filling and polishing or repeating again and again the same ornaments, figure groups etc. The better artists, however, generally were learned and wore pompous titles–for example, Gupta Hoysala temples, etc, The whole was designed by a master of high academic training (sutradhara) who merely prepared the design (when unfinished still visible).

This is the normal situation of art in India, nay, as well as in the majority of countries and civilizations on this earth. All this results in a very complicated picture, and though the basic factors may be clear and simple, their variations are innumerable, but very characteristic, enabling us to read the culture-historically evolution of all Indian States. As anterior to quite modern developments India had never been a national, but a geographical unit held together by limits like oceans and mountains, a subcontinent like South-Western Asia, Europe, South-Eastern Asia, Central or Eastern Asia, the last stage of local art in most cases was the expression of the last stage of a State and of its society. For this reason that local style never lasted longer than a few hundred years. Then a renascence set in, renewing art with merely slight changes, when the whole of the cultural tradition was still valid, or with considerable changes when art production was either transferred into another area, for example, into South-Eastern Asia and Indonesia–or taken over by maecenas of a very different ground for example, Indo-Islamic, and again modern art.

Mediaeval Indian Art Theory

This is the normal process of art development, such as it can be observed all over the earth in any civilization, in any country. But these observations are a rather modern discovery, and the art theory of ancient India, as laid down in Sanskrit literature is quite different. Art, like all aspects of human life, especially religion, is regarded as revealed by the Gods to the Rishis, first transmitted orally, but at last written down in the Vastu-Silpa and Natya-Sastras. Some Sastras are independent, others are parts or the Puranas, mainly later, of Gupta times, some others even considerably earlier, but practically all of them pretending to be very old. Abridgements are included in various instructions (Samhitas) how life should be (rarely how it really is), by Varahamihira and others. However, all of them, in the first place do not deal with the how (the style) of art, but with the what, i.e., the contents of art. What they describe as namely, the Hindu temple and its decoration, sculptures and paintings, such as we know it from Gupta times to the Muslim conquest and later wherever Hindu art could again reassert itself. Much less space is allotted to other themes, places, houses, gardens, towns, etc.

That in practice the teachings of those Sastras are not in conflict with but supplementary to the style problem, can be easily found out. For when surveying Hindu temples in chronological sequence, we find, on the average, a systematic growth of types from simple sanctuaries to most involved plans. Their decoration grows from very simple to most complicated forms, by subdividing all parts of the building horizontally as well as vertically. Likewise the sculptures became complicated, first sparsely along the walls, later innumerable groups of projecting and receding figures including dwarfs, Surasundaris and other godlings.

Classicism in Occidental and Other Arts

Moreover, this art was merely that of a certain period, not Indian art as such. This has been proved by archaeology. For official Hinduism has first been fixed as an orthodoxy under the Gupta emperors before whose time Vedic rituals seem to have been restricted to court ceremonies, since the time that Buddhist, Jain and other ascetic sects had begun to dominate public life. In any case, up to the time of the Mahakshatrapas and Kushanas we know almost exclusively Buddhist monuments and the Gods and Goddesses of later times represented on Buddhist monuments, if at all, as additional powers serving the Buddha and his doctrine. Therefore, for mediaeval times the Gupta Age was the “Golden Age” of India.

This circumstance offers us a hint how to understand this concept in a wider perspective. For, in Occidental civilization such a retrospective on a past golden age, which should be a model for the present and the future, is called “classicism.” It was and is the basis of every later renascence, in Romanesque art–which actually means “Roman” art of the Christian Middle Ages, the Renaissance proper and especially classicism proper in the decade about A. D. 1800. The model of this classicism was not any special, genuinely classic style of the ancient Mediterranean, but Graeco-Roman art and culture as a whole. In the last decade, however, we have discovered that classicism as such can be a phenomenon in any civilization, in any art all over the world, whenever there was a crisis, even a break between an earlier city civilization and a new form of culture trying to appear as continuation, but actually something else.

Great Incision in Indian Civilisation

If Hindu culture survived at all in Northern India, it must have been mainly by conversion and absorption of the many nomadic invaders. Of course, for the time being I can put forward this merely as a working theory. It will need further confirmation from other sides. In the field of ethnology I may mention not only the scattered references to the many dispersed settlements of Hunas, Gujaras, Sulikas, but also that there are costumes the predecessors of which can be traced not in ancient India but at Tunhuang at the Chinese frontier. In linguistics we have to study the transition from Sanskrit as an upper class language, to its survival as a language known only to priests and courtly scholars, and the de facto change of style during those critical centuries, acknowledged by pandits, but not yet sufficiently studied by Sanskrit scholars. That those texts behave as if no crisis ever had existed, has its parallel in early Mediaeval Europe. It was court literature expressing how things should be interpreted, not how they really were. It was part of the tactics in absorbing and converting mighty newcomers and just a continuation of the old politics in converting Scythians and Kushanas.

Renaissauce of Art

Here the Sastras have played the decisive role as a guidance inaugurated by the “Golden Age” of the Guptas. For the Sastras and Puranas in India, like the Avesta in Iran, the Christian Scriptures in the Roman Empire, claimed, as religious authorities, to be very cold, and this seems partly probable. For much of this literature must have been formulated, as a merely theoretical matter, already in the preceding centuries, under Buddhist as well as foreign rulers during the discussions held in the agraharas conceded to the Brahmins. Under the first Guptas, these tracts seem to have been propagated as authoritative.

In the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries we can already observe a renaissance created by them in the art of Naresar, Gwalior, Osian, Bhinmal, Amber, etc. In all these places we find a very quick evolution from a deed, slavish imitation of late Gupta models to a living art, rich of expression, though also a young instead of an old art, and a revealing admixture of primitive ornaments, in so far as those did not contravene the teachings of the Sastras. But the fact has likewise to be stated that this art was in principle not unique. We have starts towards a similar sculpture with the Sasanians, never completed because of the conquest of Sasanian Iran by the Moslems. We have a similar art in the Occident, called “Romanesque” art, pretending to be Roman, likewise intermixed with primitive tribal ornaments when the Roman Empire had already disappeared.

Indian Art-An Analysis

I believe we may now venture on to an analysis of Indian art. The basic experience: Art is a creative process, in other words a process of eternal change, because every one of us changes in life as long as he grows and may reach maturity only in later years, because society around us changes all the time, and because the wider perspectives of life change likewise, as vague ground and as individual experience. Art, however, is important only as long as it has a message for real life, its forms and styles being no more than an instrument of truth for the expression of this message. But for this very reason, there has never existed, in India or elsewhere, that rigid attitude which can imagine intellectual, emotional or artistic contacts only in terms of “no contacts” or imitation. No contacts, this means stupidity, thoughtlessness, ignorance and indifference, the death of all individual, national and cultural life. Real contact means neither snobbish imitation, it means information, goodwill for understanding, criticism and then either rejection or taking over of certain features, or adaption, however with a strong individual note to whatever this individual note may refer. Thus, the product always is something new, of whatever category this may be.

This Interpretation, however, seems contradicted by the Sastras. However, this apparent “timelessness” had been merely a practical means of the conversion of barbarian invaders and is refuted by the evidence of the monuments. The whole theory of a smooth transition from ancient to mediaeval Indian art likewise was a fiction–a most fertile fiction –like in the Occident, that from Roman to Romanesque art, or in Iran that from Achaemenian to Sasanian art. And in all the three cases this referred not only to art, but also to religion, to the whole way of life, to culture in all its aspects. The result has been grand, often very similar, as already pointed out by A. Coomaraswamy in his later studies, and is worth a careful study even today. Of course, this classicism of the Sastras opens the way to further historical, linguistic and religious studies in a new, very fertile direction.

A Genuine New Creation

But at least we are now able to study Indian art in the same light and in the same categories as all the other arts of mankind. And thus also, modern Indian art in the same perspective as all genuine arts, as a genuine new creation, neither an imitation of the Indian past, nor of the foreign present. Learn we can from both, being aware that our space and atomic age is very different from the past, however, that the Indian tradition is not the same as that of Europe and America or of Eastern Asia, finally that new art creations need not be a sign of progress, that they can be as much signs of disintegrating civilisations. I do not feel entitled to proclaim any programme for the future. I feel only entitled to suggest the greatest measure of truth and honesty expressed with the best artistic means. It will not be uniform, but the expression of as many spiritual types as there are people. And then leave it to the future to decide what will stand the criticism of time and conviction!
21st December, 1973